Someone sent me this as a laugh. Apparently Laurie Penny has ‘come out’. As what am not sure. She is apparently ‘genderqueer’, which means she gets to partake of queer politics without actually being a lesbian, and gets to declare women should be written out of feminism. Hardly surprising, if incredibly vacuous, self obsessed, shallow and narcissistic. From private school, to Oxford, to media career, to Harvard, while coping with the plight of how to cut your hair. Of course feminism should end and be rewritten to suit Laurie’s new identity, and we should all remember the pronouns she wishes us to use.

Anyway, this comment was on a blog I came across and said clearly what I wanted to say. After five years of realising Laurie’s abusive culture is just the protective film around media, there to make sure inequality is not discussed and willing to commit crimes against women, abuse them, and do whatever it takes to silence them. Feminism is probably dead and these people were the last manifestation. Now is time to discuss inequality, and misogyny and what it looks like.

”To put understand why Penny makes so little sense from a feminist (or indeed any) point of view, it’s important to bear in mind that third-wave liberal fun feminism aka ‘sex-positive’ feminism was, and is, primarily a media-driven phenomenon that was part of the backlash to second-wave feminism, which was a grassroots movement that largely proceeded through activism and independent publishing.

The effect on the integrity of feminism of having feminist dialogue carried out primarily through the media has been devastating. It has meant feminism for the past 30 years has been defined by women whose primary interest is not solidarity with other women but their own media careers, and who are aware (either consciously or subconsciously) that this depends very much on the approval of the men who control these outlets. All forms of media, both mainstream and leftist/alternative, are overwhelmingly male-controlled and they have every interest in co-opting and distorting the feminist movement and what feminism is. This means that what mostly gets published is not feminism but counter-feminism: which I define as a bullshit pseudo-feminism that appropriates the language and concerns articulated by radical feminists in order to attack radical feminism, strips feminist analysis of its explanatory power, and deploys a mangled version of it that ultimately serves to prop up male supremacy, as much by its sheer incoherence as its explicit defences of woman-hating institutions like the sex industry.

The function of counter-feminists like Laurie Penny is to point out instances of sexism while at the same time denying the structural roots of sexism and shutting down women with a radical analysis. It’s what writers for Jezebel, Salon et al do all the time. Counter-feminism is distinct from straight-up anti-feminism not because it is different in effect (ultimately it isn’t – and sometimes it isn’t much different in rhetoric either), but because it poses as actual feminism, especially in acting as a kind of safety-valve that allows women to vent about sexism and misogyny without ever actually challenging male power. It brings page hits because it appeals to women who are desperate for some acknowledgement of the sexism that blights their existence, while it simultaneously denies them any cohesive analysis of it or real solutions.

Thus Penny can write passionately about her struggle with anorexia as a teen, and the next month publish an article claiming that push-up bras for 7-year-olds are about agency, and the mothers who object to them are just prudes who want to police their daughters’ sexuality (no really, she did). The fact that girl children are objectified as consumerable sexual goods before they even reach puberty, and then many girls then go on to develop eating disorders – well, that’s a connection that is both bleedingly obvious and yet clearly a bridge too far for Penny’s mind to travel. And her refusal to do so is rooted in self-protectiveness, a deep understanding – whether she acknowledges it to herself or not – that to challenge the actual roots of the misogyny she protests against would be fatal to her career as a darling of the male left. Whereas attacking the women who do challenge it as prudes and neo-Victorians (the term she used to use to denigrate abolitionist feminists, before switching to the trendier ‘whorephobia’) – well, that brings untold rewards. It takes breathtaking intellectual dishonesty and, frankly, a real cruelty and contempt towards women, to distort feminist analysis to the extent that she does; to pose as a champion of women while freely deploying language that implies women don’t have ideas or arguments – they have hang-ups, hysterias and phobias.

And that’s why reading Penny and her ilk is so headache-inducing: they sometimes come across as women who get it, while at the same time they resolutely REFUSE to get it. It’s the opposite of what actual feminist analysis does, which is to wake the reader up with a shock of recognition; cut through years of obscurantist bullshit and illuminate half-formed thoughts with one sentence; help women make the connections between phenomena that seemed only distantly related. Contrast the feeling one gets from reading brilliant feminist thinkers like Greer, Dworkin and Lorde – the sharp thrill of being in the presence of an incisive, fearless and FEMALE-IDENTIFIED mind – with the confused fog that counter-feminist writers like Penny induce, proceeding as they do through vague references to actual feminist theory, disavowals of the logic of same, contradictory reasoning, false analogies and dishonest accusations, and desperate attempts to placate men.”