timberwraith
@FlashMobOfOne It was one of those things that cultural subgroups do as an aspect of group identity formation. Different subculture from the mainstream with a different set of linguistic quirks that serve as a way of drawing social and cultural boundaries. Humans do this. All the time. It's a thing.
This was kind of an amusingly awkward variant that opened itself up to a fair amount of ridicule but it did perform a function for a subculture of a certain era.
timberwraith
And yes, they actually spelled women with a "y" in the last syllable of "Womyn's" in the festival's name. That wasn't me doing satire.
timberwraith
I want to be clear that I find phrases like "masculine energy" and "feminine energy" to be massive eye-rolling bullshit terms.
They're contrived categories bound in the whims of whatever the current era defines as "acceptable" and "normal" for a gender binary that is equally as contrived.
There are people, there are myriad behaviors that people engage in, and then there are the simplistic categories that humans shove EVERYTHING into.
Just be yourself and fuck the socially derived categories.
timberwraith
Plus, "masculine energy" is a massive trigger for me left over from the days of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival which was a trans-exclusionary feminist gathering which supposedly included all women but very actively opposed trans women from participating.
Trans women were described as having too much "masculine energy" to be considered to be safe for cis women to spend time around in a festival that was declared to be a "safe space for women."
What a bigoted mess.
timberwraith
@FlashMobOfOne Having once been a part of the feminist/women's community who used that language in the 1990s, I can assure you that most of us did not expect outsiders to use or understand alternate spellings of "woman" and "women." That expectation was not common.
Clifton Royston
Back then I found that it was perfectly possible to have lovely conversations with a number of dedicated lesbian separatist feminists - the ones who wanted to establish a separate society without men - because they had nothing against men as people, only against socially "masculine" behavior.
Even back then, I was able to understand the difference and not take it as a personal attack, and for them that made it clear enough that I wasn't invested in it.
Clifton Royston
I remember from the late '70s and my lesbian friends then, that "wimmin" was another popular alternative. The idea of course was to bypass the linguistic implication that woman and women are subcategories of man and men.
Spelling it womyn or wimmin isn't and wasn't the problem, it was identifying physical gender as the source of our societal "masculinity" problems.
That both interferes with recognizing men as its other victims, and promotes "gendered" exclusion.
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