No one is above the ToS, including (especially) admins, so I want to have an open dialogue about this and hopefully it will help /u/Tequila_Wolf understand why this rhetoric is harmful to women and why it reinforces structural oppression when they dismiss important feminist issues (women's reproductive rights).
This is the comment in question:
It's been interesting watching people care about this person as a US liberal reproductive rights hero in the same week that nobody gave a shit about the revealing of forced sterilisations of migrants at ICE detention centres.
White liberal feminism strikes again.
A user linked to a reddit post (on a brocialist sub) as an example of similar rhetoric and I do see the similarities between this comment and the above anti-feminist comment made on raddle. One tries to erase black people and the other tries to erase women, both by bringing up another group and pretending group 2's suffering somehow invalidates group 1's suffering.
It's not acceptable to dismiss the struggle for feminism and the hard battles fought by women to secure reproductive rights just because the state committed an atrocity against migrant women. It blames women for the crimes of the state. Blames women for the suffering endured by women.
It's a classic example of toxic whataboutism and it shouldn't be an argument made on raddle because it demonises feminism and basically shames (USAmerican) women for caring about their own lives, suggesting their lives and struggles don't matter as long as x suffering or x atrocity exists. It erases those fierce battles fought by generations of feminists and dismisses any woman who cares about her reproductive choices. It's sadly a cruel and misogynistic mindset, and it's a form of victim-blaming since it blames women for forced hysterectomies imposed on women by the empire.
Someone I care about left raddle a long time ago because she was attacked for talking about her rape, so this sadly isn't an isolated incident.
I'll leave you with the words of one of the users who pmed me and hope everyone who replies to this post or the linked comment will consider their words very carefully first.
It used to be “why do feminists not focus on women in the Middle East who have it worse than them?” to get women to stop asking for equal pay or abortion rights. Now it’s this. Literally no feminist I know is saying we shouldn’t care about forced hysterectomies in ICE facilities. In fact, my sample set of women I know have people equally upset about those as they are concerned that they and their daughters will lose their rights to have abortions.
An_Old_Big_Tree wrote
Alright. So I hope I’ve adequately looked into this. There’s plenty chance I’m wrong somewhere and in that case I am happy to be corrected. I definitely don’t mean to dismiss the issue of reproductive autonomy in any way, it is a massively important issue, and I recognise that emotionally impacts people in an intimate way. I stand by what I said, so I am hoping that it will help to clarify.
I don’t think that what I have done is whataboutism at all, given my general understanding of what that is. What I said is the basics of what any regular critique of white liberal feminism looks like: “Why is it that there is excess of care given to this “feminism” and not that feminism?” That is real critique. If what I did is whataboutism then so far as I can tell, so are critiques of white liberal feminism generally.
I was not directing it at anyone on raddle at the time and did not indicate that - there was no overt white liberalism happening. What I was doing was noting white liberal feminism that I had been watching (mostly on Facebook).
Why have I been understood as attacking feminism and not the thing I said I was attacking, white liberal feminism?
I am not sure why it is not clear that my concern is with the whiteness and the liberalness of the “feminism” represented by a significant cog in the biggest anti-women machine in history. I am not sure if people here understand RBG to have given them any rights or anything valuable whatsoever. I do not believe that anything that can merely be legislated away is politically resilient - it is flimsy and false. I do believe that RBG could only do what she did because there were huge feminist movements doing real and valuable work. Those movements are who I will never dismiss as having worked hard for feminism, and they are all I care about in this broad context. So far as I can tell, RBG is the bird shit on the tip of of the worst part of an iceberg of feminism, and I don’t care at all how much she worked or not for what she believed in - it is diametrically opposed to what I believe in, even though reproductive autonomy is a shared value in an abstract sense.
So far as I can tell, I’m not doing that at all, and I hope that I can express what is important to express here. I think that the liberal rights frameworks are fundamentally oppressive. I’m pretty confident I have have expressed versions of this multiple times on this site over the years, while considering rights and human rights generally. I believe rights frameworks within our globalised system do and always have created in-groups and out-groups for whom the rights apply or don’t, but not only that, the rights of the in-group actually depends on the continued existence of targeted out-groups. In our current world, that in- and out-group divide is regularly around nationality and skin colour. Which is to say that the whole US empire, which is inseparable from its rights framework that people fought and suffered for, a framework has nothing to do with actual feminism located in people and movement, is actually oppositional to and does come at the expense of the well-being of women who are in the out-group.
Supreme courts don’t give rights, they gatekeep them, and the whole thing needs to be abolished. This is the same general logic behind Indigenous Action's Voting Is Not Harm Reduction.
If I blame anything for the suffering of women it is the whole system, including white liberal feminists who are coopted to it, regardless of how hard they fought for their white liberal feminism (i.e. a seat at the master’s table).
White liberal feminists are complicit, they are systemically on the side of empire.
I believe that there are no liberal heroes and that RBG was anti-women, because liberalism is. Intentions and hard work mean nothing. That is how systemic critique works. Liberals think that they are good people. I don’t think any of this is controversial here.
As is hopefully clear by now, I am not asking people to drop their fight for reproductive autonomy because there is some more important cause. I am saying that RBG and the genuine fight for reproductive autonomy have little to do with each other, and that disproportionate care is given by white liberal feminists to causes that they believe affect them, which is part of the standard critique of white liberal feminism. I’m calling for a genuine feminism that is intersectional, decolonial, and anti-authoritarian.
This is what I think, and from the best I can judge at the moment those of you who saw an anti-woman position in what I said need to work on your decolonial theory as well as do more thinking about how you relate to rights as given by authorities, because I think those thoughts should be present with you always.
I am confused about why people assumed I was anti-women, so much that I feel I may have missed something, or perhaps it was how I said it. Insofar as I shamed anyone for caring about their own lives I would appreciate if someone who is willing could help me understand in a less general sense what exactly made that happen, because it was not my intention at all, and I would like to guard against that in future.
I am happy to be wrong and to learn. This is the best I have at the moment, but I learn all the time.