Women's Liberation Radio News

Edition 103: Why We are Radical Feminists & Why We Joined WLRN

This month's edition is packed with women's voices from around the USA as the nation braces itself for the new regime led by president-elect Donald Trump. First up, hear aurora linnea greet the listener before Mary O'Neill offers up news stories and information about women around the world. Then, enjoy the song "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?" by Taylor Swift before listening to Thistle, aurora, Mary and Lola describe what led them to radical feminism and why they joined the WLRN team. This show is dedicated to our future feminist endeavor of meeting up with likeminded feminists in person at the FiLia conference 2025 in the UK. https://www.filia.org.uk/tickets Please consider donating to our FiLia fundraiser by clicking on the donate button at wlrnmedia.com OR by going to the totally excellent radical feminist period products company GARNUU.COM and typing in "WLRN" at checkout. Thanks sisters! Be sure to share with your female friends and family! #WLRN #GARNUU #RadicalFeminism

Duration:: 59m
Broadcast on:: 06 Nov 2024
Audio Format:: other

WLRN edition 103 broadcasting in 3, 2, 1... I was born woman off my knees I will stand for my liberation sisters rise again I was born woman off my knees I will stand for my liberation rise and rise again Greetings and welcome to the 103rd edition podcast of Women's Liberation Radio News for this Thursday, November 7th, 2024. This is a Royal Nail, Biological Feminist and Reality Enthusiast. We hope you had a safe and fun Halloween weekend. This month's edition focuses on why we are radical feminists and what brought us to WLRN. But before we get started, just a reminder that WLRN is partnering with the women focused, woman owned and operated period products company, Garnu.com. Non-toxic period products exclusively for adult human females go to Garnu.com that's g-a-r-n-u-u.com and type in WLRN at checkout for a nice little discount. The team at WLRN produces a monthly radio broadcast to break the sound barrier women are blocked by under the status quo rule of men. This blocking of women's discourse we see in all sectors of society be they conservative, liberal, mainstream, progressive or radical. The thread that runs through all of American politics except for separatist feminism is male dominance and entitlement in all spheres. To start off today's edition, here's Mary with women's news from around the globe for this Thursday, November 7th, 2024. Thanks, Aurora. At Thailand's Women's Empowerment Awards, 18 businesses were honored for their commitment to gender equality. Organized by UN Women as part of its initiative entitled Gender Action Lab, Innovation and Impact for Gender Equality in Asia Pacific, the event also recognized Thailand's high number of women in business leadership positions. Australia's Ambassador to Thailand, Dr. Angela McDonald said, "Women's economic empowerment is critical to the economic resilience of the Mekong sub-region. Enabling women-owned businesses and gender responsive enterprises to flourish is key to economic inclusivity in a thriving private sector." Redux has reported on a correctional facility in Shakopee, Minnesota where trans-identified men are housed with women. Two of the five men have been convicted of the sexual abuse of children. These men still have male anatomy and one woman said, "I definitely live more on edge, hyper-alert, because many of us have been sexually assaulted by men in our past and now we're being housed together." Another said of a male inmate incarcerated for sexually assaulting children, he had sex with his own daughters, sold the video on a predator's website and is looking at a lot of years here. It makes me sick that he is here. He is happy and how is this fair? His actions here clearly show he is a predator himself. Alicia Beckman, who resigned from her post to the facility in protest of the policy allowing trans-identified men to transfer there, stated, "You bring in biological males who are violent, who would be housed at a custody level four facility. I just believe we're revictimizing some of these women, re-traumatizing them." CNN ran a story illustrating the rise of the manosphere in Kenya and the impact such a rise has had on women. In Kenya, it is estimated that 34% of women have suffered from physical violence and 13% have suffered sexual violence. Between January and June 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdowns, sex-based violence cases increased by 92.2%. Now, women are also contending with misogynistic ideologies spreading on social media. CNN's analysis of the Kenyan manosphere revealed that there was an average of 4,000 mentions a day of manosphere terms and language on X in 2023. In fact, despite only having 1.8 million users on X, Kenya was often in the top 10 countries using terms and phrases common in the manosphere. A women's rights activist said, "The hostility against women and girls was something I'd never experienced before. It was shocking to hear how 15-year-old boys were describing girls, using very degrading language as objects to be used and dumped." A non-invasive test to diagnose endometriosis is now offered in some parts of the UK. While the test is used in the United States, it is not utilized outside of research settings. Dr. David Griffiths, a gynecologist in Swindon's Great Western Hospital, said, "When treating women with disease, the effects can be terrible, wrecking relationships and affecting jobs. When I diagnose a patient, they often cry because nobody actually believes them." Known as end ashore, the test involves topical pads that measure the myoelectrical activity of the smooth muscle of the GI tract, and it takes less than an hour. Since April 2023, Sudan has been embroiled in a civil war that has already displaced over 10.5 million people. The UN's sexual and reproductive health agency estimates that 1.2 million pregnant or breastfeeding women and teenage girls are suffering from acute malnutrition. There are also reports that armed men have gang raped women and girls and have forced some into sexual slavery. The Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs, also