RedFem

With reference to Lauren Southern, Candace Owens, Katharine Birbalsingh, and Pearl Davis, we ask why so many rightwing women do not practice what they preach in terms of trad gender roles? High-powered, and often unmarried and/or childless career women, traditionalists and conservative women advocate marriage and being a housewife for women, but not for themselves. We explore this political trend, what Andrea Dworkin had to say about the tendency of rightwing women towards exceptionalism, and comment on a number of topics, from educational traditionalism, to the importance of having the freedom to learn conflict resolution during adolescence, and the latest Marks & Spencer's Christmas advert. 

We also wonder why Marxist-feminists, who only view women's liberation as women workers under capitalism, not liberation for women as a sex class, so often want to be stay-at-home wives and mothers? Despite their politics focusing on the workplace and women as workers. How is it that more leftwing women want what rightwing women advocate for in terms of lifestyle, than rightwing women do themselves?

Asexuality or being 'ace' (short for asexual) is a newly invented LGBTQ+ category promoted by former gay rights charity Stonewall. What is it? Asexuality includes being 'gray sexual', meaning feeling more inclined towards sexual activity some of the time than at other times, and 'demisexual', which means wanting to develop romantic feelings for a partner before engaging in sexual contact i.e most people, most of the time. You can be an 'asexual lesbian' or 'demisexual gay man', so asexuality is not so much of a claim to orientation (which sex you fancy), but a characteristic of that sexual orientation or its overall sexual character. 

Where does the category come from? We discuss 'asexuality' as reaction to, and logic of, pornography: that there is now an invented group category, who are supposedly a minority, who refuse the pornographic representation of being sexually available for immediate sexual contact with strangers at all times. It also, we say, represents the instantaneousness of access to pornography online and as if refuting this, and preferring greater sexual connections with real people in real life, is somehow novel or now a marginal view, placing you in a minority status sexual group.

We also discuss the impact of SSRIs on women's libido, Jen refutes any claim to asexuality at all from a Freudian perspective, and we consider whether Stonewall is simply looking for its next 'young person' cohort to claim it represents now that the Trans train is grinding to a holt. What services would asexuals need? Are Stonewall planning to campaign for those in sexless marriages, who number in the millions? We also consider 'asexuality' as a way to frame the volcel and incel trends, and that most people as they mature do not consider their sexual orientation, or their sexual life, to be the most important things about them - are they therefore, in their tens of millions, also asexual?

We think through 'asexuality' as an effect of alienation, the loss of third spaces, Trans and Asexuals as an oddball club, and how these new sexual categories are an attempt to create subcultures and social scenes after their decline this century. Towards the second half of the episode other themes include lifestylism as competition e.g. mommy vloggers and lifestyle bloggers, organic fun as the only real fun, and we discuss why women love True Crime so much?

We discuss whether the gender critical movement is the inheritor of the second-wave feminist movement, or in fact perhaps the inheritor of the radical feminist tradition itself? Hannah makes an argument for the latter, Jen argues for the former. Does being gender critical mean simply being critical of Transgenderism, or does it require interrogating gender roles and gender as an ideology (a set of ideas and practices that reinforce one another) as a whole? Can someone be a conservative or traditionalist and still be considered part of the GC movement? And in what sense can gender norms and gender conformity be understood within a radical feminist framework when there has never been a fully developed and fleshed out radical feminist theoretical model of it? 

This episode focuses on the radical feminist idea of gender abolitionism and asks, could we really ever fully abolish gender? Gender, here understood as the ideological norms and social expectations of the sexes. We discuss what abolishing gender would look like, and also take a rather large detour into Critical Race Theory and Robin DiAngelo for the first half of the episode, before bringing it back to the question of gender. 

Topics include 'white woman tears' as a form of feminine policing that appeals to authority, Lacan's understanding of being 'born into language' (and thus society, ideology, and culture), Foucault's conception that power, as dominance and submission, is inescapable, and how this lead to Derrida's deconstructionism as a kind of doomerism that necessarily forecloses liberationary ideas like gender abolition. Those three post-structural thinkers informed Judith Butler, who therefore accepted gender as immutable and unchangeable, and so attempted to instead reconceive sex as mutable and changeable. This, we argue, is a disastrous concession that reflects the turn away from meta-narrative structuralism, one that implicitly heralds the possibility of structural change and remaking the world, towards a pessimistic and individualistic deconstructionism (a pessimism that developed in part through disappointment at the failures of the USSR) where all that can be remade is the individual at a micro-level and in a very limited sense.

We also explore the framing that "all politics is, is what happens to a man and his family" in relation to divorce and secularisms impact on 'social reproduction' (a Marxist term meaning how society and cultures reproduce themselves). This leads to admitting, and scrutinising, the tension between the family as a unit of private social reproduction (socialisation in the home and through the family) and public social reproduction through the state (socialisation through schooling, universities, healthcare, and childcare settings).

The 'bimbo', a feminine archetype that has at times existed as a cultural construct, stereotype, or epithet thrown at women, is making a return in the form of 'bimboism'. What defines bimboism? Wilful empty headedness, nonchalance, vacancy, a superficial interest in matters, or only an interest in the superficial, combining to ensure nothing is ever taken seriously, except appearance.  We ask why self-consciously adopted 'bimboism' has become popular amongst young women? And even some 'looksmaxxing' young men. We put forward two key explanations, firstly that the given the declining prospects for young people, who are watching the world and their futures burn (sometimes literally), is it any wonder many want to checkout mentally? Secondly, in our pornified culture, that raises the expectation to have sex of the kind represented in pornography, the modern 'bimbo' is surely a form of disassociation and attempt to appear and be absent, other than a pornified image. If 'bimboism' is a protective measure and retreat, when else has that happened historically? And isn't there some appeal to everyone in rejecting responsibility and shrugging off caring about serious things?

