Liberal Femicide

Liberal 

Feminismcide

Feminism has, in name at least, been claimed by pop culture. It's been bleached, starched and caged. A toothless, obese guard dog on a very short and heavy chain. 

Like an evening at the neighbours as they force you to peruse their holiday snaps, expressing wonder and envy; where in every picture they stand by the Eiffel tower with matching 'I ❤ Paris' hats, boasting of staying off the tourist track and seeing the 'real' country. 

It's a fragile shop display that mustn't be touched. Easy answers with easy mantras for everything from the serious to innane. It's the breathless, vapid 'here comes the science bit' of Loreal ads (or whoever it was).

It's been stripped down to nothing. It's the cast off exoskeleton of a spider hanging in a web, looking real from a distance - but - your breath, from the other side of the room, sends it spiralling off into the air. It has no integrity, function or bite. 

It's a crap pop tune, a chanting mob of nothing; "How are you?" followed immediately with "Ok, good". 

It has been so infiltrated and destroyed, so utterly usurped it is little more than a Red Tractor logo on your factory farmed chicken, assuring you that this bird had a good life - all 42 days between conveyor belts from hatchery to abattoir, that is.

There's no room for disagreement, for analysis or difficult questions or, especially, doubt. It's hyper-capitalism; you need everything they sell and, if you can't afford it, you should have worked harder.

It centres everyone except for women, and still uses 'exclusionary' as an othering slur.

It sees almost nothing as sexual exploitation. Sexual exploitation is liberation. 'We're all whores now!' they cry, claiming their entirely straight, monogamous relationships are 'open' and queer.

 It is the incel calling the woman who wouldn't shag him a whore. It is 'not all men' at another murdered woman's vigil; it dresses itself, identifies as anti-racist while abusing survivors of FGM as backwards and worse. 

It claims to be anti-colonialist, while insisting campaigns to stop women and girls being forced into period huts in Nepal use gender neutral language. God forbid one identifies as a man and is unwittingly excluded from the conversation, while bleeding in a freezing, insecure, lonely lean-to.

It's the humanitarian aid worker who pays the desperate local for sex and rationalises he's helping her, that she probably likes it, too.

It's the kid in McDonald's with the Che Guevara tee shirt, tweeting about anti-capitalism on their iPhone.

It got where it is through the old boy's network, and has a strong belief in the power of hard work alone.

It's the middle-class trustafarian, barely emerging from full parental control and still highly subsidised, dictating how women in hostels and prisons should deal with their trauma when faced with male inmates.

And it is those same coddled ideologues, with anarchy-A profile pictures and a Kropotkin logo on their jacket, as they abuse Helen Steel as a neo-lib TERF.

They threaten and assault women at anti-male violence demos and trade stories on it after.

It's them as they raid the Fairshare shelves, filling their rucksacks with food they'll never touch, just to exhibit their urban survivalism and hard knocks life back at home.

It's the nonbinary who cites there being only single sex changing rooms, 'forcing' them to pick, as a serious an insult as the woman forced to refer to her rapist with she/her.

It goes to the press to complain of harassment after hurling abuse at minimum wage check-out staff who greeted them with gendered terms. 

It's the woman who always has the money for a cab home, blaming the woman who does not, and was assaulted when returning from her night shift.

It's banging on about 'white feminists' acknowledging biology while comparing trans identifying males to black women.

It's the debating team who play white noise at opponents and leave, bragging of their 'win'.

It's the Bullingdon boys - sexually assaulting lap dancers, burning £50 notes in front of the homeless, smashing up bars and getting mum and dad to pay it off - finalising their career plans to be barristers and politicians.

It's the twat with an ACAB banner who calls the police to report stickers for hate crimes: Who thinks abolishing prisons is a grand idea while claiming a contrary opinion on twitter makes them unsafe.

It's the rabidly pro-Muslim white kid who denies women have the right to spaces to be without males and sees no contradiction.

It's the environmentalist who takes several holiday flights a year.

It's the young man with an adoring family and trust fund, who preaches like Jacob Rees Mogg at dinner, abusing women for insisting on single sex refuges. Him, as he's smugly stating he'll donate hundreds of pounds to campaigns which harm them, since they are TERFs. He'll leave the donation in their name. And he calls himself left-wing.

And his friend, the shiny, simpering 'pick me!' girl who has never once had nowhere to run to, lecturing women on trans inclusion in those same spaces. It bombards any comment or question with a laugh react, a meme and a block, screenshotting it to publicly mock later.

It takes the feminist framework of black women to analyse their layered oppression and shoves the white dude into the fore. 'Be kind' it squeals as it searches for your employer and sends threats on messenger.

It's the awkward jokes that break the ice after you saw her husband hit her and heard him call her a bitch. It's telling her that she really needs to understand him better, and a bit of make up wouldn't hurt.

It's an elitist game. A round of contrived compliments followed by spiteful whispers during the obligatory continental kiss. It's a privilege system of in-group consensus, in-jokes and standing on the backs of other's to get in camera shot.

It invokes the suffragettes and woke-washes their values before damning the whole movement as white supremacist. It dresses up in Vivian Westwood vintage punk and crosses the road to avoid the Big Issue vendor.

And one day it will crumble, and all of them will be revising their histories and brainstorming excuses and fishing out those photos which they posed for as they handed some clothes to the charity shop.

And I will never forget. But, as a feminist, I'll still defend their rights.