I wonder if it would be possible to reprint Julia’s writings and that way she would get some royalties payments?

Heart

Ugh, that just pisses me off.  What an asshole.

I think what feminism did was open the door to lots of careers that women were blocked from entering decades ago, and a whole generation of women has gone into these fields.  But radical feminism kind of got lost and fell behind somewhere along the line, and the women who went into business had no way to meet the radical feminists anymore.

Either that, or women are still really frightened of radical feminist, and still really frightened of lesbians.  I meet really nice successful straight women all the time!  They are very nice, will take you for a ride on their nice big boat, and they’ll spend $24,000 on a face lift.  These women are afraid, afraid of the radical, afraid of feminism… and I don’t know what bubble they seem trapped in, but they are in it.  I’m meerly the rare out lesbian who wanders into these strange worlds, trying to figure it all out.

So when you go everywhere, you kind of wish we could get the big picture, or just why radical feminism is just as dirt poor today as it was in 1972.  We have a problem women, and I have seen this contradiction for a long time, and still I see the siren song of patriarchy just keeping women from doing more.  It’s a mystery.

I call it the Condi dilemma.  Condi got to be secretary of state because of feminism, but look what she did!  She’s just one example.  Feminism opens the doors and does the hard work, and then the opportunists just move in and could care less.  When older women are trashed by younger women, we will lose again.
Clearly women collude in patriarchy all the time, and get easily scared, yet at some moments in time, women march in the streets and fight back….

So I must be the really odd duck, perhaps the only radical feminist financial person and business person who writes here.  I keep wondering why business is so taboo, and I wonder where are the business lesbian feminists are…. and well, I guess I’ll be this weird little contradiction. :-)

Yes. Capitalism is a Ponzi scheme - that fact is pretty much in the name capitalism, if you take it seriously. It’s the Amway of economic systems. It’s requires a major suspension of disbelief: those with the capital have it because they work both harder and smarter.

If you really do see through to what capitalism IS, it’s hard to say “yes, I’m excited to work my way to the top of the Amway pyramid.”

At the same time, we’re IN it. It affects every person on the face of this planet in a very personal way. Even if we were able to drop completely off the grid, our ability to breathe air and drink water and put our feet on dry land depends upon an assessment made by some capitalist near the top of the ladder. It just does.

There has to be some place between falsely denying that you’re involved with capitalists like it or not, ignoring them and hoping it will work out (it doesn’t, as far as I can tell), and trying to win at the game, knowing the whole time that regardless of how hard/smart you do in fact work, you’re perpetuating a fraud, one  that hurts other people.

I don’t know what it looks like, how it’s livable, whatever. But I do think it’s absolutely a respectable point of view to believe that long-term economic security for women is invaluable and a worthy goal, starting on the personal level, and simultaneously that capitalism is specifically, purposely structured such that it will NOT provide long-term economic security for all women.

I can’t help but think that a part of why women (and the Women’s Movement) have this almost instinctive dislike of money and money systems, has to do with the exploitive nature of much of capitalism. Capitalism is largely based on exploiting workers, yes? (not saying that being compensated for work performed is necessarily inherently exploitive, mind, just that that’s the way it’s being going down for <i>so long.</i>) Women know all too well what it’s like to be exploited. We’re exploited all the time, by men, by other women too sometimes. Exploited sexually, yes, as in funnie’s “utmost expression” of capitalism, but also house/all-work wise, emotionally, psychologically. I wonder how much of that dynamic, that exploitive, unfair, “I’ll make bags of cash ordering you around and making you do the grunt work for very little” dynamic is just a major turn-off for women, and for feminists in particular?

I think that that is a good part of what goes into what my old friends used to call “the poverty ethic.” We just really didn’t want to be a part of that shite. And, come the Revolution, we won’t have to be. But until then we need to get by. We need to work from within the system as we struggle to pull it down and inside out. So I hear what you’re saying, Satsuma. Feminism as a movement needs to find ways to create wealth, in order to be able to afford a new way of doing things, and to be able to look after our own.

I’m very sleepy and I hope I’m making sense. 

That’s why it’s still a patriarchy.