Brought to my attention by the Ending Victimization and Blame blog and by Louise Pennington, there’s a new “feminist magazine”, The Feminist TImes, officially released today. Their editorial mission statement reads:
Feminist Times is a PR & ad-free magazine, website and membership group. It’s the only real alternative to normal “women’s” magazines. Life not Lifestyle is our guiding thought.
They have paid memberships starting at UKP 5 per month. You, too can have a White Feminist card with subscription levels ranging “Firestone” (the most expensive one) to “Barr” (apparently, a Roseanne Barr is only worth 5 quid/ month; whereas a Shulamith Firestone is worth over 100).
So, what does this “Feminist magazine” publish on the day of their release? Why a piece advocating forced sterilisation, of course. From their “feminist oeuvre”:
Taboo Corner: sterilise her
I once exclaimed to a group of friends, after a few drinks, that I believed in forced sterilisation.[…]
I came to this idea from a personal experience which involves a family member who decided to bring a child into the world. It was her choice, like lot’s of people everyday who have children, because that’s what happens, we reproduce.
However she also decided to neglect the child.
Downhill from there. DOWNHILL AT MISSILE SPEEDS DOWNHILL. This advocacy for forced sterilisation is followed by slut shaming (OMG the woman sleeps around! she picked an ex convict!). It’s a trainwreck that we wouldn’t even believe to be published at a Fox News affiliate, much less under the banner of feminism. This surpasses anything in my “Victorian Feminism” archives.
Now, when I vehemently write about feminist ethics, this is precisely the kind of bullshit I have in mind: no “freedom of opinion” nonsense can ever be placed above the well being of women. In what kind of neocolonial feminist hell did I wake up where under the banner of “opening a discussion”, repulsive ideas like this are given a space? What is there to discuss after centuries of eugenics interventions on the bodies of Women of Color, women with disabilities, women deemed “unfit”, etc etc? What kind of decontextualized, ahistorical hell is this when, in 2013, a discussion about forced sterilizations is deemed “feminist”?!
The Feminist Times should, perhaps, be more aptly renamed to “The anti woman bullshit I should remove from under my fingernails after a day gardening and picking on my ass”. But I suppose the new name wouldn’t be Twitter friendly enough, what with the character limitation.
ETA: The original piece has been deleted and replaced with a fauxpology. A screenshot can be found here.
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