HUB reaches blogging milestone: 500,000 hits and counting

This week, thanks to our readers, writers and our wonderful guest-bloggers, the HUB has reached the milestone of 500,000 pageviews.  While this is a very tiny number compared to the amount of traffic any number of mainstream blogs attract in a month, a week, or even a single day, considering that one-million pageviews is a milestone that most blogs never reach, and considering how marginalized radical feminism is, this number is significant and encouraging.

So what has brought HUB to this place, since its beginnings on May 18, 2011?  Read on to see significant events in our herstory, including links to our top posts, an opportunity to revisit our wonderful guest posts, and more.

Carrying a Sheila Jeffreys sign at Dyke March is inappropriate? What?

As is often the case with misogynists and anti-feminists, the trans horde that took advantage of the “inclusivity” (read: a transwoman helped organize the march, and woe be unto anyone who crosses men who demand access to woman-only space in general) of NYC Dyke March — and others who weren’t even there — don’t seem to have read a word of anything Sheila Jeffreys has actually written.  If they had read her, how could it have rationally been said that Jeffreys — a pro-female, pro-lesbian writer — and her work had no place at a lesbian-centered event?

Or, perhaps they read a couple of words, saw something they didn’t like, and threw away the rest?  “The rest” being Sheila Jeffreys’s entire life’s work of pro-female, pro-lesbian, PIV-critical radical feminist analysis which spans decades and examines women’s lives from pre-WWI — a body of work from which modern women can draw many parallels, recognize obvious patterns in how women are oppressed by men over time, and call age-old bullshit when we see it, because we are never, ever allowed to see it.  Women’s history is routinely erased, and this is a deliberate political strategy to keep women as ignorant of patriarchal context and as oppressed — and as complicit in our own oppression — as possible.

Happy Birthday to Hub

RadFem Hub published its first post May 18th, 2011, making the site one year old now. We want to thank all of our readers, commenters, guest bloggers, and the many women who have been involved along the way for their participation and hard work in this undertaking.

“Religious Freedom” is Code for the Sanctioned Removal of Women’s Rights

-Jan Brewer, Handmaiden of the Patriarchy-

US  residents may have noticed the recent War on Women being perpetrated in this country using the excuse of “religious freedom” to justify this rollback of women’s rights.

For the most recent installment of this assault on our rights, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer recently signed House Bill 2625, which authorizes employers with religious affiliations to refuse to cover contraception on their employees’ health insurance plans.

States Brewer about the bill:

In its final form, this bill is about nothing more than preserving the religious freedom to which we are all Constitutionally-entitled.  Mandating that a religious institution provide a service in direct contradiction with its faith would represent an obvious encroachment upon the 1st Amendment.

Terroristic Anti-Abortion Group Publishes Patient Docs Online

Last week, the Kansas-based organization Operation Rescue posted papers from an abortion clinic on their website. The documents were not official patient records, but included names, ages, phone numbers, photocopies of driver’s licenses, sonograms, and other personal identifying information for 86 women and girls who received care in the month of April. While the group was nice enough to redact the names before publishing the documents for all to see, Operation Rescue is still in possession of that information – stolen information, of course.

On 50 Shades of Grey and the Erotization of Male Domination

Freedom is slavery.

Submissiveness is empowering.

BDSM erotica is feminist.

The above are just a few of the lies that patriarchal culture has served up for women in the best selling BDSM novel 50 Shades of Grey.

First-time female novelist E L James began the piece as short fan fiction based off of the Twilight series whose main relationship between a 104 year old vampire and a teenage girl meets all the criteria for domestic violence.

Given its source material, it’s not surprising that 50 Shades of Grey and its sequels tells the story of a billionaire who convinces a young woman to agree to be his full time sex slave.

E L James’ story is not new.

The ‘Pomo’ Backlash: Looking at Feminism in the Aftermath of Postmodernism (Part 2)

Guest post by Maggie H.

[This is part two of a two part post. Read part one here.]

There is an over-emphasis on discourse and domination of ‘language’ in postmodern feminist works; this frequently fails to address the central issue of structural male domination over women. There is validity in linking language with power. However, radical feminists have explained where the ‘master narrative’ lies; it is not in women’s accounts of their life experiences. The voices of the oppressed ought not to be deconstructed. It is men who have privilege and the power of naming in a patriarchy (Daly, 1979; Dworkin, 1979), and men like Foucault or Derrida are no exception.

Structural male dominance should adequately be addressed; but Jane Flax (in Thinking Fragments; 1990), for example, would rather use the terms ‘gender’ and ‘gender relations’ than male dominance. She makes the absurd claim that there is a need to find what gender relations ‘really are’, while gender continues to be constructed and enforced by a male-supremacist context. She remains obscure on the reality of sex hierarchy in a gendered society where men dominate women. There is notable reluctance, in Flax’s work, to seriously name the agent for women’s oppression, i.e. men.

The “Born This Way” Political Tactic: What’s Next?

Around the time of the discovery of the AIDS virus in the very early 1980s, the Gay (and Lesbian) community adopted the ideology of homosexuality as innate; Gay (and Lesbian) people were born this way ergo they could not be “fixed”, it wasn’t their “fault” and AIDS could not be a punishment from God if the theist belief of being “made in His image“ were to hold.

It was politically expedient at the time, and quite intuitive really, to claim a biological basis for homosexuality when the AIDS pandemic itself was, and continues to be, a biological disaster. An innate homosexuality also allowed people close to Gays (and Lesbians), especially mothers, to absolve themselves of any *wrong doing* and instead build a platform from which they could advocate for their children, fathers (and mothers), brothers (and sisters), husbands (and wives) as full human beings with full human/medical rights.

The ‘Pomo’ Backlash: Looking at Feminism in the Aftermath of Postmodernism (Part 1)

Guest post by Maggie H.

Poststructuralism, also referred to as postmodernism (1), has been majorly influential on recent feminist theory, especially within the context of Academia. This is an analysis and a critical assessment of postmodern ‘feminism’ from my own radical lesbian feminist standpoint. I will first highlight some key issues coming from the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970’s (i.e. background on feminism, as it looked like before postmodernism). I will then look at the academic feminist theoretical postmodernist turn of recent years, and later point out to Queer culture as an offshoot of postmodernism. I will also explain why postmodernism is seriously antithetical to the goal to eradicate the oppression of women, and conclude with hope for resistance. This essay is also the result of a research into postmodern feminism that I had been doing for University. Here, I analyse some postmodern ‘feminist’ works.

Female Lawmakers Use Satire Against Conservative War on Women

Lately, legislation across the United States has been rife with various attacks on anything that gives women even a modicum of control over their bodies. President Obama caved on his administration’s mandate for contraceptive insurance coverage (and no women were allowed on a congressional panel on the matter), Illinois saw two anti-abortion bills pass, Utah is considering imposing a 3-day waiting period before abortions, and three states (Iowa, Texas, Virginia) have proposed (or have already passed) forcing women to have ultrasounds before they can obtain an abortion. In the last week, women everywhere began to realize just how much Republican men hate them when the news Virginia’s ultrasound bill made mainstream headlines. The word “trans-vaginal” had never seen such a limelight before this week.

In response to such “small government” conservative measures, a handful of  female lawmakers have realized something recently too — how to wield satire against this crap.