known as UBCIC, stated that Canada still discriminates against indigenous women and children, and specify that this discrimination occurs on the basis of sex, race, and family status. The UBCIC in several women's groups presented their research in Geneva to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. Their research focused on the Indian Act and found that between 1876 and 1985, the Indian Act defined thousands of the First Nations women and their children as non-Indian because the women were married to non-First Nations men. They seek compensation and restored status for all women and children who were impacted. In Peru, archaeologists excavated Pandemarca, a significant site in the ancient Moche civilization which was situated on the northern Peruvian coast from 100 to 800 CE. While it's been traditionally assumed that men were the only ones who held positions of power, clues from the excavation indicate that women in fact did as well. In a throne room, for example, they found paintings of a woman seated on a throne. Gabriela Cervantes Que Quezana, an archaeologist who was not involved in the excavation, said, "There are several things that are very important regarding this wonderful discovery. We've seen other representations of women in tombs, but not in the depth and complexity in the discoveries in Pandemarca." On November 1st, American women in Atlanta, New York, LA, Washington, D.C., Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston gathered in front of German embassies and consulates to heed the call from Las Frauens Sprekin, an ad hoc German feminist group whose name in English means "Let Women Speak." The American organizations, Women's Liberation Front, WOLF, Women's Declaration International, WDI, USA, and Feminists in Struggle, FIST, all stood together in solidarity with German women who faced the enactment of so-called "self-ID laws" on November 1st in their country. These laws have their counterparts in the United States and other countries worldwide. Self-ID laws allow men who claim to be female to gain access to vulnerable women into women's spaces, scholarships, and positions in sports teams, and to infringe upon the right women have to privacy in bathrooms, locker rooms, shelters, and prisons. In all of the protest locations across the U.S., women chanted, marched, and rose in unity, reporting to W.L.R.N. that they received more positive than negative comments and feedback from passers-by. Here's a short report from Steph Free about the San Francisco protest. It went extremely well in San Francisco yesterday. We had about two dozen women there, lots of signs, and along them, yes, we took a carpool to reactions to our signs, and a 53 reactions that we got. 50 of them were horn-hunking, thumbs-up, positive smiles, and only three were negative. It was a fabulous day. In Washington, D.C., Karodansky opened up the demo with this statement. It's 1205 in Washington, D.C., and we are here standing in solidarity with German women. This morning, we delivered a letter in support of German women to the German embassy. Now we've moved to the Supreme Court in part because it's a beautiful day, and there are all sorts of lovely people wandering around who are asking us questions, wondering what we're doing. Someone walked by and said, "Is this about Germany?" That's how much noise this is making all over the world. We are so happy to be here because there are so many cases that are coming before this court soon to allow the court to determine exactly what a woman is and to say that no men are women, no men are lesbians, ever. And we're here to stand in support with German women. In Chicago, women gathered near Michigan Avenue in front of the German Consulate and chanted gave speeches and played turf music through a bullhorn. Breonna Presley, WDI Illinois organizer, gave the welcoming speech. Soon after, Thistle played a song she wrote for the occasion. We are here standing in front of the German Consulate, representing a multitude of women's groups, all coming together to a public enactment of the new German cell might be lost, which takes effect today, November 1st, 2021. This legislation replaces the category of sex with gender identity in law. Under this new law, any man can search and locate women with no restrictions for American patients. Any person convicted of calling a man command may be fined up to 10,000 euros. The American women still have our first amendment rights gathered here today to say no. No, no to men in women's bathrooms. No, no to men in women's sports. No, no to men in lesbian-only spaces. No, no to self-id. Here, here, in Germany, right in time. Born in a ride. Breonna Presley, WDI Illinois. In the churches, in the schools, in the restaurants, in the schools. When we rise, when we rise, when we rise. And Castiel here, stepping in for Mary. In Atlanta, women gathered, and Alexandra Renee just sent in this report to WLRN. Olad WLRN listeners. It's Alexandra Renee, aka Pinwheel Art. The organizer of the Atlanta, Georgia, November 1st, global protest and solidarity with the women of Germany. The four phenomenal women of different generations come together in Atlanta on November 1st at 12.05 to speak and hold our sign, which read, "Self-ID Harms, Women, Children, Sport, Democracy, Science and Reality." #SelfIDHarms#WomenRise We were able to have our voices heard on the street and also enter the building and drop off pamphlets with information about this harmful new law that has taken hold in Germany. None of the locations reported hostility from TRA's or counter-protester activities. The November 1st action, called by feminists in Germany, provided an opportunity for American women to learn the ropes of street protest organizing, and to build the feminist movement in the US. WLRN hopes to see more of this kind of in-person, real-life activism sweep the nation in the future. Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, defeating Vice President Kamala Harris in both the popular vote and the electoral vote. The majority of American voters voted for a convicted felon, rapist, pedophile, and traitor over a competent, intelligent woman. The glass ceiling, once again, remains intact. That concludes WLRN's world news segment for Thursday, November 7th. I'm Mary. Share your news stories, announcements, and tips with us by emailing info@wLRNMedia.com and letting us know what's going on. This is Jo Brew, and you are listening to WLRN. ♪ The who's who, of who's that, is poised for the attack. But my parents paved their paths. You don't get to tell me about sad. ♪ If you wanted me dead, you should've just said. ♪ Nothing makes me feel more alive. So I leap from the gallows and I levitate down your street. Crash the party like a record scratched as I scream. Who's afraid of little all of me? You should be. ♪ ♪ ♪ The scandal was contained. The bullet had just graced. At all costs keep your good name. Don't get to tell me you feel bad. ♪ Is it a wonder I broke? Let's hear one more joke. ♪ Then we could all just laugh until I cry. So I leap from the gallows and I levitate down your street. Crash the party like a record scratched as I scream. Who's afraid of little all of me? I was tamed by those gentle till the circus life make me mean. Don't you worry folks, we took out all her teeth. Who's afraid of little all of me? Well you should be. You should be. You should be. You should be. You should be. You should be. ♪ So tell me everything is not about me. But what if it is? Then say they didn't do it to hurt me. But what if they did? I wanna snarl and show you just how disturbed this is made me. You wouldn't last an hour and be asylum where they raised me. So all you kids can sneak into my house with all the cobwebs. I'm always drunk on my own tears. Isn't that what they all said? That I'll sue you if you step on my love. That I'm fearsome and I'm wretched. And I'm wrong. Put narcotics into all of my songs. And that's why you're still singing along. So I leave from the gallows and I levitate on your street. Crash the party like a racket scratch as I scream. Who's afraid of little old me? I was tamed, I was gentle to the circus life made me mean. Don't you worry folks, we took out all her teeth. Who's afraid of little old me? Well you should be, you should be, you should be, you should be. 'Cause you lured me, you hurt me, and you taught me. You catch me and you call me crazy. I can't walk, I am 'cause you changed me. So who's afraid of me? Who's afraid of little old me? Who's afraid of little old me? That was Taylor Swift with her song "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?" Next up we'll hear commentaries from WLRN members, Thistle, Aurora, myself, and Lola about what brought us to radical feminism and to WLRN. Part of why we chose to do this episode is to remind listeners of our fundraising goal to get a small team of WLRN members to the Philly conference next year in the UK. To support that effort, consider getting a subscription to www.garnew.com for your period products such as tampons, pads, and other menstruation gear. Pass the word along to your female friends and family and really make a difference in our fundraising efforts, it's easy. Just go to www.garnew.com, select what you want and then type in WLRN at checkout to receive your special RadFam discount that helps us get to Philly next year. First up, we'll hear from Thistle, founding member of WLRN and volunteer coordinator for the crew. Take it away, Thistle. Hello, sisters. Thistle here. It's great to be on the airwaves of good old WLRN again, talking about why we are radical feminists. Happy Hallows to One and All. I've always been a radical, which I define as someone who questions the status quo of how things are run in society, looking for the root causes of society's ills, to transform and break free from these root causes, to plant a new tree with branches stretching out for justice and liberty for all. I didn't realize that many in my radical community were not feminists until I discovered and attempted to root out the cause of one of society's many ills, male rule. I founded WLRN in May of 2016 after being ostracized and banned by members of the Board of Directors and Executive Committee at WORT 89.9 FM Community Radio Station in Madison, my hometown. The ostracizing and admonishment began before that by the organizing committee for the anarchist book fair in the Twin Cities in 2012. This was way before many radical feminists were outspoken about transgenderism and its harms. Sheila Jeffries started off our current radical feminist movement with the 2014 release of her book, Gender Hurts of Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism. I contacted Sheila in 2013 before her book was released about my zine called Musings on Manarchy in the Midwest, recounting the details of my experiences getting cancelled publicly by the Twin Cities anarchist book fair organizers. I wanted her opinion and feedback before I published my thoughts for my anarchist activist community. I wanted to see if I could find like-minded activists out there to fight the obvious injustices against women this trans thing reinforced. I thought my zine would be well received and would simply clear up any confusion anybody had about the issue or at least start an open dialogue and discussion. Boy, was I wrong. Sheila was happy to hear from me and told me that my musings were good ones based on my experiences in the anarchist scene and that she thought I should publish it as is. So I did. She also cringed to hear I was working with self-proclaimed anarchists because she said of the leftist men's movements out there, the anarchists are some of the worst when it comes to their treatment of women. The Musings on Manarchy Zine describes exchanges between me and book fair organizers via phone calls, email cop correspondence, and Facebook event page comments that appeared online in the late summer of 2012, leaving up to the book fair held in September. Within those exchanges, the reader comes to understand that the organizers canceled my workshop because it was "are you ready for it?" transphobic. A word I would later learn is a homophobic and sexist and sexist term used against women who refused to submit to men. A friend convinced me to post about my cancellation on the 2012 anarchist book fair Facebook event page, reasoning that I would find allies by doing so. We were both shocked