What made you question liberal feminism?

I started questioning liberal feminism because of the trans movement. I started to follow trans people on social media and came to the conclusion that pretty much all of these trans women sexualize themselves and want to be complimented / praised all the time. The trans men want the opposite usually, they don't want to be seen through the male gaze anymore. All of these trans people think they are being revolutionary by breaking the gender norms, but they are doing the complete opposite. The trans movement is just so full of contradictions.

Tbh I think part of the reason why men and women are so divided these days is because of them.

For me it was when I realized that their version of Feminism became less and less about talking points and topics that benefit women and more and more about things that actually benefit men under the guise of benefitting women. Some examples:

- when they went from decriminalizing the prostitutes (which I agree with because they shouldn't be punished for something they were forced into by men or their life's circumstances like extreme poverty) to decriminalizing the pimps, madams and johns who exploit and rape them

- when they went from fighting sexism and harrassment in the workplace and schools to fighting over who gets to use which bathroom and which random pronouns to use for people and if those people can sue someone for getting it wrong

- when they went from fighting for mandatory access to paid maternity and paternity leave, decent health insurance and preventative care for everyone and access to birth control and abortions to fighting over if calling biological women "women" is discrimination and if saying trans "women" don't menstruate or ovulate and are therefore not part of this community or conversation is harrassment

- when they went from fighting for the rights and liberation of women and children who have to grow up and live in archaic, patriarchal regimes, religions and cultures to going "Those are their traditions! It's so racist and evil white supremacy to criticize that! They have the right to CHOOSE if they mutilate their children's genitals, not send their daughters to school and marry them to an old man at the age of 12 and forbid their wives to leave the house without a male relative!"

- when they went from trying to educate women about sex and their sexuality and trying to stop "slut shaming" if a woman dared to express any sexual needs to advocating for hook up culture, polyamory, kink and casual sex with random men without any expectation of respect and commitment

- when they started to include men and men's problems in EVERY conversation and issue and letting them take over our spaces, groups and topics. Now you can't mention a single thing without a choir of men and pickmes going "But men get raped/abused/harrassed/bullied/falsely accused/body shamed, too! Poor men!" and expecting us to fight for men's rights, too, while the men in question obviously don't lift a finger...

Do I have to continue?

It's a confusing, inconsistent movement and I have low tolerance for confusion and inconsistency.

I never fully understood what they stood for and what was in it for me. Like I thought I SHOULD relate but I didn't. Maybe the sex posy stuff is what peaked me. I can't relate to any of it, and I've always been pretty sexual (not that it's a credential, I just found weird to be told I was a prude while also simultaneously being slut shamed). Basically I heard the same arguments from libfems and my abusive ex. Also I've always found weird how all the cool girls who felt empowered by casual sex had had like zero orgasms in their life. At some point I stopped called myself a feminist because I thought feminism was stupid.

Then thanks to JK Rowling I discovered radical feminism lol. Like Gail Dines said, I've been a radical feminist since birth.

I was on board with the "respect sex work" stuff (because I knew next to nothing about it) until some scrote was coming at me about how I shouldn't think of prostitution as just "kind of okay I guess", I should think of it as a great thing for everyone. My reaction was "no, that's too far, don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining."

This prompted me to look up what it's actually like, which lead me to stories of violence, which was shocking to me at the time. And I found some radical feminist writing that came down hard against the sex industry, and it was a light-bulb moment "oh wow, what she's saying makes a lot of sense!"

Then a similar thing happened again when some person on the internet came into a discussion about a relationship between a man and a woman, that had nothing whatsoever to do with trans people, and scolded everyone "don't use words like 'man' and 'woman', you're supposed to say 'cis-man' and 'cis-woman'!"

I was on board with "use whatever bathroom you want" at the time, but this was new to me: "what the hell is 'cis'? And why are you being so annoying about it?" That lead me to find Gender Critical soon after.

Combative people are their own worst enemies. They can't even manage to keep my past clueless self on their team and continuing to buy their bullshit. Would have been so easy. All they had to do was be a little less irritating. But no... they just had to keep pissing me off until I went "fuck this noise" and "educated myself" with some radical feminist writing. 😆

the depravity desguised as "sexual liberation"

I don't think I was ever a LibFem. It always sat uncomfortably on me, when you know something is wrong but haven't identified what it is. When I found FDS and started reading opinions that resonated with me is when I found out what school of feminism I truly belong to

Believe it or not… reading non-canonical Christian texts, the Quran, Hadiths (especially those narrated by Ayesha), reading the works by a Mexican nun called Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, reading John Stuart Mill’s “The Subjugation of Women”, and reading first wave feminists FROM LATIN AMERICA (since one of the most prominent 1st wave feminists of LatAm was FROM MY HOME CITY). Some of the above may seen contradictory between each other, but when put together, cross-analyzed, and looked into the bigger picture… it makes sense at the end of the day. Liberal feminism is a HIGHLY NORTHERN, ANGLICIZED, SUBURBAN, COSMOPOLITAN MOVEMENT. It does not speak for the majority of the world nor it fits the needs of the average woman. That’s why it has failed at the end of the day.

A couple things. The libfem obnoxious cheerleading for prostitution. No. Just NO. A world where women and girls can be for sale for the purpose of sexual abuse is NOT a world that will ever be healthy for women.

Also, their ridiculous cheerleading for autogynephilic men in dresses. Supporting a population of perverts who are hell-bent on erasing women's rights is the exact OPPOSITE of feminism. Libfems are evil idiots, and I stay far away. Radfem 4 life!

