RedFem

We talk about how the infantilisation of LGBTQ+ politics has helped kill off lesbian nightlife and its effects. Including, the awkwardness of asexual discos, gay bars becoming popular with straight people and then inevitably changing, and the difficulty of maintaining a policy that only allows women through the door in the era of gender identity. We cover the wider context of historical neglect of lesbian venues due to an optimism that they would always exist, how a women's disco is not the same as a lesbian event, and  monogamy's impact on lesbian footfall through nightclubs.  

Also discussed is the reality that it's a challenge to maintain venues for any minority that is less than 1% of the general population, how poor provisions in those that do exist reflect lesbians low social status, and the apparent fact that hiking and cruises are much more attractive to lesbians than going out late night. The episode also includes the door policy at Heaven of checking women's fingernail length, the 'lesbian manicure' that brings new meaning to the phrase 'bowling alone', the now unimaginable time of weekly student gay nights pre-2008 economic crash, and Hannah regales a very award gay disco at Labour Party conference.

Are contemporary fascists and communists in practice all ultimately moderates due to the political climate that has narrowed around capitalism since Soviet collapse? We discuss that question, as well as why the rightwing are bold whilst the socialist left are pessimistic and tribal, the purpose of the Labour Party, and ask why socialists are masochistically loyal to organisations who hate them. This episode also includes commentary on 'stuck culture', living in times of social decay, why rightwing women are more likely to acknowledge male violence than socialist women, and the imagined scenario of Keir Starmer shitting in Jeremy Corbyn's house.

Gypsy Rose Blanchard has been released from prison after taking part in the plot to murder her Munchausen's by Proxy mother, after decades of neglect, physical abuse, and medical abuse.  We discuss women's relationship to their bodies, their children, fictitious disorder (the new term for Munchausen's Syndrome), and the predicament of dealing with a low sense of Self.

This special edition episode discusses the taboos surrounding Christmas, including overfamiliarity, serving up passive-aggressive 'shit sandwich' situations to younger relatives, the weird 'queer' concept of 'chosen family' (that doesn't exist in practice), and the traditional expectations of harmony and happiness which many families do not manage. We also consider the questions of unequal domestic labour amongst the sexes within family structures, the non-existence of feminist communes as alternatives, and fraught dynamics between people who do, or are pretending, to love one another.

In 2013 Oscar Pistorius murdered his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp on Valentines Day by shooting her to death as she hid in a bathroom. We discuss our changing perspectives on the trial, his conviction at first for manslaughter and later murder, and comment on the fact Pistorius is due to be released after only serving six years in prison. This episode also includes discussion of wounded masculinity and its close relationship to male violence as a way to regain any perceived lost ground of male dominance. Denial around disability and lack of recognition, and how denial produces emotional repression and in turn that can produce out of control anger. Plus, vulnerable men as not being nicer, kinder, or more complex than less vulnerable men. Guns as phallic substitutes, women coping with male violence against women (including against themselves) by siding with the man, and Jen describes an incident of being sexually harassed by a disabled man at a public political rally.

Why do women seek romantic love more than men? We consider that question through discussion of New Age digital 'high demand group' Twin Flames Universe and the recent documentary on the cult available on Prime (which is much better than the one on Netflix). Our key focus is idealised romance culture that's primarily sold to women and how that informed the function of gender identity inside the Twin Flames cult. The gender essentialism inside the cult of allotting every person as either a 'divine feminine' or 'divine masculine' and heterosexually pairing people off into arranged marriages based on those oppositional, supposedly complimentary matches, is highly representative and revealing of Transgenderism's underlying essentialist ideology and tendency towards conversion therapy.

We also discuss the illusion of the perfect partner, eroticisms relationship with separation, the need for a developed Self to engage fruitfully in romantic relationships, women's avoidance of conflict, and the almost limitless scope of the internet to access and exploit emotionally desperate people.

This episode serves as an introduction to the Cambodian genocide and we discuss, as communists, how the genocide occurred, the ideas that led to it, and ask, how much does communism have a cultism problem? Discussion includes identifying cult tactics of control, the rise of radical groups within a vacuum caused by political and state instability, understanding the Khmer Rouge as a kind of 'peasant ISIS', who viewed the working class as their oppressive class. We also touch on the reoccurring persistence in radical politics of a need to systematise all matters and believe in one universal theory that explains everything, and proposing a system based on the one grand theory that can supposedly solve all society's problems.

We regale more experiences from the late 2000s and mid 2010s that steered us on our journey to peak trans. Jen speaks about a disastrous date with a Drag King, Hannah talks about being chatted up by a 'transwoman' wearing a giant vulva, and we tell a socialist woman's story about a 'transwoman' showing up to her Women's Network meeting begging for money for fake breasts, who then sexted all the women attendees after. We also discuss the Trans online begging phenomenon of so-called 'mutual aid' in its origin of anarchist thinker and Russian crackpot Peter Kropotkin. Towards the end of the episode we bring up the joining of the T to LGB in the student world and how the Black Students campaign in the UK avoided postmodern identity politics madness in bygone days.

The advent of gay marriage in the Western world led to many third sector industry organisations in need of a new cause (step forward transgenderism). In this respect, was gay marriage worth it? Especially considering only 10% of gay people are married. We discuss that, cohabitation laws, wages for housewives, and the tension between women's role in the family and the state. What would a feminist vision of marriage look like? What could an adept welfare state offer to guarantee a living standard outside of marriage for mothers? If we take as valid the radical feminist criticism of the welfare state potentially operating towards women as a patriarchal father or husband, how could  such a risk be mitigated?

The latter half of the episode is concerned with late capitalism's failure to secure working class marriage and social reproduction, making marriage and having children largely out of reach for everybody young, including straight people, creating a strange kind marital 'equality' in its growing impossibility. Hannah speaks about how she's convinced that capitalism and patriarchy are separate (dual systems theory, as outlined in Heidi Hartmann's essay Marxism & Feminism: An Unhappy Marriage) as capitalism structurally undermines patriarchy in certain periods and contexts, such as the present, making the nuclear family economically unviable for most people young enough to biologically reproduce. Jen suggests that perhaps soon banks will propose polyamory and 'throuples' as a way to secure a mortgage!

Why are so many lesbian prone to conformity? As seen in the adoption of transgender identity by so many lesbians. But also, why is lesbianism sometimes associated with feminism? We discuss political lesbianism, lesbian invisibility, lesbophobia as a form of misogyny rather than strictly homophobia, lesbian experience as distinct from that of gay men, lesbians as a taboo within families, and the conflation between female friendship and lesbianism. Plus, the figure of the 'man hating dyke', lesbian's probably naivety about men compared with that of heterosexual women, the real or perceived ideological prejudice that at times prohibits lesbian's freedom of movement, lesbians being understood to be men or manlike, and Jen comments on her research in South Korea on the radical women's movement.