If you wed yourself to the gender binary, you can't see past it

Regarding:

Claire Dederer. Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023.

Unlike people who transform their outrage into art, where it can be a "powerful and subtle hammer," Valerie Solanas

“is like a rat in a trap by the end. She understands, on some level, that material circumstances shape our lives, and must be altered if we are to improve the world. But she’s held back by the limits of her critique—she can’t see past gender. In this way, she exposes the limits of radical feminism. Seeing the world through a binary lens—men versus women—has its uses, but she can’t build a revolution out of that schism. The divide between male and female becomes a kind of spectacle she loses herself in.”

And by “taking us to the farthest extreme of a certain kind of radical feminism, she’s given us a glimpse of its limits. She sacrifices a true vision of liberation on the altar of gender essentialism.”

As Dederer phrases it: “She makes me wonder: How much is my preoccupation with the crimes of men blinkering me? What am I not seeing when I monster the monstrous men?

But as I’d put a slight twist or reemphasis on it: When we think in terms of a binary, and we preoccupy ourselves with monstering one side of it, we blinker ourselves. There will always be much that we’re not seeing.

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