A few years ago I was chatting to a woman, a radical feminist, who expressed puzzlement at my interest in radical feminism: where had it come from, what had drawn me towards it? I explained that it had felt like its enmities were towards things I myself detested, and that it seemed both a cogent articulation of what was wrong with them, and a powerful line of attack against them. No, there was nothing in it about solidarity with women as such. I could see cosmic injustice in its picture of the world, and wanted to attack that injustice at its root, but I didn’t see this in terms of recognising it as morally incumbent upon me to right a wrong done by Team Men (which would de facto include me) against Team Women. I had, and have, no interest in the moral contortions involved in trying to position oneself as a Feminist Man; no interest in trying to generate a plausible altruistic motive for undermining my own self-interest as a beneficiary of unequal distributions of prestige, agency, impunity and material reward. I just wanted the world I had to live in to be less fucking stupid.
This is still basically my position, although I’ve soured a little on radical feminism as both descriptive and prescriptive framework. I recognise its situational genius and can still thrill to its ferocity, but I think it’s metaphysically overreaching: no, sex isn’t the primary contradiction either in present society or in the historical development of previous societies. It isn’t the foundational template for racism, the original sin behind imperalist belligerence and colonial exploitation, the ur-enslavement and ur-dehumanisation from which all others take their cue. More than that, I’ve realised that I had a basically skewed understanding of what was actually oppressive about patriarchal gendercraft, because I was looking at it from an autistic perspective as consisting as a panoply of impositions that I, as an autistic person, would specifically hate and resent. The more autistic the feminist, the better I understood where they were coming from. How dreadful to have to think, at all, ever, about one’s appearance! How intolerable to be constituted as a sexual being by others’ desire! When M. Remi Yergeau coined “compulsory neurotypical sociality” as a variation on “compulsory heterosexuality” I realised that I’d always understood the latter through the lens of the former.
This left me ill-equipped to consider how patriarchal gendercraft succeeded at least in part by making an offer to allistic women that many found, and apparently still find, rather seductive. Did you know it can be fun and validating to be constituted as a sexual being by others’ desire? It has some unwanted liabilities, and can be a vector for grossly disempowering or violent ill-treatment, but it isn’t in itself as axiomatically and universally odious as I’d imagined it must be. The world of social media is literally full of women throwing themselves at the camera, demanding to be constituted as sexual beings by others’ desire. OK, they’re often also after money. But they’re playing to their strengths in ways that simply didn’t make sense to me in early adulthood, because I had no internal model whatsoever for what it might feel like for that to be an ordinary way of seeking and expressing status, of trying to be something one wanted to be and get something one wanted to get. I’d see women engaged in these pursuits and think, no, you’re making a mistake. We should be trying to obliterate the entire system of status valuations you’re trying to game your way though. Please, stop investing time and energy in that system of status valuations. I don’t like it, and I want it to go away.
Here we are in 2025, and the feminism of autigender weirdoes working out their discontents with compulsory neurotypical gender-doing by plotting apocalypses has largely crashed and burned, or morphed with horrible historical irony into the hideous normie rampage of gendercrit. And I’m left with the realisation that I got into feminism for mostly the wrong reasons — as a special interest, really, as well as a way to grind my own axes against what patriarchal gendercraft had told me I was supposed to want and be. It seems a forlorn resentment at this point. Projects for the re-moralisation of manhood abound. The world continues to be fucking stupid with unabated creative enthusiasm. It’s not a winnable fight. Meanwhile, the material politics of sexual oppression are still about sexual violence, femicide, reproductive autonomy, the right to access education, the immurement of human beings in structures designed to fetter, dissipate and misdirect agency. Radical feminism gave me a way to “care” in a big sweeping handwavey way about all of these things, while in reality mostly being preoccupied with the big dumb spectacle of ideological reproduction through which patriarchal gendercraft does its big dumb business. I’ll never not be a hater, but it’s the wrong focus.