No sex, please; we’re Maoist!

Yup, this kind of thing’s definitely par for the course with western Maoists. I used to come into semi-regular contact with a bunch of them and they’ve definitely earned their reputation as being where you find the left’s real bizarro fringe. The weird, feverish anti-sex fixation and the absurd grandiosity where some rando’s Twitter account is the true mass workers’ party that will gloriously sweep to victory are pretty standard features. You find a lot of really strange conspiracy stuff and massive amounts of total nonsense that bears no relation to Mao, actual Maoist movements around the world, or anything else on the left as well and in my experience a sizeable chunk seem to be anti-vaxxers too. They’re very strange people.

You get a lot of extreme puritanism and asceticism with anarchists as well at the straight edge and primitivist ends, there’s quite a few of their endlessly-splitting microfactions who define absolutely any kind of pleasure or comfort at all as being bourgeois decadence that will be abolished after the revolution that their specific sect are going to pull off any day now. With them it seems to be part and parcel of a very distinct strain of machismo where anything other than violent purification is condemned as immoral, they’re also very big on revolution-as-ultraviolent-revenge-fantasy rhetoric where they constantly rant about how Any Day Now when the revolution comes they’re going to exterminate everyone who ever disagreed with them.

To be honest “tankie” at this point doesn’t have any real meaning beyond “anyone on the left I disagree with” (or sometimes just “anyone left of centre at all”), I mean I’ve heard people calling mild left-liberals “tankies” before. Weirdly it didn’t even refer to Stalinists in the first place but to uncritical western Brezhnev supporters, and Maoists of either the actual Mao-follower variety or the western crank variety wouldn’t count by either definition. Also it’s not much use as a term to describe hateful, toxic people on the left considering how so much of the most hateful, reactionary and violence-fetishising elements of the left define themselves obsessively by their opposition to and hatred of whoever they themselves categorise as “tankies” – for example the kind of anarchists I mentioned above who go around denouncing everyone outside their own sect as being “tankies”, including other anarchists, then following it up with declarations that they’re going to murder all those people and their families When The Revolution Comes™.

Most of this stuff isn’t any kind of actual leftist tendency so much as just what happens when the same kinds of people who become incels or join the alt-right end up developing the pseudo-politics that act as a social cover story for their toxic personalities in the context of a left-leaning university campus or Tumblr instead of Reddit or 4chan. The rest is literally just reactionary entryism, sometimes as a deliberate strategy but more often just as the result of people who hold reactionary views but want the social cachet of being seen as progressive trying to redwash those views to make them more acceptable.

@Pope of Discord

the result of people who hold reactionary views but want the social cachet of being seen as progressive trying to redwash those views to make them more acceptable.

I’ve also seen a similar phenomenon among anarcho primitivists, who often are very ableist but use the ideology to claim they’re not. They are fine with that in their planned world many disabled people would die or otherwise suffer. There’s also some transphobia inherent in that they would like to deny gender affirming medical treatment.

I think some of it comes from the collision of British and American usage too – here in the UK “tankie” started off being used to describe groups who followed the Soviet line on everything and more or less instantly ended up as the go-to insult slung back and forth between the three or four hundred different Trotskyite sects who dominated the British hard left until recently, while in the USA it’s just used as a synonym for “communist” in a political culture where accusing your opponent of communism has been the standard line of attack against anyone regardless of their actual position for generations to the point where even Donald Trump gets called one, and it all got kind of mashed together in a bunch of endlessly bickering online subcultures where a solid chunk of the people involved don’t know what they’re talking about with anything anyway.

In a society dominated by the patriarchy, sexual intercourse is unscientific and useless.

I refuse to have sex until it is scientific! Once we have crushed the patriarchy, all sexual relationships will be double-blind and meticulously analyzed for statistical significance.

Edit: Is there a better term in use than the rather ableist “double-blind”? I am not a scientist, and my cursory Google didn’t reveal anything.

Ot

I got my medical test done for my fertility. I was told if I were to stop taking my birth control and have unprotected sex and keep track of my fertile days i should be able to get pregnant. It’s still kind wishy washy if I’ll be able to carry to full term because I don’t think any doctor can guarantee that. I do have some genetic abnormalities i carry with me that I could give to a child like there is a higher chance from the average birth that my baby will be born blind or lose their sight later in life. But I already knew that one.