to discover that instead of allies, activists bombarded me with accusations of trans misogyny, hateful bigotry, and threats to break my guitar and land me in the hospital. Simply because I stood my ground that the workshop should be a place for a discussion centering female-born women. I think I used the term "female-bodied people" in an attempt to be clear that we were going to talk about women's struggles with patriarchy and not men's. Men were welcome to attend the discussion as allies. This is what was deemed transphobic and therefore worthy of canceling instead of coming head to head to discuss as comrades and allies, all the different flavors of the same soup of life we live in in this mixed up crazy world. I've always craved unity, collaboration, and cooperation as my modus operandi, believing that well-meaning individuals coming together from diverse interests and backgrounds can and should work together to achieve the collective healing of our society's ills. But over more recent years, I have come to cherish and believe even more strongly in the collective organizing principle surrounding free association and affinity groups that draw individuals together based on common traits, characteristics, and common interests that often are in opposition to the notion that everyone can and should get along with everyone if we just try harder, principal. But at the time in 2012 and 13, I was truly shocked to find out that these radicals were not able to see the feminist struggle clearly and that they would turn against me in the most sinister, vicious, and fearful of ways. I was immersed and embedded in American anarchist activist culture, having joined the DNC to RNC, represent gonna take down the president. Democracy Uprising March of 2004 from Boston to New York to attend the two parties political conventions that elections year. Our message resonated and we were mostly well-received along the march's 28-day long route. We wanted grassroots democracy in our communities instead of presidents and rulers. We wanted more than the American two-party presidential circus provides for us and for the world. My point in telling you all this is that I was radical from the start on a few different levels including cultural, social, physical. I rode my bicycle for three years around the country on bike music tours, economic levels, artistic and political. There was a community of us born out of the march of 2004 that became the bike ride of 2008 from Madison where the PNC or the People's Networking Convention was held to the RNC protests in the Twin Cities. It wasn't until I was confronted by trans activists within my activist communities that I realized how big trans activism would become and how violent my comrades could be or how complicit in that violence they would be with their ignorance, fear and silence. With this realization came my fervor to stand up tall and proud to use my strengths, talents, music, attributes to push forward the feminist cause. I did it out of sheer exasperation at the ridiculousness of it all and because I trusted that my radical community who had been listening to me and supporting my organizing and music for years would easily come around to see how harmful the trans thing was. "Men are not women," I bravely proclaimed, marveling that anybody could construe such a statement to be bigotry. And then, I put the infamous "El Tranz Activismo es mi sogenia," trans activism is misogyny message on my sign for the Women's March in 2017. I say it in Spanish today in this commentary because I found it online that year, translated into Spanish, and as a hashtag that led me to Laura Lecuona, who has become prominent with WDI and has published many books on feminism. I was connected by the electronic interwebs to other budding and blooming feminists all over the world who were willing to withstand the backlash we took in these moments back in the 20 teens. You got to understand that back in 2012, 13, 14, 15, and even 16 and 17, the silence was deafening. Not even Meghan Murphy nor Wolf had specifically come out against trans activism and trans ideology when WLRN released its first podcast. I was part of the Wolf's social media outreach team in 2015, and we had discussions of the pros and cons of fighting gender ideology through our pages on social media. We mostly posted about other things because we didn't want our pages to be cancelled. The silence was so loud one day in early 2017 that I just got up in the morning and wrote what needed to be heard in black and red magic marker on a piece of cardboard I found in the dumpster. "Don't believe the hype," it said. "Trans activism is misogyny." I desperately wanted to cut through the BS with my sort of truth, thinking that, of course, everyone will understand that men pretending to be women is harmful to the cause of women's liberation. Of course, my community would care and would come around to support me as I spoke out. The song "Warrior's Lullaby" is about the action I took, that single action on the battlefield of life with my message and sword, and then the need for rest and a soothing cosmic lullaby to recover. You can hear "Warrior's Lullaby" and other songs of mine on the album "Spinning and Leaving," a collection of my songs and a couple of covers that are dear to me. Just go to my personal website, thistlepeterson.com, and you can purchase the album. Okay, enough shameless self-promotion, but I do need to say that the things happening in and around me in Madison made a difference in how trans activism progressed in my city, but possibly also influenced how it has behaved in other regions experiencing an upsurge in TRA activity. We are all interconnected these days, no matter where we are physically. When I became active in my resistance to trans ideology and misogynistic men posing as women in my city and region, it created a ripple effect, and trans activism, unfortunately, became the ugly, hideous, and ridiculous monster we see today. I often wonder how things would have gone if my comrades on the organizing committees and official organizations had not turned against me and my due diligence in defending women and girls above men pretending to be women. They had the choice back then in 2012, and I could feel the push and pull between reason, common sense, and compassion and the dark avenues of hate, fear, fear of violence, and actual violence in our society as I journeyed onward into my radical feminism. It's been a journey of steady activist work, mostly collectivist work with primarily American feminists who have joined WLRN or who work in media and social media to fight gender ideology. I took what I learned about leftist collectivist organizing and politics and applied it to the creation of WLRN, defying the individualism I see in much of the feminist activism occurring online. But our activism has also been on the streets, as witnessed on WLRN's YouTube channel in our live videos archive. Women in the Madison area were very brave to come out for the Sisters for Sisters Conference, a radical feminist conference held in Madison in 2022. 