Random Thoughts on Gender, Writing and Activism

Bulleted posts are the lazy woman's blogging, but right now I have too many thoughts bouncing around neither time nor the motivation to write a proper post. However, the first thing is a pretty important one.

• Reducing feminist community to binary terms like male and female when not all its members define themselves along those axes is cissexist, and I'm sorry. I should have specified cisgendered men. My original posts still stands, though with a few caveats now that I've had time to mull over it. There are a few feminist men (Jay Smooth comes to mind) whose work is invaluable, but I'm still suspicious of men who call themselves feminists without actually doing anything to break down gender stereotypes or fight for women's equality, and I surely don't think their voices should be privileged over women's, especially when the feminist blogosphere itself has a pretty contentious history with including WOC, trans women, working-class women, and anyone else who doesn't fit somewhere along the straight, white, middle-class, cis spectrum.
• That being said, I'm really frustrated with discussions devolving into a competition of "My feminism is better than yours." All radfems are inherently transphobic and all sex-positive feminists are incapable of viewing their actions within a larger social context? And these are my only choices? Where's the nuance here?
• I already linked to Autostraddle's pretty meaty review of Jeffrey Eugenides's book, The Marriage Plot, which has been on a lot of year-end lists. I just started reading it, and yeah, it fails the Bechdel Test miserably, but overall I am enjoying it. My biggest issue is finding some of the the secondary male characters far more relatable than the female protagonist, not because of some long-standing internalized misogyny, but because they're much better written. I had the same reaction to Jonathan Franzen's Freedom last year, another book that was as problematic as it was praised. Are most men just incapable of writing good, strong female characters?