The Sydney Feminists

Dear Auntie, What’s a good comeback for someone who says, “only women who are raped deserve to have an abortion”?  Thanks, M Well for starters, that’s a horrible thing to say. That’s like saying “only people who have their nose broken from an assault deserve to have it fixed” or “car accident victims only warrant medical help if another driver smashes into them on purpose”. A woman shouldn’t need to be degraded and violated to warrant a termination. People have accidents. Sometimes they’re freak accidents. Others are accidents waiting to happen. Or worse yet, people hurt other people on purpose . The reason behind someone’s need for medical care shouldn’t dictate their right to it.  Furthermore, people can have an unwanted pregnancy for a plethora of agonising reasons and they should never be taken lightly .   I could go on and on about people’s right to safe abortion ... and I will. People against abortion often disregard the lac...

If you've spent enough time in feminist circles and enough time engaging with allies, you are practically guaranteed to have heard the term "not all men!" If you had an automatic eye-roll reaction, I'll understand, and if not I'll explain. It's the sentiment consistently expressed by men in the face of stories about problematic male behaviour. Not all men, they will say. Not all men are rapists. Not all men are misogynists. Not all men are violent. All of these sentiments are true. But the expression itself is toxic - and I for one will no longer engage with anyone who employs this diversionary tactic any longer. The reason is simple: it's not rhetoric that signals someone is a legitimate ally, it's a logical fallacy designed to derail an important conversation back to a topic they feel is more deserving - namely, men's problems. You might remember something similar in the #alllivesmatter response to the Black Lives Matter movement. There it was ...

Following the Toronto attack, where Alek Minassian drove a van into a crowd of people, killing 10, many people have been questioning exactly this. Because before Minassian turned a van into a weapon, he called for an Incel Rebellion. People are questioning this because they aren’t quite sure what to do with Minassian. What he did seems like a terrorist attack, but mainstream media is struggling to come up with  how  it is. What was his goal? I see narratives shifting towards Minassian as mentally disturbed. I’m sure he was. But he was also a terrorist. His goal was to terrorise women and “normies” under the banner of male supremacy and entitlement. Because Minassian felt he was entitled to female bodies, and he felt he was being denied, he decided to enact violence. Incel means involuntary celibate – and the people in the community take this title on themselves. It means they feel they are forced to be celibate, because society is unfair. When people make a scrape at...