I CAN'T BELIEVE WE STILL HAVE TO PROTEST THIS SHIT

How Much Further Back Will the 3rd Wave Shove Women?

(FD: I am a co-editor and member of The Radical Notion collective)

Issue 10 is coming together, and serendipity has given us a testament to how much the third wave has cost women. To #CostIt is to say that we are nearly back to 1963. Men on the left and right want to co-opt what energy we do have, and that way too, nothing is new. And we have much to win back and rebuild.

We built the women's estate, the women's sector, our own refuges and shelters, our own abortion networks and clinics, our own social spaces for organizing and for pleasure. We exposed the stomach-turning levels of sexual and physical violence against us, the vast damage of trafficking for sex, the soul-rot of pornography, the constriction of talent/self/body/love/health that comes with feminine socialization and male entitlement to women's time and bodies.

We built disciplines and methodologies that centre, archive, and represent women across the institutions of learning and industry, and then … to save ourselves the exhaustion of self-funding every little thing … we made a bargain to professionalize, to accept government funding with its conditions and precariousness. And the daughters who became the third wave, my generation, accepted the conditions: sex work is work, objectifiction is empowerment, women are equal enough now, trans women are women, woman is just a feeling. The long third wave gave up so much in the name of acceptance and moving to the centre that we are here now in 2023 having to defend the legal definition of a millenia old word and epoch-deep concept of sexual difference.

Women's safety, our dignity, our rights, even our lives are in retreat in most of the world. Even in Latin America where women are winning on abortion, they are still murdered, disappeared, and trafficked at astronomical rates. There, as in most of the world, the demands of trans women are over-writing the claims women make on the world. There, as in most of the world, these women are still pushing against national instability and crushing levels of poverty.

But intersectionality has become ‘intersectionality' about identity, about style, and not about material categories and effects of oppression and marginalization. We all thought that moving from the margin to centre would change the nature of power, but the gravity well of the Great White Late-Capitalist Hetero Patriarchy is deep and strong. The margin, the outside, the hinterland is always where the strongest social imagination is created way out there, and always the machines of the centre arrive to colonize and tame the challenge that counter-cultural imagination poses. Women's autonomous liberation movement was such a challenge for a while.

And even when we did move our feminism into bargains with patriarchal institutions, in only the 70ish years that women have been educated and employed en masse – we have lapped the millennia of men thinking they were the brains of this operation, the brawn. We make every human life on this earth, nurture them to adulthood, AND we are pushing the boundaries of physics, medicine, business, and tech More of us graduate, more of make more money than men, and they are feeling it, and here they come with their nationalism, their facism, their violence, their pornified sexual demands, their subversions of democratic ideals, and yes their junk-showing-mini-skirted identities in the high heels the second wave knew gave women arthritis of the hip and spine to raze what we built. And it's not been too hard because the third wave let the foundation rot out from under themselves and all the women before.

I CAN'T BELIEVE WE STILL HAVE TO PROTEST THIS SHIT

ISSUE 10 of #TheRadicalNotion will rekindle your fire, set you building women's movement on women's terms again. From our words to our public gatherings of more than 26 to our lesbians sisters’ bars to our reproductive freedom, we will rebuild.

And we will build wider and deep than ever. We must begin to deepen connection to women working for women across all languages and continents, classes and status. Goddess knows the authoritarians are fully international!!!
Begin here, and build in the ways your are called.

THE RADICAL NOTION is self-funded entirely by our subscribers, and our goal is to keep our feminist sisters inspired, encouraged, and connected to each other as we turn our energy rebuild a women's movement for women on women's terms!!