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An App of Her Own: Sall Grover and ALL Women Won’t Justify Our Class Rights Based on Mens’ Bullshit Anymore
- female.liberation
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
I want my female-only space cause I said so
I didn’t learn of Sall Grover’s app “Giggle” until it was already destroyed by one man with the help of the male-controlled legal system. Being American and within male culture-centered leftist echo chambers, my media silos prevented me from knowing about this story until after the fact. I’m just grateful I learned about it at all. Each country’s government tries to silo women from knowing how male culture is targeting fellow women around the world. Sall Grover and her app were the “final straw that broke the camel’s back,” allowing me to fully see the attack on female sovereignty.
When I think about Giggle, I mourn the loss of something that never quite existed. I daydream about the app, imagining new ways to connect with fellow radical feminists, lesbian women, and be amongst those who share the material reality and culture of being female. I’ve been yearning for an online space of our own. Just for women. Period. Full Stop. I’ve even dreamt up my own space for the Metaverse. What drew me to Sall so deeply was that she is a woman in tech; someone who inspires me. Neither Sall, I, nor any woman owes any reasons or explanations for wanting female-only spaces to exist. Yet, it feels like women are pushed to justify our needs with endless examples, and we must always include males’ violence. Male culture creates unwritten rules that women must follow if we want even the consideration of being heard. That first step of dismantling male supremacy—consideration—is what we’ve been fighting for, for centuries.
Male Culture’s Justifications’ Rulebook for Women and Girls:*
Women must justify our right to exist freely
Women must justify our needs as they relate to males
Women must disclose stories of male violence for the consideration to be heard
Women must connect our need for privacy to bodily exposure
Women must hyperfocus on the physical differences between male and female, through the false lens of phallocentrism
*Notice that these rules are female-only, the ultimate in males’ gaslighting
Now, all these realities—male violence, bodily exposure, sex differences—are sound, valid, and necessary discussions for women to have. What’s grossly unfair is that women have to reveal any of this for access to freedom of assembly; a right every other demographic has, except the female-sex class. This is where the argument should end. But it doesn’t due to males’ goal of subjugating women and girls. So we’re coerced to give the details of every depraved thing the male-sex class has inflicted upon us, and even then, it’s never enough. It seems as if these males just want to force us to disclose as another form of male supremacist power and control. After decades of disclosures, and a mass movement of women and girls disclosing rape through #MeToo, it’s apparent that the issue isn’t a lack of exposing males’ violence. The issue returns to the reality that women and girls are treated as subhuman by men and boys. Women and girls don’t even get access to the right to be heard. Both the “Me Too Movement” and “Let Women Speak” rallies are real-world case studies to prove this. Tarana Burke started #MeToo specifically to give voice to African American girls who were victims of male violence. Kellie-Jay Keen started #LetWomenSpeak specifically to give voice to transgender-critical women who were victims of male violence. In both cases, the women and girls most targeted by male violence are the ones who are most silenced and forgotten. This is not a coincidence. This is male supremacy at work. Even an undergrad sociology student could put these pieces of data together. You don’t even need a high school education to do that. Women and girls around the globe at all levels of expertise have been sharing this data analysis for too many decades. Women and girls are tired of sharing their valid fears of men and boys to justify their needs. On the other side of this request for female-only space is something even more important. Female Joy. We never wanted to talk about violence, but we do so because males continually inflict it. We just want to be free to grow. That’s it. But men and boys won’t let us.
According to countless studies and women and girls themselves, we thrive in a multitude of ways in female-only spaces. In other words, spaces free from men and boys. We learn better, collaborate better, can operate from a more relaxed mindset, have increased self-esteem and creativity, and perform better at the tasks at hand. Female-only spaces are in no way utopias; they’re simply necessary to provide women and girls with their own spaces, their right to sovereignty. They’re also a respite in a world controlled by male culture. Men and boys talk over each other, and they talk over women and girls. They hog space, bully, and sow discord through communication. In all my years of being a leader, teacher, and an auntie, it’s boys and men who disproportionately try to disrupt cooperative group dynamics, are poor sports, and try to take over a space because they need to be the center of attention. One of the reasons women wanted to keep chess separated by sex is because of the verbal atmosphere created by men. But when we tried to speak up, men retaliated by trying to gaslight us with a false equivalence between a non-contact game like chess versus contact games like sports. We were questioned on our abilities and intelligence because we said we need our own divisions. Every girl and woman has a story of being around boys or men who created hostile atmospheres. What gets rebranded as “locker room talk” is just sexism and misogyny; disrespectful, bullying words aimed at denigrating women and girls. And it's been happening for centuries by both men and boys. The issues of male culture can’t be pinned solely on the current digital landscape. It’s not just Andrew Tate and “porn” to blame. This goes back to papyrus and feather. To stone tablets. Males have tried to control women and girls in every way and every space.