70 women from around the country swarmed Madison and turked the town on State Street, the classic street for lively creative protest in Madison. WLRN held a speaker's corner outside the Capitol on the steps where our Lady Forward statue stands tall. Over 100 activists on both sides attended the rally with the choir of our women's voices chiming out in harmony and dissonance. After that success, April 23, 2022, women in the region continued to organize public speak out free speech for women events. And the local TRA's got uglier, increased their numbers and upped their tactics to include an assault on one of our women at one of the events in Madison and the doxing of another women participating in our group online. Not to mention their attacks on my place of employment, which led to my eventual firing. So needless to say, we stopped our organizing in the Midwest to regroup and rethink what kind of activism we are willing to do to stay safe and also be heard. Currently, most of my radical feminist practice surrounds the work I do at and for WLRN and my sisters here at the station. Throughout the eight and a half years of being part of the WLRN collective, I have been frustrated, confronted with problems and blessed with a team of women who are determined to make sense of this apocalyptic moment we share this election year 2024 and beyond. By the way, that was a plug for next month's show that we'll focus on WLRN members' reflection on the presidential election cycle this year. As of the recording of this commentary, I don't know the outcome but say whoever wins in November, we still have a lot to do, so be brave, be smart, be safe and tell the world you believe women are real. When I look back on the WLRN archive, I feel proud of bringing like-minded women together to speak and be heard as best we can to break the sound barrier women are blocked by under the status quo rule of men. And I feel a sense of community, of not being so isolated and alone in my struggles as a female facing the annihilation of common sense, communal living and the planet. WLRN is more than a women's news and cultural information service for me. It became a safe haven and home for my musings, my music, my thoughts and my voice to be listened to and heard in community amongst women I admire and want to hear and know. Thanks women for being here. It is only by seeing our commonalities and building on our collective strengths that we will achieve women's liberation from male tyranny. Why am I a radical feminist? Because I am a woman who wishes to die standing with my sisters in dignity and strength in the midst of patriarchal chaos. And because I love women who yearn to taste freedom on the wind while flying in sync with each other. Women loving women and creating and crafting a safe space for women to be free is the goal. So I leave you with a witch's cackle from former WLRN member Julia Beck that she recorded for a Halloween show back in 2018. Happy Halloween 2024 sisters. I hope it was a safe one and I hope we've made it through the elections. Hello the women at WLRN. We hope you have a safe and fun Halloween. This is Julia Beck signing off for now. Thanks Thistle. Next we'll hear from WLRN member Elora Lunea about how she found radical feminism in WLRN. Take it away Aurora. There are women who can say they were born feminist practically. Reared by feminist mothers or activist parents they plucked Simone de Beauvoir off the shelves of their family libraries to glean a primary education on patriarchy. And it's discontent. Sister Hoto's powerful for them back in their sandbox days. They'd spurned sex roles before they could tie their shoes. I'm not one of those women. I was late learning to tie my shoes because I discovered that boys would tie them for me. And this shown to my child's mind is proof of a supremacy over the males of the world. I was reluctant to relinquish by performing the dull task myself. So I was, it pains me to admit, a second grade right wing woman keen to preserve my place on the pedestal, misunderstanding men's readiness to venerate me in ways that would keep me helpless as the measure of my female power. But I was doomed to topple from that pedestal well before I came to realize it's real purpose as a sacrificial altar for the simple reason that I was consistently garbage at playing the good girl. When my nana gifted me a baby doll with the supposedly fun feature of being able to wet itself, I repurposed it for use as a squirt gun, affronted by the notion that I should amuse myself, drawing an ursatz infant's plastic loins. When my fifth grade schoolmates began acquiring training bras and boyfriends, I scorned their new diversions as unspeakably dumb, and I told them so. I despised niceness, being sweet, the dopey, mush-headed, inanity, and smarmy lameness I perceived as girlhood, properly practiced. Still, I was not a feminist at this point, I was merely disagreeable, a reactionary, because here's the crucial thing. I thought that other girls submitted to girlishness because the obsequious vacuity it demanded was somehow intrinsic to their nature. It was therefore difficult for me to muster much respect for them. Not that I held boys and especially high esteem either, what I wanted to be when I grew up was a dog. Fitting into any human mold felt as impossible as it was degrading, but