I dont really have a particular moment. But I started coming across radfem stuff online. When I read it at first I honestly thought those women were crazy man haters. as time went on I’d see things happen in my personal life, media etc and realized “this is what the radfems we’re talking about “

I started seeing it everywhere! I saw they were right about alot. It took me a while to completely move from Libfem ideals.

I was browsing Reddit one day and saw people discussing fds and it sounded completely out there but I wanted to see what was going on there. So I lurked for hours and LOVED it. And that was it , I was done with libfems after that. Everything that fds was all about , was stuff that I had trouble expressing about what was wrong with liberal feminism .

I was groomed into liberal feminism from a young age by media, my friends, and community. Took me until my 30s to realize its ideology had only harmed me. All the men I dated were abusive cheaters who tried to either groom me into poly or possess me as a bangmaid slave. No women warned me or helped me because no one respects or helps a “sexually liberated woman” (aka wh*re). That’s the reality of liberal feminism —outside of hippie, hipster, poly and queer spaces you’re just a wh*re and will be treated as such. Now if anything even smells vaguely of liberal feminism, I run in the opposite direction. It’s a lie stemming from the hippie movement designed by men to get their dicks wet more easily by removing women’s right to consent by grooming young women to never turn down sexual advances. It has no benefit to women.

For me, it was the realization that hookup culture had brought me nothing but abuse, disrespect, wasted time, and therapy bills.

And not just for me, but all my girlfriends. And wait, all these women on social media too?? It was the same complaints and horror stories across the board.

Women jumped into casual sex with both feet, expecting orgasms and fun and maybe a boyfriend, and instead we got trauma and STIs and rape and cheating and stalking and shattered self-esteem.

And we're the lucky ones. If you're not so lucky, your story gets reported by the news as somebody's daughter who didn't come home.

It was around this time that I found myself crying over another messy situationship with an emotionally retarded loser who lied upfront about everything, and it hit me that NOTHING I'd been taught about dating, men, or how to be a woman had ever benefited me in any way. Something was really, really wrong. I'd tried being nice, understanding, putting men first, viewing us as equals, assuming we were operating from the same playbook and values, and that casual sex served me somehow, and men were having a field day with it.

Found FDS around this time and never looked back.

EDIT:

Not just hookup culture, but dating in general. (The two are closely intertwined, anyway.)

I was hard pressed to think of any het relationships where the woman was happy. It made me start to realize how much liberal feminism overvalues men.

When I saw a LOT of men joining in the movement and I started questioning "who does this *insert libfem rhetoric here* benefit?" and every time I saw that the libfem tropes overwhelmingly benefit men. Once I realized that, I saw it for the gaslighting PsyOp it is. Liberal "feminism" is an overt MRA movement with a very thin veneer of meaningless feminist buzzwords to sound woke™. "Sex work is work!" "Trans women are women!" "Selling your body is empowering!" "Violence against women is a kink, don't kink shame!" "Being called a slut, whore, or bitch is empowering!" "Sleep with everyone, regardless of the dangerous consequences, you don't want to be called a *gasp* prude!" "Don't ever talk about female anatomy or biological processes, that's tRaNsPhObiC!" "Lesbians have to accept 'girl dick' or they're Nazi bigots!" NO TO ALL OF THAT BULLSHIT.

When I realized that liberal feminism does not actually solve the real issues - systemic issues of women being exploited, not being treated as persons, voices not being heard or respected, etc. I read a lot of women's issues books that helped me open my mind of all the conditioning and grooming girls and women have been through.

That liberal feminism is just a cope to feel a sense of enjoy or feel empowered in the cage that they're in.

I was a full pickme libfem for years and used to support trans rights. For me it was no different to being pro immigration; I believed everyone had the right to live their life with freedom and security. But then I was told I needed to give up my freedom and security for that to happen. That I wasn’t entitled to my sex based rights any more, that I wasn’t even allowed to be called a woman (I will never accept being called cis). I couldn’t get my head around why as the sex with the least money and power, women were the ones having to give up space for men. Then the gaslighting started and I wasn’t allowed to say trans women were men. I found the gender critical and it’s a fetish subreddits and felt relieved it wasn’t just me. The backdrop to all this was my husband becoming a porn and gambling addict. One day I was on xx chromosomes and someone mentioned FDS as being a cesspit of transphobic bitches who hated porn and sex work and I actually squealed with excitement. I couldn’t look it up fast enough 😂

wasting several years on the pickme hell that is twitter 🙃

all of my ~libfem~ ”friends” ganging up on me and hating on me when I wanted better for myself

When they centered men, claimed sex work was empowerment, and stopped recognizing the exploitive nature of many aspects of sex entertainment & how it found its way into mainstream dating culture. When men started calling themselves feminist, I knew it was done.

I’ve always been a RadFem, however I used to think feminism was a big tent, and reasonable feminists could disagree on certain issues. Not anymore. Thanks to LibFem for Men, thanks to me getting mansplained about feminism by some far left idiot male X-frenemies, I started side-eyeing “male feminists” and quickly saw how MRA attack language was getting bandied about to silence women, such as the word TERF being used as a slur to derail discussion.

These same male feminists are always very in favor of the filmed SA industry, and try to equate the so-called struggles of kink and poly dudes to those of people living in genuinely marginalized communities. It's all about men, but they gaslight and act like it's benefitting women.

I am a woman and identify as a woman, but what I question is the artificial constraints put on us by old conservative traditional teachings. I do not want people to think I am doing wrong or I am a man of some kind because of doing atypical things (according to the arbitrary gender roles that include stupid ideas like color, hobbies, or incompetence being related to genitals.) How is this oppressive nonsense ever going to stop unless one day it no longer matters at all? I don’t think it will reach a point of total abolition, but it seems the correct direction. What is another answer to this issue?