Tumblr and its consequences for girls: social media, ideology, and woman hatred
This article is based on the main session presentation ‘Social Media: How Did We Get Here?’ delivered at the second annual LGB Alliance Conference in October 2022 by Hannah Berrelli and Shay Woulahan. Gender ideology has spread rapidly throughout the Western world in the last decade, becoming embedded inside the third sector, within corporate HR…
Anti-feminism and Antisemitism
Young women who have never heard of Dworkin, Firestone, or Atkinson, are being exposed to the idea that feminism was cooked up by a cabal of Jewish overlords in order to separate them from their children. If their only exposure to ‘feminism’ has been Buzzfeed videos extoling the virtues of pornography, they will be suspectable…
Porn and Dating Apps: The ‘Brothel Model’ Approach to Modern Heterosexuality
Social theorists say we are entering a new age. Neoliberalism will soon deliver us, they predict, a neo-feudal age — which they variously call neo-patrimonialism, re-patrimonialism, or the re-feudalization of capitalism. This new age will be one of ‘parceled sovereignty, new lords and peasants, hinterlandization, and catastrophism’, or, more simply, the ‘Reformation into reverse’. In…
Queer Identity and Lesbian Erasure
Heterosexuality is undoubtedly necessary for the social and sexual reproduction of existing social conditions. For this reason, some radical feminists make the mistake of classifying heterosexuality as an institution — but this is an error. Instead, heterosexuality is institutionalised across all material and ideological state apparatus: education, the family, medicine, religion, etc. As society has…
LESBIAN VISIBILITY DAY: Lesbophobia is not Homophobia, it’s Misogyny
Lesbophobia is, like lesbianism itself, invisibalised in favour of more respected social forms. The wider amorphous ‘homophobia’ serves today as a catchall for any anti-gay sentiment, but it only really captures what gay men face: prejudice and discrimination based on their sexuality i.e same-sex attraction (to other men). Anti-gay prejudice experienced by men is pure…
Third Gender Categories, Homosexuality and Transgender Identity
The capitalist mode of production requires a continually growing workforce in order to meet the production demands of a ‘constantly expanding market’. This, in turn, requires continued and widespread heterosexual reproduction in order that capitalist states continue to profit from overpopulation.Beyond the active workforce, the capitalist mode of production also requires overpopulation in order to…
‘Not All Men!’ and Other Responses to Sarah Everard’s Death
The discovery of missing 33 year old Sarah Everard’s body has drawn substantial media attention over the past few weeks. The subsequent arrest and charging of a serving Met police officer in connection with her murder has sparked national and international outrage. Women across the country are sharing their experiences of male violence, including harassment,…
Losing Lesbians: The Strange Disappearance of Ellen Page
Today, many lesbians are choosing to avoid lesbophobia and misogyny by identifying as men and transitioning to replicate a ‘male appearance’. Of course, it is not possible to change sex, but the appearance of men’s secondary sexual characteristics can be mimicked through surgery and maintained by continuous hormone use. An obvious example is the actress…
A Marxist Analysis of Violence Against Women
Though the coronavirus pandemic continues to dominate public attention, rising rates of domestic abuse, rape and femicide suggests that women are experiencing a dangerous and deadly pandemic of our own: misogyny. However, data from the Office for National Statistics shows that while the rate of male homicide victims is on the decline, the number of…
Reflections on Sarah Everard’s Disappearance
I, like so many women, have watched the news of Sarah’s disappearance and the subsequent arrest and charge of a serving police officer for her murder. We have all watched with our hearts in our mouths and a beating sense of dread as the story unfolded. Women, every woman, knows that we could have been Sarah. Women…
Book Review: Dangerous Relationships: Pornography, Misogyny and Rape
Dangerous Relationships: Pornography, Misogyny and Rape by Diana E. H. Russell looks at the relationship between pornography and how its growth has fuelled the conditions for misogyny and rape to flourish. The text begins by picking apart the complex nature of defining pornography, and the various ways it manifests harm, using previous case studies, feminist…
Women Behaving Badly: Meghan Markle, Meekness and Misogyny
The ongoingcMegan Markle controversy reached new heights this week after her tell-all interview with American TV show host, Oprah Winfrey. After facing years of mounting hostility, Meghan is now considered an element hostile to the Royal family and has found herself the subject of a very British denunciation. In speaking publicly, Meghan is guilty of…
Women, Wages and Labour during the Industrial Revolution
A significant contributing factor to the current trend of conceptualising ‘gender’ as a standalone form of oppression is a lack of familiarity with its application throughout history as the intense ideological enforcement of material female oppression. Here, it is useful to explore periods of history where the significance of sex (as opposed to gender) is…
Difficult Women: The Silencing of Alexandra Kollontai
Communists often hail the work of Alexandra Kollontai, holding her up as a decorated Marxist feminist and member of the Soviet Central Committee. In reality, Kollontai’s favour with the majority male leadership of the Soviet Union was highly dependent upon her compliance, and she spent much of her political career combatting the Communist Party’s disregard…
WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH: Engels on the Origin of Women’s Oppression
The great significance of Friedrich Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property & the State is that it is one of the first Marxist analyses of development of family and origins of women’s oppression (the first was August Bebel’s Women & Socialism, 1879) — a subject in which most men were uninterested. A Short Summary…
Sex Work Is Not Work: A Marxist Feminist Analysis of Prostitution – PART III
Part III: We cannot abstract labour from its social context ‘value converts every product into a social hieroglyphic.’ Marx, Capital Vol I In light of the enormous sex disparity between producers and consumers within the sex industry(majority female sellers; majority male buyers), prostitution and other ‘sex work’ cannot be considered outside of its historical, material,…