my disdain for my species did not make me a feminist. By high school, I'd given up the dream of becoming a dog, but I was still committed to not being a girl, never turning into a woman. I took measures to slow the maturation of my body into visible abject femaleness. To ward off a womanish mind, I prostrated myself before the pantheon of revered male literary geniuses with a special taste for the transgressive, which I'd been conned into believing would usher me unto the furthest shore from good girldom. I tore through Dostowvsky, Nabokov, Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, Kafka, Camus, Rambo, Genet, I read Dylan Thomas, James Joyce. I read Fight Club, I read Horror Novels. All of this careful reading did sharpen my distrust of men, for I learned from these books just how much men hate women. But it did not make me a feminist. Instead, I was just one more woman confused into self-hatred by the male authors of a culture engineered to destroy me. It wasn't until college that I was confronted with anything explicitly served up as feminism. This was the late 2000s peak empowerment era, when to be feminist meant developing a canny approach to sexualizing and selling oneself for cold hard cash and/or the social capital necessary to earn cool girl status. My cohort of rising young female intellectuals was initiated into a burlesque feminism of sequined pasties, sex work as work, and the wink-wink coquetry of slutwalks. The feminist philosophy course I took was taught by a man, who assigned us texts by French post-structuralists like Elene Zizzou and Luce Elgarai, which I labored to parse while wondering precisely how anything these women had written might be of use to women with actual problems. Disenchanted by opaque French theory and disinclined to pursue empowerment by posing nude, I distanced myself from feminism. I was, however, an angry young woman. I wrote my senior project about men murdering their wives, my writing returning constantly to how men hurt women and how women hurt themselves in men's service. I voiced criticism of pornography, an incredibly gosh move for a college aged woman in 2010. I had a good nose for bullshit, but I was not a feminist. When I was 23, I found Andrea Dworkin. I sought out her work after it was made clear to me that one was not supposed to agree with Dworkin. Each time I came across some high profile, supposed feminist making a point of denouncing Andrea Dworkin, I was more intrigued by the woman everyone seemed to hate, this pariah figure at modern feminism's margins, endlessly mocked and derided. Since I disagreed with most of what the culturally approved feminists were saying, I suspected I might find some common ground with their chosen enemy, and I did. Page after page I agreed with Andrea Dworkin, and more than that I loved her. She was a woman, she wrote about women, but there was no mealy-mouthed, bite-your-tongued, feminized politeness to her words. She told whole truths, when every other woman I'd read had given me half-truths at best. I rejoiced, this woman was not playing nice. Andrea Dworkin's writing was fierce and unsparing, but so untender it made me ache. She wrote with dignity, and without apology, as if she were allowed to take herself seriously when we all know women are not, how I adored her. Alone on a fungal bus from Boston to New York, I read intercourse and I wept, in public, alone, an unthinkable shame for the tough girl I tried, all my life to be. But Andrea Dworkin dredged up the buried hurt, bleeding into my mouth, so raw a bitterness I could not contain it, and I sat there on that bus, wet-faced, trembling, gagging on the knowledge that my life would be forever changed. I could not go on denying the horror of what men have done, what men are doing to women, to us, to me. By the time my tears dried, I was a radical feminist. Since then, my feminist praxis, if not my theoretical framework, has been very simple. If men are hurting women, I'm against it. Whatever men do to endanger, to exploit, to demean or to dominate women, I oppose. If men tell me to shut up about something I keep talking, I do not allow men to intimidate me from saying or doing what I know to be right, I do not side with men over women, I do not lie for men. As a consequence of this relatively simple praxis, my social standing has suffered. I'm not a well-liked woman. I've been blacklisted and ousted, I've lost friends, lost jobs, forfeited opportunities as a writer and an artist. There are people who dislike me very much, and indeed, I know that by the standards of femininity I'm not likeable. I'm not nice, not conciliatory, not here to make anyone comfortable, not here to be anyone's friend. But instead to stake my claim to an integrity women are systematically deprived of in this society, so no concessions, no compromises, no constellations. I'm not a radical feminist to make friends. That said, it can be a lonely thing to be a woman unwilling to lie for men in the United States today. This sense of isolation is what brought me to women's liberation radio news. I joined WLRN after being banished from an art collective, resigning under pressure from a job at a women's shelter and being abruptly forced out of the rape crisis response organization for which I volunteered for years. In all cases, I was ostracized because I would not lie for men at the expense of women's dignity and well-being. By nature, I am a solitary creature, as writers I want to be, but despite my disposition, I understand that a lone radical feminist is an aberration, not a revolution. Social transformation is achieved only through collective action. Collective organizing is what made the women's movements of the past possible and powerful, and it's what we need today. Yet it's harder now. We live too far apart. We're spread too thin, distracted by struggling to survive in a world less livable by the day. The holes that neoliberalism is chewed through the social fabric have left us atomized and isolated, passive and pessimistic. We're enjoined to cultivate our own individual brands, develop our platforms, market our wares, each one of us, a separate shiny star of a face and a tiny box on the internet. But a million talking