"TERF" was always going to go mainstream

So, Glamour went there. It printed a piece in which women are called "TERF".

It was inevitable that the word "TERF" will become mainstream. The feminists slammed with this "description" are the most unforgivable of activists: women who stand for women, as women, and women only. Women wihout a modifier, women as members of no class other than their own, women as completely divorced from any political association with men.

To cover its own profound and endemic misogyny, the Left allows certain kind of feminist activity - anti-racist, anti-homophobic - to flourish, so long as the gains from that activity are likely to benefit some men, too. And of course anything that might benefit some men in practice ends up benefiting mostly men - advantage flows up the power gradient, that's not news to anyone.

Radical feminism doesn't operate within that narrowly permitted sphere. It kicks at the traces: it says no, women as women and women only and with no relationship (mother, sister, daughter) or affiliation (black, gay, poor) with men of any kind we are worthy of political consideration, we have interests, we have rights, we have power, we have thoughts and talents and capabilities and we. Are. Oppressed. As women.

That a "women's" magazine (in reality, a publication whose aim and purpose is to inform the subordinate class about the terms on which its subordination is to be carried out) should be among the first mainstream media organs to legitimise a word that is used as a cover for lurid fantasies about inflicting snuff-like violence on these insubordinate, obstinate, monstrous women who continue to insist that "women" means something and that women matter, is not surprising. It's not even ironic. It's completely predictable.

Women's magazines exist to tell us what we are not allowed to be. Fat. Hairy. Ugly. Old. Ambitious. That a women's magazine should take it upon itself to thickly hint that one additional thing we are not allowed to be is partisans for our own political class - that we are not, in fact, allowed to insist that we are members of a political class that really exists and has a right to organise and agitate on its own behalf - is one hundred percent in accordance with the mission statement of such a publication. In a world in which it has become socially gauche to tell women outright that feminism will be stigmatised and punished, a workaround has been found: narrow the definition of permissible feminism down such as to exclude almost all serious political activity, then call women who don't conform names.

Oh but it's not a slur, says the (soon to be rather beleaguered I think) intern in charge of Glamour's Twitter account. It's a description. Well, "fat" is a description too. "Ugly" is a description. "Manhater" is a description. "Spinster" is a description. "Nasty woman", of course, is a mere description. I don't know quite how to break it to people whose jobs, ostensibly, are to choose and use words, but: how you choose to describe someone matters. And you've chosen to describe women in the oldest, hoariest way possible: as hateful harridans, eldrich witches whose inattention to men and their needs makes them a legitimate target for both symbolic and actual violence.