Radical feminism has shaped my worldview, my politics, my relationships, and my work over the past two decades. When I was in my 20s, its approach to things like pornography and prostitution empowered me to stop questioning my discomfort with things I was told were fun, sexy, and harmless, like pornography and strip clubs, and instead to understand why I found these things and this imagery so uncomfortable and depressing, and why they turned me off, not on. I was able to understand and explain why self-objectification and male attention did not, in and of themselves, empower women in the long ..read more

On April 12, the Chinese government removed radical feminist groups from a popular social networking website named Douban. Similar to Reddit — which banned feminist groups critical of gender ideology last year — Douban is an online forum with a group function allowing users to post on various topics and engage in discussions. Of the groups deleted, several were centered on facets of the “6B4T” movement. Additionally, the term 6B4T was censored, and Douban users are not permitted to mention the names of the disappeared groups without risking suspension. The abbreviation “6B4T” is a Chinese rad ..read more

Image: https://twitter.com/XYfreeWorld/status/1010870088633741312?s=19 Last fall, Jen Izaakson travelled to South Korea to document the rise of the radical feminist movement as part of a Cambridge University working group, after winning a research grant, interviewing over 40 female activists. She co-authored this piece with Tae Kyung Kim, a Korean radical feminist from Seoul, currently living and studying in Berlin. News of the growing feminist movement in South Korea has reached Western media, but the roots of this radical uprising are undercovered. Mainstream media reporting in the West ofte ..read more

Marie Shear coined the phrase “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people” in her review of A Feminist Dictionary in New Directions for Women in 1986. Feminism has a problem. And it’s getting worse. To be fair, it could be argued feminism has many problems. I’m going to talk about the one I see as most destructive, if indeed our goal is movement-building. This is what we keep telling each other, yes? We have been lying to ourselves for too long, and it’s time to start being honest. Actually, this is the main problem I have with feminism: the lies. And by that I don’t necessarily mean ..read more

Image: MIT Press Maligned in life and in death as anti-man and anti-sex, Andrea Dworkin believed writing “could move the earth and raise the dead — at least, the living dead.” According to her friend Dr. Catharine A. MacKinnon, the prolific Dworkin’s writing did just that. In 2005, MacKinnon wrote that the radical feminist author “lived the stigma of being identified with women, especially sexually abused women,” “exposed the ugliest realities of women’s lives and said what they mean,” “saw through male power as a political system,” and “exposed the sexual core of male supremacy, the heart of ..read more

pic.twitter.com/r4VzMd3n1E — RaquelRosarioSánchez (@8RosarioSanchez) March 26, 2019 On February 15th, during an assembly of the Argentinean Violence Against Women Collective, Ni Una Menos, a male trans activist physically assaulted a woman. The gathering had been organized to plan events to be held on March 8th, International Women’s Day, and feminists had been invited to address the congregation with their demands for the day in prepared statements. A group of women — members of Feministas Radicales Independientes de Argentina (FRIA) — were scheduled to speak, but when a member named Ana w ..read more

  On October 6, the fifth molka rally was held in Seoul, near the Hyehwa subway station. Sixty thousand women took to the streets of the capital to protest police inaction over molka — the trend wherein men secretly take spycam and up-skirt videos of women in public places, then upload the footage to pornography sites. Journalists from around the world have been reporting on these large-scale women’s rights rallies, which have taken place almost every month since May. Chartered buses transport women from towns and cities all over the southern half of the Korean peninsula to attend. A pos ..read more

Jewish women being deported in Russia in July 1941. (Image: Wikimedia Commons/German Federal Archive This month will see the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, a word that, translated, literally means, “night of glass.” On the evening of November 9th, 1938, into the early hours of November 10th, mobs throughout German towns and cities smashed the windows of Jewish homes, schools, and businesses. Two hundred and sixty seven synagogues were destroyed or burned throughout the Reich, 91 Jews were murdered, and over 30,000 were “transferred” to labour camps. Kristallnacht owes its name to the shard ..read more

Renee Gerlich Renee Gerlich is an independent writer and feminist activist based in Wellington, New Zealand. She was a researcher for the 2016 social history documentary The Heart of the Matter. Her current work aims to generate discussion in a climate women are increasingly silenced, using satire, interventions, street art, and exhibitions like, Too Much Truth: Women’s Global Resistance to Sexploitation. You can listen to her interview on prostitution in New Zealand with Women’s Liberation Radio News here, and follow her writing at reneejg.net. Meghan Murphy interviewed her via email last wee ..read more

A before-and-after transformation picture captioned, “I became a human after ditching the regime of looking sexy or fragile.” The #MeToo movement has reached countless women around the world, morphing into various campaigns specific to what women are experiencing under local forms of patriarchy. In April, The Telegraph reported on a growing movement against “cultural violence against women” in South Korea, which rose up in response to the fact that women in the nation were undergoing more plastic surgery than anywhere else in the world. Emanuel Pastreich, head of the Asia Institute, told Julia ..read more