heads competing for attention is not a movement. This all created WLRN in the model of the feminist collectives that nourished the 1970s women's liberation movement. She takes sisterhood seriously, not in the abstract but in practice, and it is for this reason that I was eager to get involved. Every radical social movement needs a culture as well as a politics we need to connect, collaborate and care for one another. It isn't an easy thing to overcome misogynist, conditioning and commit to cooperation rather than competition with our female peers. Men don't want us sticking together as women or standing up for one another. We haven't had many chances to practice, but we can learn to do it in collectives. Groups like WLRN, which operates primarily online, are a good start, but we will also need to get offline and gather in person to share space and talk with one another with no screens separating us. Which is why conferences like Filia are so crucial. Thank you for your support sisters, you know you have mine. I hope we'll see one another very soon. Great to hear from you Aurora. To check out Aurora's latest work for WLRN, go to WLRNMedia.com and click on her essay entitled "Grifters All The Way Down," a review of Jennifer Billick's transsexual transgender transhuman. Dispatches from the 11th hour. Not to mention, we are so proud to announce the release of Aurora's new book called "Man Against Being, Body Horror and the Death of Life," published by Spinifex Press. Now stay tuned for commentary from yours truly. I became a radical feminist in college. While I had long considered myself a feminist before, it wasn't until then that I began to deeply engage in feminist literature and political thought. When I started in the mid 2010s, I was thrilled to be attending a women's college, one with a long history providing women with a well-rounded and female focused education since the late 19th century. For the first time in my life, I was in a place where every building was named after women, and women were the default in conversation and consideration. But that didn't last long. Even before trans-identified men started to attend, the language changed around campus. Instead of saying "sister" or "sisterhood," my classmates said "sibling" and "siblinghood." If a professor who didn't speak English as a first language called the students in her class "ladies," someone would inevitably either complain aloud or even worse in writing to the administration. If art decorating the hallway celebrated the female form, it would be torn down. If a sign said "women's room," it would be scratched out and replaced with the phrase "gender neutral" or "all genders." And while these changes may seem innocuous, they were a part of the growing erasure of women's existence, history, health, and experiences, and they were just the beginning. At a once proud women's college, trans-identified men were accepted and began to attend. And since it is still technically a women's college, that means dorms never had to be separated by sex, so these men were, and are, housed with female students. By the time I graduated, it was impossible to discuss true feminism on campus. Everything was viewed through a liberal feminist lens, and merely suggesting that female homosexuality was real and based on same-sex attraction was met with hostility. After defending a student who stated that she felt guilty for not wanting to have sex with people oedipines that are known as men, I was told that because I was such a horrible person, I deserved to have terrible things happen to me, including rape. Keep in mind that my defense amounted to simply saying that no one is entitled to sex, and women shouldn't feel guilty for their sexuality. I did not mention gender identity at all. Simply defending same-sex attraction was enough. In what world are to saying someone deserves to be raped, considered feminism? I'll tell you, in a man's world. I found W. L. Rann a few years later during the pandemic. It was a relief to find a female-centered community that cared about female liberation, which is all too rare in the 21st century. Noticeably, it was also the only place that aired news stories focusing on women. It was, and is, a place for issues like prostitution, surrogacy, sex apartheid, and the importance of single-sex spaces can be discussed within an actual and unapologetic feminist framework. Last but not least is W. L. Rann Super-Sistar Lola Bessis with her commentary on why she is a radical feminist, and what brought her to join the team at W. L. Rann. Take it away, Lola. I've always been a quote-unquote feminist. In the sixth grade, I was even deemed a feminazi by my male peers, for daring to argue for equal rights. I took pride in my ability to grow armpit hair and I showed it off in the gym locker room. Yet, I never read theory or invested in activism. I just held a strong belief that women and girls deserved better. My adolescence was heavily marked by the growing online pornography industry. All the boys talked of Kate Upton and Mia Khalifa, whoever and whatever was trending on PornHub. I always had a distaste for it, the pornography, but it forced me to understand how they, the boys, saw me and other girls. I sex objects. I felt crazy for feeling this way, and I was isolated in my beliefs. I thought I was the only one who felt like this. I wasn't approved or against sex in any way, but something about pornography deeply disturbed me. It wasn't until a decade later, when I read Anja Dorkin's inner course, that I felt understood for the first time. I immersed myself in literature. After reading all of the work and I followed her bibliography and discovered other radical feminists, like Mary Daily, German Greer, Carol Paintman, and Gail Don. It felt strange calling myself a radical feminist at first. It somehow felt like a bad word. I consumed podcast, interviews, books, anything. I felt like I had woken up and opened my eyes for the first time in my life. An important part of my journey through radical feminism has been to define what it is, at least how I understand it. Radical feminism is a theory. I do not understand it to be a lifestyle or about individual women and men. It is a theory