Another Progressive Demands ‘Diversity’ Be ‘Conformity’…

Julie Bindel, that is.

When I was a young lesbian feminist campaigning to overthrow patriarchy, what irked me most was the fact that some men would impose their own idiotic view of my sexuality on me, by asking if I would perform threesomes with them, or titillate them with a porny kissing display with my girlfriend.

Presumably after a good skinful? They’d need it, Gawd knows…

Today it would seem that, for a number of lesbians, dissatisfaction and anger at being viewed as a male sex toy has been replaced with the desire to become as badly behaved as they are, paradoxically in the name of equality. Last week the Washington Times reported that a lesbian, Tamara Yatkin, who was refused entry to a California strip club because she was not accompanied by a man, is suing the owners for discrimination on the grounds of gender and sexual orientation.

Well, yes. Shouldn’t this be welcomed by you?

I have no doubt that Yatkin was denied entry because of her gender and sexuality, and, in both law and principle, that makes it discrimination. But how have we got to a situation where some of us are trying to enter such bastions of male privilege rather than campaign against the sexual exploitation of women?

Because we aren’t all the same, and don’t all think alike?

We have free will, and that means we get to choose what concepts like ‘equality’ mean for us, rather than conform?

Is liberation tantamount to behaving like some lesbian version of Hugh Heffner? In these times of "choice feminism" and neoliberalism, it seems that the very basis of our political movement is being eroded and replaced with an "anything goes" attitude.

How very terrible. But…didn’t all the boring old straights feel that way when you came on the scene?

So…suck it up. Life is change.