I read Glosswitch’s take on Laurie Penny’s fatuous claims this morning (this morning my time, Hellfire West Coast time) but got too entangled with LP’s nonsense to point it out here. Let this be a lesson to you: if you can read either Laurie Penny or Glosswitch, don’t choose Laurie Penny.

Glosswitch starts with the “I’d advise her not to stare at other people’s genitals without their permission, because it’s rude” tweet. The issue is not penises, she assures us.

The issue – highlighted in another of [the] well-known feminist’s tweets today, in which she told feminists who think biological sex is politically salient “your feminism is bad and you should feel bad” – is making other women feel ashamed of their feelings, their fears, their boundaries, their entire inner lives.

This is not about trans people. It is not about questioning the authenticity of someone’s self-perception. It is not about gender identity, or genitalia, or  “being one’s true self”. It is about the absolute patriarchal basics: power, shame, blame and control. It is about rape culture, domestic abuse, coercive control. It’s about all the things certain feminists claim to want to stop, then go on to reinforce.

Like, you know, men intruding on spaces for women, and ignoring women’s discomfort or fear, and getting their sexual jollies from that discomfort and fear. Those patriarchal basics.

When you recommend shaming a young woman for any potential discomfort  – when you insinuate that it is somehow voyeuristic, rude, obsessive not to want to be in close proximity to the naked male bodies of strangers – you are doing what abusive men have always done to women and girls: shaming them into feeling their distress is their fault.

I bet you anything Laurie Penny had no idea she was doing that when she did it. You can kind of see what she thought she was doing – being funny, being clever, turning things around so that she comes out funny and clever and the woman talking about her teenage daughter comes out timid and “sex-negative” and boring as well as transphobic. She thought she was being hip. It didn’t occur to her that she was being just another “Stop fighting, bitch, or I’ll break your fucking jaw.”

If only women felt nothing – or, failing that, if only they could resolve never to acknowledge or express their own pain – then we might see an end to all the struggles. Come on, girls. Just give in.

Don’t cry; your tears are manipulative, deceptive, the weaponisation of toxic femininity against people more vulnerable than you. Don’t speak; don’t be a Karen complaining to the manager, exploiting your experience of trauma to prop up carceral norms. Don’t acknowledge distress at the things that are done to and taken from your body; it’s all just penetration, just gestation, just meat, just nothing at all.

It’s just a guy getting naked next to you, smirking at you, watching you flinch.

I see women absorbing these lessons, believing there might be virtue, some ill-defined liberation, in following these heartless rules, never putting themselves first, but never putting other women first, either. Vying to be the best at not feeling anything, condemning those who foolishly slip up. It is so cruel, and so rooted in active dislike for women as people.

It’s all that good. Read the whole thing.