that sees women as a sex class, subjugated by men as a sex class, through sex and by sex. Radical feminism has four key stances. The opposition to prostitution, pornography, surrogacy, and gender identity ideology. These oppositions stem from an understanding that each of these harms the status and well-being of all women and girls. From there, I've understood that the movement diverges. There are political lesbians. There is the 4B movement, which stemmed from Korea and has now arrived in the United States. The anti-imperialist and post-colonialist radical feminists. There's also the female supremacists and more. Once I came to understand all this, I became much more comfortable identifying myself as a radical feminist. I was not attaching myself to a tribe, rather I was evoking my stance against prostitution, pornography, surrogacy, and transgenderism. I often hear the accusation that radical feminism is a theory fueled by hatred, especially the hatred of men, and that it portrays all women as victims. I disagree with that. I see radical feminism as a theory that comes from a place of love, and a need to end female suffering. Radical feminism has never made me feel like a victim. It helped me place my suffering into a broader context and understand that my unique experiences are a part of a system. This allowed me to let go of blame I held against myself and against the men in my life. It lit a fire in my soul to fight instead of mope around. Radical feminism provided me with a moral compass, a set of ethics to which to live by. It provided me with a community, a goal, and a purpose. And ultimately, it gives me a set of tools for critical thinking. But I believe it is crucial to balance out radical feminist theories with other theories of the world to avoid it becoming blinding, or totalizing, and coming to the immature conclusion that all men are bad and all women are good. Of course, radical feminism helped me on a personal level as well. It helped me heal my eating disorder to learn to love my body as it comes. It also helped me see through men and their social conditioning. It helped me gain self-respect and it completely changed the way I see the world. It gave me a passion and a reason to live. But all that will be useless if I don't act. That's why I joined WLRN. Although I was already doing work with a digital safety NGO and Gayle Dines, I'm keeping the youth safe online amid the pornography they encounter. I wanted to join an explicitly radical feminist team of all women and do only radical feminist work. So, I got in touch with Thistle, and here I am today. A part of this incredible team of radical feminists who volunteer their time to this podcast. I hope that you, women, listening to me now, feel comforted knowing that there are like-minded radical feminists across the world. I hope this podcast brings you comfort as it brings me. I may only be one voice, but when we come together, as women, defending women, we are powerful and we make an impact. As a professor once told me, be critical, be radical, and as the workin reminds us, we are feminists, not the fun kind. Thanks, Lola. That concludes our individual presentations on why we are radical feminists and what it means to us to be a part of WLRN. Thanks for tuning in. I'm Mary. Don't forget to support WLRN's fundraiser by either going to WLRNMedia.com and clicking on the donate button or going to our first ever company sponsors website at Garnew.com and purchasing some rad period products with the code WLRN at checkout. Thank you, sisters. You are listening to WLRN. Thanks for listening to WLRN's 103rd edition podcast on why we are radical feminists and why we joined WLRN. WLRN would like to thank our members this month for sharing their views on why they are radical feminists and what the WLRN collective means to them. Thank you so much, Lola. This one are all rough contributing. This is Mary signing off on another WLRN podcast. If you like what you're hearing and would like to donate to the cause of Feminist Community Radio, please visit our WordPress site WLRNMedia.com and click on the donate button. Check out our merch tab to get a nice gift and exchange for your donation. And if you're interested in joining our team, we're always looking for new volunteers to conduct interviews, write blog posts, post to our Facebook and other social media pages, and do other tasks to keep us moving forward as a collective of media activist women. Thanks for listening. This is Thistle signing off for now. And this is Aurora. Thank you sincerely for tuning in. Next month, we will be reflecting as a collective on the US presidential election. Our Handcrafted podcasts always come out on the first Thursday of the month, so look for it on Thursday, December 5th. If you would like to receive our newsletter that notifies you when each podcast music show and interview is released, please sign up for our newsletter on the WLRN WordPress site. Finally, on a more personal note, I'm excited to report that my new book, "Man Against Being, Body Horror and the Death of Life," is being published this month by SpinFX Press. In the book, I deal at Greater Link with themes that I've written about for WLRN in the past, like male dominions, flight for material reality, for example, or its immortality fantasies, or its love of machines over living bodies. So if you've enjoyed my work here, chances are the book will give you something to chew on. I hope that you'll consider taking a look. Stay strong in the struggle, sisters, and thank you for listening. And this is Anne Castile signing off on another edition of WLRN's monthly Handcrafted podcast. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Spinster, Over It, and SoundCloud in addition to our website. Our monthly podcasts are always crafted with tender love and care and in solidarity with women worldwide. We would love to hear from you, so please share widely, like, and comment. Thanks for your support, sisters. ♪ But how will we find our way out of this? ♪ ♪ What is the antidote for the patriarchal kiss? ♪ ♪ How will we find what needs to be shown? ♪ ♪ And then after that, where is home? ♪ ♪ Tell me where is my home? ♪ ♪ 'Cause gender hurts ♪ [BLANK_AUDIO]