One name: Julie Bindel.
Her latest invective against everyone not her is in The Huffington Post, wherein she attempts to delegitimize female bisexuality:
It is more à la mode to have sex with a man if you are a lesbian than if you’re a straight woman, who is merely doing what she is expected to do “naturally.” Lesbians having heterosexual sex are seen as transgressive, when in fact they are simply reverting to a traditional way of being a woman. For a straight woman, having a girlfriend on the side is almost like having the latest Prada handbag.
Her attitude is not unique among radical feminists. Sheila Jeffreys, Andrea Dworkin, Donna Hughes, and others have expressed similar notions, especially when said women are prostitutes providing heterosexual prostitution services. Though Bindel identifies as lesbian, I don’t think she has any sexual orientation at all, much less enjoys whatever sex she does have. This is a woman filled with hate toward other women who aren’t just like her. Someone filled with that much hate and mistrust toward sex can’t actually enjoy it. Considering what she claims in her own words about choosing to be a lesbian, it’s not for a love of women so much as it is a hatred of men. How is that a good mentality for anyone wanting to expound upon human sex and sexuality? You don’t love the one sex so much as you vehemently hate the other sex.
And why is she so popular? Why does she get to continue to have her words accepted wholly instead of publicly criticized for the insanity that they are? For the very reasons she claims to fight against: her misogyny supports the status quo which seeks to strictly define and dictate female sexuality, especially when it comes to sex work, Bindel’s other bete noire. She’s useful for the very patriarchy* she claims to be against. With the exception of one comment as of this writing, all of the commenters at The Huffington Post were aghast at her claims and her attitude. It’s nothing new for those of us who have been paying attention to her, whether we wanted to or not, for years. But maybe more people are waking up to her and other rad fem insanity. Oh, and she also attacks Camille Paglia in the article, which is also à la mode for many feminists, whether they identify as radical or not.
That said, I wonder how many of these commenters will see that what Bindel and her ilk say about sex work is equally ghastly? One commenter named SunnyAndCrowe states in part of her response (full response here):
Seriously, just because a penis might possibly touch some part of a woman’s anatomy does not suddenly contaminate her so that she cannot then think for herself.
Yet that is the very standard most people use to ignore anything any stripe of sex worker may state about their work. I hope the commenter is aware of this but I wouldn’t be surprised if she or he were not. Sex workers are always the exception to a variety of asinine rules. Julie Bindel and others like her fit the definition of misogyny but are rarely described as such because she is a woman and claims to be a feminist.
*And by patriarchy I do not mean “anything that men do, no matter how innately harmless, that some women are uncomfortable with”.
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