Lesbian Politics and the Limits of Liberalism
Women’s economic dependence on men historically ensured that women married. Marriage was, and is still today, seen as aspiration for women and a way to access material wealth and secure basic sustenance. Though in the last half century due to the women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s, women’s ability to sustain themselves economically has…
Sex Work Is Not Work: A Marxist Feminist Analysis of Prostitution – PART II
Part II: Can ‘sex work’ be considered ‘labour’? ‘all [commodities] are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract.’ Marx, Capital Vol I Marx tells us that ‘human labour power’ is expended in the production of commodities — that ‘human labour is embodied in them’ — and that it…
Movies For Feminists To Enjoy This Valentine’s Day
Singletons, cynics and feminists unite! The 14th of February, as we all know, signifies the annual commercialisation of romantic love. As Marxist feminists, we at OTWQ see Valentine’s Day as a homage to the bourgeois nuclear family — pah! Of course, we couldn’t let it pass without criticism. With that in mind, we have ten…
Sex Work Is Not Work: A Marxist Feminist Analysis of Prostitution – PART I
Part I: Can sex be considered a commodity? ‘A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.’ Marx, Capital Vol I In an attempt to move beyond the moralism that frequently surrounds…
Children Cannot Consent: Puberty Blockers, Gender Eugenics and Keira Bell
Today, the verdict of a judicial review ruled that is ‘highly unlikely’ that 13 year old children can give informed consent to puberty blockers and that it is ‘doubtful’ that 14 and 15 year old children can ‘understand and weigh the long term risks and consequences’ of such medication. The ruling also recognised that, even…
Linda Bellos on Oppression
If ‘oppression’ describes a system of power, it necessarily means that some groups of people will hold power over other groups of people. Oppressors — usually men, and usually men with wealth — hold power over other categories of people. Oppression exists everywhere and functions as a global system, enforced universally under the capitalism. This…
Netflix, Cuties, and the Disturbing Rise of Paedophile Culture
Netflix’s new film, Cuties, has attracted a significant amount of criticism over recent days and weeks due to its overt sexualisation of young girls — both in its promotional material and in the film itself. The original thumbnail used by Netflix to promote the film (the featured image of this article) has since been replaced…
WAP: Women As Property
The internet is awash with reaction to Cardi B’s new music video for her song Wet-Ass Pussy (WAP), known mainly by its radio ‘clean edit’ version Wet And Gushy. The reaction has largely been one of derision and dismissal though, predictably, the sex-positive left have gallantly made the case for women’s continued sexual exploitation under…
Marxist Feminism Part IV: Historical, Material Oppression
This article is part of a series. Read Part I here. Read Part II here. Read Part III here. A significant contributing factor to the current trend of conceptualising ‘gender’ as a standalone form of oppression is a lack of familiarity with its application throughout history as the ideological enforcement of material female oppression. Here,…
Marxist Feminism Part III: Division of Labour
This article is part of a series. Read Part I here. Read Part II here. In The Origin of the Family, Engels attributes the ‘world historical defeat of the female sex’ to a single event: the overthrow of matriarchal lineage. This achieved male control over paternity and sexual reproduction — the original means of production. Through this new,…
Marxist Feminism Part II: Social Reproduction
This article is part of a series. Read Part I here. Rejecting dualist and identity approaches to women’s politics, Marxist feminists argue that the domestic sphere and the capitalist mode of production are not separate, autonomous systems; but that social reproduction (including the vast amount of unpaid work which takes place outside the workplace) is…
Marxist Feminism Part I: Fragmented Feminism
The left is plagued by a paternalism which treats feminist issues and organising with condescension at best; at worst, with contempt. This attitude demonstrates not only the prevalence of individual prejudices towards women but, more importantly, a significant theoretical misunderstanding which fails to adequately consider the totality of the capitalist mode of production. Due to…
Book Launch: Women & Class
Women and Class frames women’s oppression as central to the struggle against capitalism and oppression. It is essential reading for all communists and feminists alike. In this article, Professor Mary Davis introduces the latest edition of her book, Women and Class. Buy your copy here. The aim of this book is to assert and consolidate…
Austerity, Women and North East Communities
The North East already has already some of the worse of the cuts and a huge lack of investment. Working class communities such as Sunderland, Hartlepool, Northumberland, and Co. Durham have suffered hugely over the decades with loss of industry and lack of real investment – Under Thatcher, New Labour and now the Tory government.…
Book Review: Kill All Normies
Street Fights of Tumblr Liberals & the Alt-Right Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies represents a break with the usual unwillingness to subject the amorphous left’s internet cultures and identity politics to the same degree of scrutiny as the right’s. Published by Zero Books, Kill All Normies uses as its title a slogan promoted on 4Chan’s…
Prostitution or Sex Work? Language Matters
The term ‘sex work’ has come to replace the word ‘prostitution’ in contemporary discussions on the subject. This is not accidental. The phrase ‘sex work’ has been adopted by liberal feminists and powerful lobbyists in a deliberate attempt to steer the narrative on prostitution. Smoke and Mirrors Superficially, the term ‘sex work’ is intended to…
Where Did Gender Identity Come From?
The term ‘gender identity’ was coined by psychologist and researcher, Dr. John Money, founder of the first gender clinic at John Hopkins Hospital in 1966. ‘Gender identity’ first appeared in print on November 21st 1966, in the press release announcing the creation of the clinic. Money would go on to develop his theory of gender…