I try not to swear too much because once I begin I can’t stop, but I am not sure how else to respond to a Feminist website calling Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie a “smug asshole.”
Actually, I can’t really respond at all to Guerrilla Feminism (NOT Guerrilla Feminist Collective) because I got banned from commenting on their site forever earlier this year for pointing out biology is actually still a thing. Which is really too bad. Thanks to my Sicilian American upbringing I guarantee I would win in any war of the swear words.
Fuck you, Guerrilla Feminism – and anyone else who thinks it is okay to name call a feminist for disagreeing with you because she is viewing feminism through a different cultural lens. Aren’t I doing the same thing, one may ask? No. This is not dismissing the viewpoint of a brilliant feminist and author using words better saved for Donald Trump. This is me expressing frustration at the liberal feminists who are LITERALLY dividing and ruining feminism.
You have made American feminism into a complete embarrassment. Flinging around the words TERF and SWERF utterly dumbs down years of complex feminist thought and analysis. And what’s worse, all of this falls on deaf ears. Thanks to a trend of no-platforming and banning and name calling on twitter, feminism now has a fascist slant, too, making this rant completely pointless.
It’s these low points such as reading the words “smug asshole” about Adichie from people claiming the name feminism that makes me pessimistic about the future of feminism, and thus the future of women’s rights. Yes, I am discovering more and more radical feminists in the blogosphere, but the marginalization within the movement makes it hard to take back the discourse from these liberal “feminists.”
Sometimes I just feel like we are all swimming upstream, struggling to make it to shore – and then bam! Along comes a fucking rock to just make everything worse.
Maybe I should stop looking at such websites, but I think that ignoring mainstream discourse is dangerous. So, in the words of Dory from Finding Nemo, I’ll “keep swimming!”
I totally agree with Chimamanda, and British journalist Jenni Murray who said the same thing just days before Chimamanda did.
I applaud these women, in the public eye, who are standing up and saying what needs to be said. Women get pregnant, have babies, get a shit deal and it’s as simple as that.
And, as you and others point out, black and latino women get an even worse deal.
So, yeah, go Chimamanda. We love ya 🙂
LikeLiked by 2 people
So, so glad she didn’t back down!
LikeLiked by 3 people
Indeed. Doesn’t she get 200% admiration for that? Hard enough for any feminist, but for a woman of colour to get shit like that? Good on her. She needs support and to stay firm, and she will be a class role model. And now I need to find her books! A Kenyan (male) friend actually alerted me to the whole fracas. The internet is sometimes good.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Americanah is an amazing book, I highly recommend it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’m so glad I found your blog. I thought I was the only wordpress anarchafeminist with these thoughts.
LikeLike
Thank you, and I believe that there are many more people who feel this way but fear speaking out so as not to be accused of being a TWERF or SWERF
LikeLike