We discuss Betty Friedan's 'The Feminine Mystique', the effects of social media's one-dimensional flattening of subjectivity, and consider the powerful impact the cultural space of the internet has across differing generational lines and especially sex. Other topics include the recent Stonewall leadership change, modern technology's relationship to anxiety, and the aesthetics of porn genres.

This episode discusses lifestyle politics and the false dichotomy of 'the personal is political' (false because it excludes politics), touching on housing cooperatives, communes, normalised drug use in sub-cultures, the delusion of aesthetics as politics, anarchist clubs for boys, and we conclude that giving the impression of politics, rather than doing politics, is symptomatic of social movements in decline. 

Should politicians be held to a higher standard in their personal and professional lives? What's the line where hypocrisy becomes too stark and a political figure is longer a credible advocate? Other themes include how unchangeable ideological values trump unchangeable sexual orientation (at least in public). How everyone acts in their own interests, not in a cynical calculated way, but overall ideologically. Radical feminists view of psychology as a 'male field' meaning child development doesn't feature in radical feminist theories. The  vulnerability and discomfort of accepting how childhood powerfully shapes us.

Other topics include Jen's trip to Russia and the quick-adaptation to cultural norms, the psychoanalytic understanding of homophobia, identity politics in feminism during the 1980s. We also discuss 'manosphere' self-help therapy rhetoric and expansive self-advancement vs. today's feminine 'sisterhood' risk of lowering your horizons, retreating into 'stringy' relationships based on a claim of 'loving' or liking all 'womyn' and withdrawing into the world of the home and online sphere.

Bodycount, the concept gripping the internet over the last month, refers to the number of sexual partners a person has had. The concepts prevalence emerged through the online RedPill space and has become a key term in the backlash against 'sex positivity' over the last few years. In a dating world now defined by apps, the internet, and, increasingly, a renewed traditional system of sexual value, in what way is 'bodycount' supposed to matter socially? Is it possible to instead think of our sexual partners as subjects, with personal histories that are meaningful, rather than as property or objects?

We discuss a 'pro-women argument' for men paying on dates, research that undermines naturalist perspectives on paternity, and criticise evolutionary psychology's perspectives about men and women's different sexual tendencies. We also discuss why some gay people still remain closeted, claim lesbians and gay men are perhaps representative of their sexes preferred sexual relations because they show how each group behaves when unmediated by the other, and consider how late-stage capitalism is beginning to undermine patriarchy. 

Other topics include casual sex as self-harm, clocking into triple digits at lesbian festivals, polyamory as 'sexual HR' organising people romantically as consumable products, and how those who are 'poly' tend to be dissatisfied and dissatisfying immature perverts who never achieve emotional intimacy with anyone.  We also ask why do gay men not have solidarity with one another in the way straight men do? And whether heterosexual men can ever get over their neurotic retrospective jealousy about their partners previous love lives?

Recent SWP member and NEU Regional Secretary Simon Murch plead guilty to the rape of a child under 13 on September 4th 2023. This episode is about the culture of far Left groups, Jen's experiences in the SWP during the 'Comrade Delta' period a decade ago, wherein the de facto General Secretary of the SWP sexually abused two teenage girls, and asks the question: why does the far-Left attract men intent on sexually abusing children? Given the far-Left wishes to liberate humanity and replace present society with one based on its own ethical and moral vision, that it believes to be superior, why is the sexual abuse of children considered so insignificant to the organised groups on the far-Left? The episode includes discussion of morality and moralism, the difference between the 'woman question' and the 'feminist question', and an update at the end that comments on the SWP's inadequate statement on Simon Murch. 

This episode explores the two key reasons that the moronic Left seeks to brand gender critical women (slurred as 'TERFs') as fascists. Firstly, we discuss that no one seems to know what an actual fascist is anymore and so the label is applied haphazardly and erroneously as an attempt to discredit any and all opposition to Transgenderism. Secondly, that it's an attempt to apply No Platform to gender critical women (historically, the tactic of No Platform was used only against fascists) in order to shut down debate, whilst also legitimising violent tactics (again, historically, it was only fascists that were considered dangerous enough that street violence could be used against them. Today, Trans Rights Activists seek to move gender critical women into the category 'fascist' so that violence against them becomes justified). The episode uses the example of McLibel defendant and Spy Cop victim Helen Steel, leftwing activist royalty within the UK, now branded a 'fascist' despite decades of work on the Left. Plus, the Melbourne Let Women Speak event and how the above reasoning played out against the women who gathered there.

This episode leads with the mugshot from Trump's recent arrest and the paving of his way to power by his inept political opponents. That discussion enters into a wider conversation about what exactly the hell is MAGA communism? In relation to that, we consider Cuba, the EFF, Palestine, Venezuela, and the BRICS system, plus the revolutionary process and its combined subjective and objective conditions. The last part of the episode deals with Oliver Anthony's viral song Rich Men North of Richmond and how it has fast become a working class anthem, transcending political divides in America.