To be a feminist is to be an everything abolitionist
“Women’s Issues” - a collage I made centered around the words “Cluster Fuck” and a cut out from a vintage pornography magazine of a woman with an added text bubble that says “What are you waiting for, permission?”
That title might sound incendiary to some, but if the patriarchy is embedded in every single institution, then every single institution needs to be abolished. You can’t get equality by just changing something that was fundamentally built on a belief system about the inferiority of women; you can only dismantle it and start again.
Roughly 100 years on from white women being able to vote in the US, which itself took 144 years from the Declaration of Independence, women don’t even make up a third of congress (27%)! 703 years on from the Magna Carta in England rich white women got the vote, and 100 years after that, UK Parliament became 34% female for the first time.
Don’t hit me with “look at how much we have achieved,” that is only admitting that we’ve sacrificed whole generations of women so as to get equality on their time scale. Maybe the people who fucked everything up in the first place shouldn’t be deciding how and when it gets fixed?
We have never gotten equality. Our vote isn’t equal, our wages aren’t equal, our rights aren’t equal. It’s not for a lack of change in the last 100 years. The political system is fatally flawed, the economic system is fatally flawed, the healthcare system is fatally flawed, the educational system is fatally flawed, the justice system is fatally flawed, the prison system is fatally flawed, the police system is fatally flawed...you get the drift.
Author’s note: this article and entire way of thinking owes a lot to Frank B. Wilderson III’s Afropessimism. I think the argument I make here equally applies to racism and ableism, although Frank B Wilderson III may disagree with that characterisation, he views there to be a pretty big distinction between the way society is based on anti-blackness vs. anti-womanism. Cynically I think that’s because he’s a man, but I’d like to know what Black women and Black nonbinary people think.
I recommend checking out the group #8ToAbolition who made this poster of 8 demands to “create the conditions for our ultimate vision: a world without police, where no one is held in a cage, and all people thrive and be well.” The eight demands listed are DEFUND THE POLICE, DEMILITARIZE COMMUNITIES, REMOVE POLICE FROM SCHOOLS, FREE PEOPLE FROM PRISONS & JAILS, REPEAL LAWS CRIMINALIZING SURVIVAL, INVEST IN COMMUNITY SELF-GOVERNANCE, PROVIDE SAFE HOUSING FOR EVERYONE, INVEST IN CARE, NOT COPS. In addition the poster reads, #8TOABOLITION A WORLD WITHOUT PRISONS OR POLICE, WHERE WE CAN ALL BE SAFE. WE BELIEVE IN A WORLD WHERE THERE ARE ZERO POLICE MURDERS BECAUSE THERE ARE ZERO POLICE. ABOLITION CAN’T WAIT.
