Total ! Woman ! Victory ! | by Esmée Streachailt
Reportage | Free | They tried us. They failed.
You will see many TORCH! attendees reflecting on the conference in the coming days. A radfem meeting can't be that richly educational and personally encouraging, and under seige, and not get a lot of blog and social media space. Every woman will have a perspective I hope you seek out and metabolize, sisters & cousins (Search for TORCH!, TORCH, TWV, or TERF CON if you want to see what the opposition was up to). This was a small group, much smaller than anyone wanted thanks to the chaos of local TRAs and pimping expansionist activists, and it was maybe more powerful for the concentration. Here's the reflection I wrote on the train home.
Total Woman Victory and Distro Sisters have both released an official statements linked at the end of this post.
( ^-^)ノ∠※。.:*:・'°☆ ( ^-^)ノ∠※。.:*:・'°☆ ( ^-^)ノ∠※。.:*:・'°☆
It got physical right away. The TRAs who came to disrupt us harmed a boy who feels Implacable Books is his second home, maybe his safe one. He's OK now, but these men, well we all know these men. The store is as much a community center serving unhomed (mostly women that weekend) folks in Worcester as it is a bookstore and library. There's bread, hot chocolate, a microwave, toiletry sets, tampons all for free at a carefully tended display at the front of the shop. I loved how the the conference and the community made room for each other.
The bookstore offers possibly the most intentionally curated collections of radical leftist writing I have ever seen. And on the floor, organized in boxes, books and activities for young kids. The space is really designed for people to use and with all those dimensions in mind. It's also housed in a former car repair garage, home to two cats who spent the first day cursing our invasion and the next two sleeping in places that clearly demonstrated their disdain for our noise. This was the fourth possible location, and entirely too small to have held everyone who'd planned to come.
The university priced TORCH! out of their platform. Back up venues cancelled due to the pervasive threats of violences from the protestors. Each at the 11th hour, in a domino of growing anxiety. Attendees didn't even know where the locations would be other than the university, but as each was revealed, a mole in our midst must have tipped off the TRAs. So, having basically retreated to the bookstore, we looked at the reading room and the empty space (formerly car wash) next door and said, "We can do this here." Instantly women coordinated chairs and AP sets. By then we'd had a few hours of getting comfortable and acquainted as Sathi and small contingent tried their one last ditch venue, a local Catholic church basement, who turned us away. You see, the protestors and the alleged raper cum prostitution expansion advocate who had beset Sathi personally and the store for a month already still had a live threat out against us.
ICYMI:
Esmée Streachailt
You see, women handle shit. Most of the shit we handle is downstream of some male fuckery or other, so down to work we got. You know, as radical and grassroots feminists always have. The goal of this meeting was to REFOUND THE AUTONOMOUS WOMEN'S LIBERATION MOVEMENT, and it worked. We got our collective effervescence on while the men who had been tips from a mole prepared to obstruct us on Saturday. By 2PM Friday, we were up and running. Posters went up on walls. Chairs rented and brought from basements. Home cooked Indian fare made by Sathi's mother (who shall henceforth be known as a goddess) the bonding that only comes from physically making community took over and the scrappy festival went on.
Watching socials, Sathi and others noticed new posts from @snuff.the.torch coming out and realized even our last minute Signal chat was also compromised. Communication with women beyond the immediate cohort stopped. We all hated this for the women who could not come thanks to fears of doxxing and violence or who we missed. Safety become paramount, and Sathi was running logistics as everything unfolded nearly alone. Her calm, focus, and leadership through the complete reshaping of the con were admirable!!
By Friday's end we were concluding that REVOLUTION was the only way forward, and by Sunday vowing to do this again – hopefully with others taking on the massive logistical burdens.
But first we got down to teaching and learning from each other. We diced the CR sessions to focus on presentations and workshops. (I'd love to see the CR posters circulated for use by more women, they were fantastic!!)
Original Schedule of TORCH! 2026
Several generations of The Redstockings (Cathie Sarachild!!) presented a history of the movement and argument that a social wage, rather than family or individual, feels like the next step and their current focus in the push toward three of the fundamental elements of women's liberation: universal, high quality health care, universal childcare, and universal high quality education (all goals since the beginning to the WLM).
