Feminist Polemic - Lux Magazine

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Where have all the female edgelords gone? The modern-day equivalent to Andrea Dworkin can no longer be found in the pages of an obscure women’s journal or the paper of record. The manifesto has moved online. No need to write a whole book on the topic — she can just tweet a hot take. Whether she’s spouting the neofascism of the Red Scare girls or never-ending tweet threads like Joyce Carol Oates and Azealia Banks, today’s edgelord uses fewer and fewer characters to make her point known. Hot takes become pithy arguments all too easy to bat away. They’re hardly a substitute for the polemical sermons of the feminist past. Moral purity can be channeled into an easy takedown. But something is lost when we give up one of the fundamental forms of feminist argument: polemics. Polemics force us to think, they offer a defensive starting point, something that won’t dissolve in our hands every time we refresh the timeline. We have plenty of provocations but few polemics, many swords but no shields

Issue 13 , Culture Where have all the female edgelords gone? The modern-day equivalent to Andrea Dworkin can no longer be found in the pages of an obscure women’s journal or the paper of record. The manifesto has moved online. No need to write a whole book on the topic — she can just tweet a hot take. Whether she’s spouting the neofascism of the Red Scare girls or never-ending tweet threads like Joyce Carol Oates and Azealia Banks, today’s edgelord uses fewer and fewer characters to make her point known. Hot takes become pithy arguments all too easy to bat away. They’re hardly a substitute for

Feminist Polemic - Lux Magazine

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