Several months ago I wrote the following post on my Tumblr account, describing the concept of toxic femininity how I see it:
Recently I’ve been thinking more about toxic femininity (as a counterpart to toxic masculinity) and how it’s poorly defined.
Texts from other people (for example, this) mostly focus on what women affected by toxic femininity do to themselves, and not to others, meanwhile I see it as a tool of violence towards other people (most often young girls and women with a lower place in the social hierarchy).
Toxic femininity encourages centering your mindset around vulnerability and harm, ranked from less to more severe according to the society’s values. One of the first lessons in toxic femininity that a person growing up as a girl receives is lectures from older female relatives about how being a girl makes them fragile, how everyone else is constantly aware of this fragility and seeking to hurt them, and the only way to prevent it is to accept fragility and learn to plan life with it in mind.
Rejecting this premise alltogether and trying to be strong, or deciding to ignore the risk of harm and prioritizing enjoying life instead, is shut down with mockery, cynicism, and appeals to wisdom. In addition to that, being severely harmed (especially sexually) is presented as something that will decrease your value as a person.
Slowly assimilating into toxic femininity requires learning to ignore your dreams and aspirations and exposing yourself to constant low levels of stress and discomfort in pursuit of safety. A common part of normative female socialization (as in “socializing with each other” rather than “being socialized”) is constantly being negative about each other’s “risky” self expression as a means of keeping each other safe. Sometimes visually similar behavior is dictated by genuine hatred, confusion between care and malice is used to get away with more and more hostility, and both can give participants long lasting trauma.
On a side note, this pairs with my vision of toxic masculinity as a system where boys and men are taught to expose themselves to risks as a means to prove or raise their value, and this also results in constant exposure to distress, although in this case it’s framed as helping your buddies to build character rather than something cautionary. But this probably warrants a separate post.
I consider what I described above to be one of the main building blocks of radical feminism.
Radical feminism differs from other branches of feminism by presenting the oppression of women as the most impactful and profound type of oppression, with many other types of oppression partially or fully stemming from it. Instead of viewing the patriarchy as a family-centric oppressive system that harms all kinds of marginalized people via gender roles, and where women of high social rank (white, neurotypical, adult, cisgender, and so on) are just as capable of committing gendered violence as men of similar social rank, they see it as a very binary arrangement where all men oppress all women. Depending on a specific radfem’s stance on trans people, the gender category of women is defined either on the basis of the assigned gender or on the basis of the gender identity. Some blame gendered socialization, others blame hormones or sometimes literally genitals. But all approaches include viewing womanhood as a social position inseparable from being hurt, and manhood – as inseparable from hurting. Seeing manhood and womanhood as the most important distinction between people leads to thinking that abuse can be explained by it and that having a certain gender identity or assigned gender is a risk factor on its own.
Many of the problems radfems are talking about (such as youth sexual abuse, partner abuse) are real and deserve attention. Each of them has a variety of complex reasons that involve multiple axes of oppression, such as race, age, or ability, yet radfems ignore it and only ever bring up intersectionality in context of how additional marginalized identities overlap with womanhood.
Following the conclusions from this framing, radfems campaign for increased separation between men and women and cite women’s exaggerated fragility as the reason. A typical terf’s reasoning for being a terf includes fear about young “girls” (very often trans men and nonbinary people) learning to not be afraid of men. Alleged pro trans radfems (no kind of radical feminism is actually safe for trans people) also believe in some variant of the above – not so long ago I came across a self-proclaimed “tirf” (“trans inclusive radical feminist”) stating that fear of penises is an essential survival skill. Baeddels, a branch of radfems founded by trans women, pushed for the idea that people who aren’t trans women are inherently not safe to be around. The following common points can be named:
- Believing in a universal vulnerability of women, sometimes in a physical sense;
- Believing that men are aware of this vulnerability and seek to exploit it;
- Believing that things a man can do to a woman are inherently more traumatic than any other type of harm;
- Believing that being vigilant of men and things associated with men (e.g. penises) is necessary for safety.
Radfems may reject the idea of being active perpetrators of anything called “toxic femininity”, since many of them believe themselves to be spokespersons for gender non-conforming women. But there is much more to gender roles than your style, mannerisms, and presentation. Vulnerability and fear are a part of the role of a woman just as much as shaving legs is, and just like shaving legs, they’re often enforced by women in a position of authority or control. And, however they may call it, this is what radfems aspire to be.
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