I tried to study, so now it's time for the rules of rad fem!

1) No one gets a get out of patriarchy free card(also known as you're not a special snowflake)

On feministe, Vanessa wore green lipstick when she was a teenager, so she's special~!


I think that it's important to look at systems rather than individuals as the font of feminism. Everyone thinks they are special. But when you start putting patterns together, you notice that in the US, 99% of makeup wearer(green lipstick or otherwise) are women, most folks randomly choosing to stay home with the kids at the expense of a massive paycut and having to be on call 24/7 are women, and so on and so forth, and you start noting that all the special little snowflakes in the world can't advert this blizzard of sexism.

2)Just because sex is involved doesn't mean that you need to toss your brain and common sense out the window.

Just because something involves sex doesn't mean it can't also be oppressive. Note this shitty comic art. I'm sure someone has a fetish for horrible anatomy, but that doesn't make bad comic art any better.

3)Everyone had a childhood.

Childhood is defined as the time when you were smaller, and your brain was less developed. Brain plasticity is also a component of childhood. Everyone had one, no matter how special they think they are.

4)Everyone lives in a culture.

This is a corralary to #3. We are also all affected by the culture. For example, thanks to a mixture of #3 and #4, I find the idea of tossing money away to be a shocking thing.

5)The dominant culture affects all of us.

Now black people have had a long tradition of explaining #5. We all know that nobody woke up one morning and decided that straight hair was the standard of beauty just for no reason at all. But I may have to explain to members of other cultures. You see, in childhood, often you are exposed to the dominant society, well, a lot, and tend to have a lot of your views of the world set in childhood. So if you learn that hair on women is the devil, you may have to unlearn that when evidence to the contrary is presented.