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So. The thing to understand with radfems is that their anti-kink / anti-BDSM stance isn’t anything new. It’s been going on since the 1970s. It’s an offshoot of what are termed the ‘feminist sex wars’, rhetorical clashes between various feminists when it comes to sexuality and the role of sex, BDSM, pornography, sex-work, etc that led to a polarization of the feminist movement as a whole and a clear delimitation between the anti-porn/anti-BDSM/SWERF crowd, who tend to be strong proponents of radical feminism and the camp that describes itself as ‘sex-positive’ and that tends to take a stance that is supportive of sex-workers and non-normative sexual practices, even if individuals or groups might have particular criticism to offer to the porn industry, for example. 

In particular, the radfem opposition to BDSM came to existence in the middle of this whole thing, at the end of the 1970s, causing counter-movements to also appear:

The main locus of the sex wars’ debate on sadomasochism and other BDSM practices was San Francisco. Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media was founded there in 1977. Its first political action was to picket a live show at a strip club featuring women performing sadomasochistic acts on each other […] As well as campaigning against pornography, WAVPM were also strongly opposed to BDSM, seeing it as ritualized violence against women and opposed its practice within the lesbian community. In 1978 SAMOIS was formed, an organization for women in the BDSM community who saw their sexual practices as consistent with feminist principles. (source)

One of the seminal works behind anti-BDSM/anti-kink attitudes on the part of radfems is also Against Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis, an anthology of essays published in 1982. Something to note is that, two years later, the anthology garnered a negative review from the Journal of Sex Research, with the reviewer saying that while the essays themselves were well, written, the arguments against BDSM in the book were akin to religious arguments against same-sex attraction, saying both only served to cause unnecessary guilt. It’s one of the reasons why I start laughing whenever a teenager on here gets all red in the face and ‘how DAAAARE you draw any comparison between gay people and kinksters!’ Parallels between the treatment of both at the hands of sexual puritans – whether that puritanism is based on religion or on radical feminism that actively denies people’s ability to consent if radfems don’t agree with the sexual practices in question – have been consistently drawn since before many of the discoursers on here were even born, for fuck’s sake! 

Radfem ideas haven’t changed much since four decades ago. What has changed has been their approach. As far as they’re concerned, my generation is a lost cause, we’re too entrenched in our views. So they leapfrogged us entirely an went for the youngsters. In this sense, Tumblr has been an absolute goldmine for them – a site with young, inexperienced people who nevertheless want to do good and to be directed as to how they can achieve that, a site where content is meant to go viral and people spread it without checking the source. This is how anti-BDSM posts written by a radfem OP and made to look like general sexual safety PSAs at a quick glance, ended up gathering tens of thousands of positive reblogs on here. It’s all rather brilliant – gather young people to you, drip-feed them things that don’t seem all that extreme and slowly inure them to ideas such as ‘BDSM is inherently patriarchal violence’ and by the end not only will they believe, they’ll be ready to go on a crusade for you! As I said, brilliant piece of work. It really shows that I’m a Scorpio and a Slytherin, when even utterly despising someone’s result, I’ll sit there and grudgingly admire the underhandedness or cunning or ruthlessness of their methods!   

The way I figured out that radfems were behind the whole thing was when I’d have fifteen year-olds say to me something along the lines of ‘consent isn’t enough if violence is involved’, that’s word-for-word something you’d read in a radical feminist tract from forty years ago, this idea that people’s consent can be utterly invalidated and tossed to the side if a group of individuals have decided to unilaterally label their sexual activities as being harmful. Add to that the fact that I also clashed two years ago with adult radfems on here when it came to things like consensual non-consent fantasies and it became clear that Tumblr was the perfect ground for them to spread their ideas and bring a new generation into their opposition to BDSM/kink.  

So, a few years ago, a series of posts that were making the rounds caught my eye because they were the first really noticeable (for me) examples of radfems politics wrapped up in dogwhistle positivity language.

These posts were criticizing the concept of being “sex positive” because, and I quote “the patriarchy demands we say yes, so there’s nothing radical about feminism that doesn’t focus on a woman’s right to say no”.

They were really well crafted. Most of them said things that, on the surface, were absolutely true! But they said them while specifically, explicitly positioning sex positivity as secret patriarchal indoctrination posing as feminism, and someone if you followed the posts back to their source you always found radfems.

And most people didn’t notice! They reblogged the posts because yeah! A feminism that doesn’t equally prioritize a woman’s right to say no isn’t gonna do anybody much good! But I had grown up in sex-positive circles, reading the literature from a young age, and I knew FOR A FACT that sex positivity had ALWAYS demanded that a woman’s right to say no be prioritized above all else. In fact the foundational tenet of the politic was “there’s no such thing as yes without the right to freely and easily say no”. So these posts blew my fucking mind! Like what the hell were they talking about trying to bash sex positivity for an idea that sex positivity LITERALLY WAS FOUNDED ON?

But then I realized. Little by little, without ever having read an ounce of sex positive feminist writing, people were declaring themselves as, at best, critical of sex positivity and at worst actively against it. They would refuse to read things that openly talked in a positive light about sex positivity because “it’s still too close to patriarchy”. And of course, what lay waiting on the other side of the spectrum? What politic was standing ready with a long standing history of being against sex-positive politics? Radfems.

Little by little, I watched people get indoctrinated. It started with associating key phrases of sex-positive, trans-positive, queer-positive, etc politics with patriarchy, with oppression, with being a traitor to womanhood and a victim of male brainwashing. And once people were taught to veer away from any feminism that might give those ideas room to grow, they started offering up radical feminism as the reasonable alternative to the “failed modern liberal feminism” that “didn’t take it far enough”.

I’d start seeing 15 year olds who could never get access to any respectable kink or sex work community proudly calling themselves “anti-porn, pro-woman” and talking disdainfully about women being brainwashed into giving blow jobs and having kinky sex. I saw people who had never talked to a stripper a day in their lives talking about how strip clubs should all be made illegal because it’s “gateway prostitution”.

It was unbelievable honestly, and I’ve only seen that strategy get used more frequently, more viciously, and across more communities since those posts started circulating.

It kills me that people honestly think I should give people the benefit of the doubt over their intentions when they use the language of radfems rather than demanding it be stamped out then and there.

Because language matters. It really does. More powerfully than you could possibly imagine. And when radfems position marginalized groups of feminists with evil, oppression, and disgust, they know exactly what they’re doing and they’re doing it very well. They have spent decades carefully tarring and feathering community after community of revolutionary feminists who dared to promote a view of feminism that didn’t allow for radfem’s supremacy. And the latest and greatest hits of anti-bi, anti-ace, anti-kink, anti-sex-positivity, and anti-queer are no exception.

I’m literally begging for people to know better this time. I’m literally begging for us not to let radfems skew an entire generation away from yet more critical and ~foundational~ feminist ideologies with their bullshit. Because there isn’t much left of those revolutions at this point, and what is left tends to be fearful and underground, unable to communicate effectively with the greater world through the fucking stranglehold that radfems have on the broader political discussion.