Af3irm: The Association of Feminists Fighting Fascism, Imperialism, Refeudalization, and Marginalization connected the historical dots between the many waves of imperialist and later anti-communist colonization & war, plus the regimes of debt demand like the WTO's Structural Adjustment Programs and service to capitalist extractivism that have entrenched legacies of prostitution throughout developing countries and the Global South.
I mean, the entire weekend was thick with importance and urgency. We had two rooms and still it was hard to choose between the knowledges on offer.
Prostitution Research & Education's Melissa Farley and survivor Cherie Jimenez added to the major theme of abolition with a focus on the need for and how to create exit pathways for prostituted women that support healing and transition to an alien kind of life. A key point in their session was a focus on the foster care to prostitution pipeline (our hearts broke and raged every couple of hours).
I spotlight these sessions to give a flavor of the seriousness of these women.
Like, you can see why an alleged raper and prostitution expansionist like Andrew Salzberg would feel put upon by our meeting, and then just naturally reach out and agitate the local TRAs to do some dirty work for him. But then, women gathering to teach & learn has incommoded men for a long time now. Even now, the Heritage Foundation and friends fund religious/political who seek the total political and social silence and servitude of women (Search 'women' in Project2025). Their position on Gender Identity Ideology and harm to children are the ONLY two positions they share with us, and they go much, much harder into the shaming, isolation, and terrorizing than radical feminists would ever imagine. We are here for the abolition of gender, not the criminalizing of way of being human. Heritage are the idea box or incubator for nearly every terror visited on the US right now from the shattering and terrorization of immigrant and undocumented communities to the razing of our forests and national monuments for extraction. They have no plans to take their jackboots off the gas or our necks. But I do not digress.
That was Day 1, which ran long as we were so obnoxiously delayed. So after a quick sandwich at Jersey Mike's ( shout out the #4!) with Preeti Paint and a DMV area radfem (so grateful to meet you all at last!!!). After that, I was for sleep. The body has to metabolize our challenges, the stakes in this nearly perma-fash country, and the menace of these men who can't stand women speaking to and about each other's lives.
Preeti's Willendorf Icon painting sits pride of place in my living room.
Day 2. The spaces are festooned with TORCH! banners and reorganized schedules! Here is not only a women's space, but one where no one came to beef or just consume an event. This was ours now and the opposite of alienation! These women ranged from an OG Redstocking to a 15 year old girl in all her fey finery. We were prostitution survivors, researchers, women of all ethnicities and sexualities, podcasters, scholars, immigrant support volunteers, women from North and South America. It wasn't every woman TWV hoped would be there, maybe a third really, but still so much of the movement was there to reground and deepen connection.
Between two sessions I had a little confab with Amy Sousa, for whose recovery from cancer I am deeply grateful! She asked about me and Medusa Rising, do we work with any other feminist organizations like WoLF for example? And why, no, I said (as readers of any of my work over that last six years will know), I'm more of a lone wolf operation allied with Women Create International, TWV, and some other radical feminists. I mean, she knows, right? My differences with them extend from strategy to some huge ideological divergences as well as of our readings of the radfem tradition. It's not that I'll trash anyone, it's just that I don't ignore what look like ... well, problems. She had a few good points to offer in some sessions on Saturday, mostly focused the "trans issue" – which was appropriate because they showed up with oh-so-male-domination behaviors that afternoon.
Because I know you're reading me now, hi-hi.
You see, it's not the trans- of the trans women that we always want to exclude. It's the male patterns of violence/domination some of you bring and, TBH, your community's refusal to deal with this bullshit. You keep affirming our reasons for protecting our spaces, our refuges and services that we built over decades with our own grassroots funding and hands-on effort.
Just stop doing what the worst hetero men do to women and children, including lie about us to the world, atone for past trespasses. Don't be Valerie: One male disrupter, Valerie Van-Dieman of Assigned Media, brought an electric power tool as a weapon against men standing between the mob and the entrance to the bookstore.
