Liberal Feminism Fails: Tiara Mack
We need a different approach.
There’s got to be a better way. I refuse to believe there are women and trans women in leadership positions representing us who don’t get that the stakes are higher than they’ve ever been before.
Just a few weeks ago, the United States Supreme Court decided to overstep its boundaries, depriving thousands of women in over a dozen states from their God-given physical autonomy* and reproductive rights by overturning Roe vs. Wade, the landmark case that protected women’s rights to an abortion. Like many women, however, I expected this to happen in this sinking ship of an empire.
Still, I was still gutted. It’s embarrassing to tell your daughter that she lost the right to her autonomy on your watch. I could have done more, but I wasted time within the confines of liberal feminism. What the hell do I have to show for it if women in other states — little girls in other states — have to flee their homes for an abortion because the American Patriarchy has embraced its deranged degeneracy?
While some women raged and (rightfully) took the law into their own hands, fighting back defiantly (legality of the action be damned), some women took the opportunity to twerk for likes, clout, and… votes?
Rhode Island State Senator Tiara Mack felt her best effort in the face of state violence against women, girls, and and transmasculine folks was to… *Checks notes* Um, twerk.
Because militant resistance, general strikes, an outright mass action at a national level that grinds the economy to a halt isn’t effective enough. Maybe Senator Mack felt her body and her performance for the male gaze was enough to get us out of this mess. I wish I had the childish hubris masking as confidence that Senator Mack displayed. Shouldn’t we all?
All we have to do is pop our shit on a handstand, and these acts will, somehow, entice the same upholders of patriarchy into seeing us as a threat. The same people who relegated us to second class citizens by law after years of evidence, scientific and anecdotal, these people were emboldened to overturn Roe v. Wade, but twerking at protests and at the beach during a very racist holiday will be effective, I’m sure… Some of these women truly don’t want to be free because they’ve found profit in being supremely feckless in the face of the oppression forced upon girls, women, trans women, and transmasculine folks.
Senator Mack doesn’t want to be seen as a threat. She wants votes at the expense of women and girls. She doesn’t want to actually inspire change, she wants to play it safe on social media while a 10 year old girl has to flee Ohio for an abortion after being sexually assaulted by a 27-year-old rapist dog who probably likes to watch twerking videos his damn self. By the way, they should put him down like the dog he is.
Who does this ludicrous, frivolous display of narcissism truly help? It’s not helping the women in states where they have no right to their bodies anymore. Senator Mack and her ilk don’t give a shit, not when it comes to the collective.
Mack asserts she did nothing wrong, doubling down on her exhibitionist, milquetoast video. Liberal feminism values the self over the collective of women so her tone deaf, childish response was unsurprising. After all, it’s about a few enjoying the benefits of aggrandizing themselves to the neoliberal state and increasingly violent capitalist patriarchy for profit and prestige.
Senator Mack doesn’t give a shit that some little girls will need to endure the fear, trauma, and burden of living in a country going off the rails, and cannibalizing itself by attacking women, black people, trans folks, and other minorities at every opportunity. That’s not nearly as important as being seen as an object to be admired or lusted after: ineffective, neutered, while still being accommodating and placating.
“You deigned to take my rights away? Let me dance for you.” The women of Rhode Island are not well-served by this senator and they never will while she continues to value social media praise and bad publicity over actually fighting for women’s rights. Even now she holds court on Twitter retweeting articles about her clownery, failing to understand, we are not laughing with her… We’re laughing at her.
You may think there’s nothing wrong with her circus show at the beach, and I’d ask you how you would react if you were powerful, without scruples, and ruthlessly misogynistic to the point of depriving women, girls, and transmasculine folks of their physical autonomy and reproductive rights? Would you be dissuaded or remotely influenced by the actions of a woman in a bikini twerking on a handstand (poorly)?
You wouldn’t.
This is just another one of the failures of liberal and neoliberal (white) feminist thought and theory. Each woman is a brand and her sexuality, body, and all that comes with the aforementioned are marketable — which means there’s always a price. It is individualistic and self-centered in its praxis and it shows in every major battle for liberation that requires women, trans women, and transmasculine folks to be on code, united, and effective.
At the end of the day, liberal feminism pushed us to this point because most of us were asleep at the wheel — myself included — and cowed by its laissez-faire, milquetoast, occasional efforts and victories. We believed we were effective retweeting Planned Parenthood or wearing pussy hats. What a fucking joke…
We were treated as if we were declawed and defanged lionesses, but I ain’t never lost my claws, fangs, or bite. Bites mean pain and claws mean scars for the aggressor at the other end of the attack. If necessary, it means death and I am perfectly alright with that level of aggression if necessary.
Senator Mack can bring the circus and she is entitled to be the biggest starring clown in her own show. As for women who are about our freedom and liberation by any means necessary? We’ll bring the pain.
*Author’s Note: As a Christian revolutionary feminist, I believe the Christians on the left (not liberals lol) have done very little to fight the fascist, neo-Victorian (word to Gerstle) dullards who have hijacked our faith and the narrative about what it is to be truly Christian for far too long. The fact is, if you are Christian, there is no way you can believe Christ and the American state are compatible. No empire, kingdom, or state of man can tell us what to do with the bodies God gave us. If you are of another faith, I’m sure that also applies, and I’m ready to fight by your side.
