Men’s crimes against women are legion, atrocious, and unforgivable. This is a simple and independent fact. Men are responsible for their own behavior and nothing women do or don’t do in response is going to change that.
But. There are only so many times you can listen to women make excuses for them either, before you get good and fed up. Lack of access to feminist analysis only goes so far in explaining het women’s maddening habit of playing ‘devil’s advocate’. Men don’t need you defending them, for one thing. They set up power structures in society to benefit themselves. Even if not a single het woman ever made excuses for them again, it wouldn’t stop them doing whatever the hell they like. Nothing would change; they would still, by and large all over the world, control finance and resources, rape and kill women, and destroy the planet.
All you are doing, het women, is making them more comfortable in doing it. You are exchanging real power – the power we have to fight back and end male supremacy in a day if we wanted to – for making them feel better about something they are going to do whether you make them feel better about it or not. It’s the ultimate disempowerment, and very much magic bean-buying. Take something real and trade it for something completely useless. Well done, het women!
It is not possible to be radical and heterosexual. If there is such a thing as natural attraction to men (for women), and frankly, I think that is a pretty big if, surely that doesn’t excuse giving in to it under the current regime of being pressured into it. Like so many have said before, how can you know your ‘attraction’ isn’t at least partly socially constructed, and wouldn’t you *want* to know, considering it means literally, and maybe unnecessarily, sleeping with the enemy?
After all, Lesbian Separatism is the single most effective tool for bringing patriarchy to its knees, so why would you sell it out just for something you might not even naturally like? Even if you did naturally like it, is that a good enough reason? If we can all agree not to buy…I don’t know, ivory or something (I don’t mean the soap, I mean from ivory dealers. Although the soap is horrible.), surely we can support a movement that revolutionizes our own lives? If we can be considerate to elephants, why not our sisters?
When you shave your legs, pubic area or underarms, you are making it easier for men to fuck children. When you wear makeup and feminine clothing and starve yourself, you are agreeing with them that natural femaleness is abhorrent. When you simper, cast your eyes down, and generally try to take up as little space as possible, you are saying ‘keep your shit going – I’m no threat to you’.
White het women are usually the biggest deniers of male violence and the abuse of women being a system of worldwide domination, but I have heard both white and non-white het women be completely honest about what men are and what you can expect from them. And then still stay het. Why? If you are really so lesbophobic and unwilling to simply access the resources to deconstruct that, which is *all* it takes, that you can’t enjoy your life with a woman, why would you continue to give men your energy anyway? If you can’t manage to unlesbophobify yourself, or can’t be bothered…well, isn’t that *kind* of your problem? I don’t get where the sense of entitlement, that you have the right to hold us ALL back, is coming from. We all do dumb things, but surely at some point you have to recognize that your choices do not affect only you. If you are still confused on that one, let me clear it up – they definitely don’t.
Female love and energy are the most valuable resources we have. Giving them to our oppressors is a direct crime against us all.