All in all the specialist I saw does not think the opioid abuse I use will effect my ability to get pregnant so long as I keep where I am at and stay sober and as healthy as I can be.

He also told me I would have to stop taking my ADHD medication during that time and I tell you that might be the hardest part of it. I can cope without medication but it becomes like 50% more difficult to get through day to day things.

@Cyborgette

I tend to see a lot of straight white male anarchists as authoritarian rebels – people who want to tear down The System because it places limits on their personal power. At the extreme, the “Anarchism means I can fuck who I want, when I want!” crowd.

I am not an anarchist, but I know a fair number of anarchist cishet men who fit this mold. It seems to be a way to live out their power fantasy and does carry a lot of “when men were men” overtones. To be fair, I also know some of LGBT anarchists as well, and they are different in that they don’t seem to be obsessed with the idea of power in an ideology that supposedly should have no power structure.

I recall one particularly frustrating online encounter with a dudebro anarchist where I asked where trans* folk would get HRT and surgery. He then regurgitated the typical transphobe/ignorant talking points about “you won’t have to have hormones or surgery because you can dress as you want in the future society.” Somehow I get the feeling he actually thought we would just be permanently closeted in his ideal society.

Yeah, in case you can’t tell, I’m kind of bitter and don’t trust straight men or Christians very much.

I feel you. Unfortunately, it’s not just Christians that can fall into this line of thought. I had (emphasis on the past tense) a friend who was Jewish yet bought into a lot of anarchist bro and “anti woke left” stuff.

As for my ideology, I don’t really like trying to modify it to fit one label, more I just have a mental list of things I believe and participate in politics accordingly.

@Masse_mysteria
I haven’t seen specifically Maoists engaging in this, but there is a certain type of ostensibly progressive dudebro who only professes those views because he thinks it will help him seduce progressive women. Maybe that’s what he’s talking about? Though most of the men doing this claim to be Marxists or some other ideology rather than Maoist.

@Lainy
It’s good to hear that you will probably be able to conceive. Best of luck with pregnancy.

As for your ADHD medication, is there a similar medication that would give the same benefits but could be used during pregnancy?

@Pope of Discord

The pseudo-feminist language they dress it up in always boils down to “I want women to be free to do whatever I tell them”.

I see the same thing in some non-anarchist men who claim to be feminists or minority allies, but really only want women or minorities to do things that please them. For example, Xanderhal et al claiming to be a trans* ally whilst attacking any trans* person who criticized him and showing some creepy chaser type behavior, and his whole harem scandal.

AnPrims were basically ground zero for the injection of TERFism into the left which is now the main foundation for most of the right-wing entryism and left-to-far-right conversion pipelines that have sprung up since.

AnPrims are behind TERFs? I didn’t realize that, but it doesn’t really surprise me. I had been under the impression that most TERFs were funded by the US religious right, through shell groups like WoLF or Hands Across the Aisle, which aren’t AnPrim to the best of my knowledge.

TERFs getting a foothold in the mainstream has definitely been the result of the religious right setting it up as a new culture war front since the anti-gay line lost political steam, but when it comes to the branch of it that exists in the nominal left, that was the result of AnPrim groups like Deep Green Resistance aggressively promoting it years ago. The religious right might deserve the “credit” for how much it’s taken off since on the right and centre, but AnPrims did a lot of the groundwork that eventually let it gain semi-respectability in parts of the left. The first time I actually came across TERFs at all was in the context of some DGR members about seven or eight years ago.

@ Viscaria:

Is there a better term in use than the rather ableist “double-blind”?

What makes that ableist?

Yes, Communist Party of India (Maoist) and Naxalite ideology is definitely a thing in radical-left politics in India. I don’t think they’re generally considered to involve any official commitment to celibacy, but that’s far from the most bizarre notion ever advocated by a CPI(M) zealot.

I may be missing something obvious here, but I don’t quite see what the rantings of this particular ideologue are doing in an anti-misogyny forum. He doesn’t seem to have any alignment with the “incel” movement or to be denigrating women in any way. No question that his commitment to “revolutionary” political celibacy seems absurdly far-out and irrational, but how is it misogynist?

@Viscaria: I have seen “mutually anonymous review” proposed as an alternative to “double blind review” in peer-review processes. I don’t know what equivalent expression might be proposed, or is currently in use, for the concept of masking key information from participants and/or researchers and/or third parties in conducting medical studies.