Listen, I hate what these christofash, tech-doom-accelerationists are doing to you, to us, to our documented and undocumented neighbors, to whole swathes of the Earth, and they will burn us all if they get the chance. We are all freaks, unhuman, and service-providers to them. We share our disposability.
For me, I would love to band together an beat this global fascist cabal in to the sea forever. But, trusting you is not on the menu yet. The official statements from TWV and Distro Sisters at the end of this post make very clear why.
The day started with quick planning convo where we quickly agreed to not engage, how to deploy the available energies people, and to carry on inside and look after each other. The whole 30 minutes of the ruckus, while some women defended the space, some police dealt with the criminal incidents outside, we kept on speaking to our experiences and analysis of just how much that experience is affected by men like these. We did not hesitate, and the goal of the disruptors never manifested. You see, dress or no dress, exogenous hormones or not, rage and intervention at women's speech and camaraderie is the oldest male supremacist bullshit in the book. Literally. Cf: The Code of Hammurabi.
Much of the day was dedicated to the many facets of the rape trade, from the very informed enjoyment by the buyers of the suffering they cause the women they harm and drain to the failures of most human rights enforcement and 'services' for these women and girls (groomed out of abusive homes, out of poverty, out of foster care, out of desperate bad luck). Mostly, what I gathered was this:
Being pimped is as deep a psychological attack as it is a physical one. The 'work' itself un-persons a woman, cores out the part of her that can care, speak, frame her experience in a way that lets her move against it. It hollows out the self in yourself. To get through each encounter, a woman has to bury that part, and whatever she doesn't hide, the buyer will drain out of her for the fun of watching it die. This is the testimony of survivors. Many women suffer repeated traumatic brain injuries that literally scramble the ability to formulate any plan for self-preservation other than compliance. Plan a new life in a whole new life-world in that condition? Unlikely.
What I learned listening to Melissa Farley and Cherri Jimenez is that survivors need 4-dimensional wrap-around programs, real pathways out that lead all the way to an exit and not to the doorsill. I say 4D because time is fundamental. It takes a long, long time to absorb enough care and tenderness to feel human again, to bring the mind to inhabit the body again. Imagine having PTSD, a TBI, and being thrown into navigating all the paperwork of a square life! It's overwhelming, it's unwelcoming, and no small part of why most women try to exit prostitution six times before they succeed, if they do.
You begin to see how a Strategic Intersectionality works, don't you? By Issues, Not Identities. By Conditions, Not Affirmations. Prostitution is an intersection of class, race, sexuality, health, colonialism, capitalism, and male violence. It's not an identity. Prostitution is a container-problem through which many social elements run. It's a material practice which those elements can be used to develop the antidote to the poison. I'm so glad these radical feminist women get that. SI is how effective work gets done. Take the example of the all the places you can find Jay Benke: Clever Human, LLC, The Network directory, Sex Trade Survivor Caucus, Elevate Academy, Oregon DOJ Human Trafficking Intervention Advisory Committee, the Blue Campaign, and the Traffic Law Center, among other groups focused on ending the purchase of human beings for sexual use.
That night, after much information and what sounded like a itinerant Ren Faire troupe until the thumping started, some us ate delicious Mexican food and Melissa Farley toasted Total ! Woman ! Victory ! because we had indeed won.
Day 3 was equally intense and amazing. Sasha Graham and I held workshops that dovetailed nicely on very clever things about the internet and organizing, and fighting back. Nevline Nnaji and Kadijah La Musa discussed their anthology, She Holds the Line: Black Women Speak on Gender Ideology. Boston Af3irm presented on 11 Principles to Live Under Authoritarianism. And, Rena Marie Grasso presented Women Under Occupation: A Radical Feminist Perspective on Palestine. I had fan-girled over women, I got fan-girled over by women, it was awesome! But then I was exhausted,in a state of introvert overwhelm, and really looking forward to using all the fresh Ticonderoga pencils Sathi gave out with so kind and adorable notebooks! They wound up on the floor, so many. Ticonderoga's are sacred!!!
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Esmée Streachailt is the founder/editor of Medusa Rising.
Reach out anytime for any reason: info@medusarising.org.
Find us everywhere you are with the social web: @gorgons@medusarising.org.
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