A male doesn’t have to put his hands on you to violate your space. Every day, women and girls deal with the assault of words, leers, and intimidation; we learn to shrink to survive. When we enter female spaces, we unclench, we stand tall, head up, and let our hair down. Even my buzzed cut hair seems to unfurl and relax. We might disagree with women and girls in these spaces, but we are free from males and their culture that pushes passive-aggressiveness, discriminatory hierarchies, hostile competition, and other notions that are counter to female culture. We are finally given space to self-define and strengthen our female culture. Though I do fear that if we can’t kill male supremacy, even girls and women will further adopt the broken male culture. There’s already proof of this phenomenon happening to women and girls in cases such as female-to-female violence; despite our sex differences, culture is still learned, and male-centered culture teaches entitlement and violence to everyone.
The most important aspect of how women and girls have better outcomes in female-only spaces is simply being able to share in different parts of our material reality, culture, and joy. Just as I have been invited to People of Color-only spaces, Hindu-only spaces, Asian-only spaces, 40+-only spaces, and so on, I want to be able to enjoy female-only spaces. These other demographic spaces were created not solely because of a fear of violence, but equally for the desire to have a community of shared realities and cultures; the desire for self-determined joy. Yet there’s no mass male protest against these demographic-specific spaces. There absolutely are examples of discrimination and harassment, such as white male supremacists who will rant about people of color-only spaces and sometimes attempt to disrupt them. But they’re not showing up and demanding entry on a similar systemic scale. I hesitate to compare different forms of oppression since mostly it becomes a comparison of apples to oranges, yet I can’t help but notice these glaring contradictions. Why is everyone allowed access to the joys of shared camaraderie through association, self-determination, freedom of assembly, and sovereignty, except women and girls? Where is our personhood? Why is it only women and girls who have to use the justification of threats to our safety in order to advocate for our access to separate spaces based on our femaleness? Why is it such that we simultaneously must justify our rights based on the threat of male violence, but then that very threat of men and boys is ignored? Why does my dignity only count in relation to a male and his penis? Where’s the dignity for my joy, my thriving, my self-discovery as a member of the female sex-class? I’m so exhausted of the over-exaggeration that this is only about a man or boy having a penis. I’m so fucking sick and tired of hearing about fucking penises. Can’t a lesbian woman be free from male’s obsession with their male genitalia? As our sister Amanda Kovattana brilliantly put it, “Why can’t I, as a lesbian, have a dick-free space?” Can we women enjoy our pussy power in peace? No doubt males do wield their genitalia as a weapon, and we rightly fear that. We have centuries of documentation to prove this tactic. But women don’t separate men from their penises. We see them as embodied human beings. Women know even the castrated male still has a mouth, thoughts, words, hands, and actions that can harm. He can still take away female sovereignty in so very many ways. Just a male’s mere presence means I’m not allowed to be amongst fellow women alone, and that he will disregard my boundaries and desire for my right to define female joy, even the word itself. His presence is what I’m asking to be free from. Why can’t he accept that this isn’t about him? It’s about us–women and girls. It only becomes about him when he ignores our boundaries and our rights.
To paraphrase Sall Grover, we want our female-only spaces because we fucking want them. Because we said so. Because that is equal treatment.
INSERT VIDEO HERE
Notice that once you look past Judith Butler’s smugness, she sounds like a woman trying to convince herself that males’ culture isn’t rooted in supremacism and violence. She’s the only one in this conversation trying to disembody humans from their genitalia. Radical feminists ask to see women and men as full embodied beings. That means that a man or boy, his whole body, his thoughts, and his penis and scrotum, are one entity. Not something a man or boy can philosophically or surgically remove to escape his maleness or his part in male culture. Women also can’t escape their femaleness through such methods. Judith Butler’s analysis ends with saying that we’re separate from our genitalia, that we’re not embodied. This is a disservice to women and girls. It’s also a disservice to any woman or man who is contemplating body modification. Radical feminists want such individuals to get the support services they need to accept themselves. Not chop themselves up into disembodied parts as Judith Butler attempts. I hope one day she will see the flaws in her analysis. I also hope she will see the obvious truth in this clip; she does acknowledge the material reality of men and boys, as she uses the words “men,” “boys,” and “sons” to discuss those who have “penises.” Somewhere, under her denial, she can’t stop the truth from leaking out. It’s only at the end of the clip that she reframes and says “those who do have penises…men, women, non-binary people” as if she realized that she had broken character. If she truly did believe humans are separate from their genitalia, then she would have said the words “son, daughter, boy, girl, man, woman, non-binary” in relation to the word “penis” throughout her response. But she didn’t do that. Because the material reality of our embodied sex can’t be escaped, not even by the best circle-talkers. I don’t point this out as a jab. But as a way for us to see how difficult it is to follow this logic or use it in speech, even for someone as well-versed in it as Judith Butler. I practiced it for years, and I still couldn’t get it down. Because it was going against my own logic.
A wonderful interview of Sall Grover conducted by Julie Bindel. Woman Power woohoo, let’s go!!!
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