Radical Feminism: Discuss

No where have I said , nor do I believe that I have inferred, that I believe feminists desire to see women gain equality at the expense of men. The very word equality precludes this. Femenism grates against my humanism not because it wants to overtake men, but because its perspective on society seems no longer relevant, if it ever was. It seems far better to fight for the equality of humanity and human rights as a collective whole, than fighting for the rights of one group at a time.

The problems facing society today are largely not of gender but of class and economics. The barriers facing middle class women in western society are no greater than those facing men, this is a very general statement, but broadly it's true and the middle classes and up have the best access to the mechanisms designed to rectify any imbalances. I don't really see many problems here. OK so there are inequalities but over time these are ironing themselves, out, there will never be 50:50 parity in all areas of life but broadly this will be the case (I'm talking about maybe 60% of care workers being men whilst 60% of teachers being women, that sort of thing). There's some tidying to do, a bit more paternity leave here, a bit more support for working mothers there.

I'll get onto the cultural points in a bit.

As we cast down the social spectrum the problems faced aren't really gender specific, its shit weather you're male, female, black or white society needs to solve the socio -economic problems. Socio-Economic oppression encompasses all others. its not being mono-focused at all. If you look at where racial and sexual inequality is at its worst it is at the bottom. Solving socio-economic problems is going to go a long way to alleviating the situation of the most oppressed women in society.

One of the oft cited examples is of academic achievement. In the UK girls do better than boys at the age of 16 but then boys do better at 18 and at university. However, if one looks at the statistics, one sees that although this is true the difference in achievement between kids of different socio-economic backgrounds is far greater than any gender differences. How well you do in society comes down to money and that's a much bigger inequality than anything brought on by gender or race.

Aside from this we have the whole problem of gender in culture.

The biggest problem being that, after a little improvement in the 80s and early 90s comodification and objectification of women is now worse than ever. What's more it's extending to men in both similar and different ways. Now far be it from me to say that the male form is exploited in the same way or as mercilessly as the female form but it is there and its growing. Its not just about sex and bodies, some people are willing to allow access to every minute aspect of there life just to gain the faint hope of fame and fortune. The lure for women (and for men) is economic (and to a certain extent narcissistic), the rewards can be high if you're lucky. If you're unlucky the price can be high.

However these problems are again best tackled from a humanist rather than feminist stand point. Concentration on the objectification of women leaves out the fact that the objectification of men is growing quietly in the background. Much better to fight the base comodification of human existence, and experience from a position of unity.

Men and women aren't all that different and the male and female experience in modern society is not all that different. To answer Orbits, point above, it's just as hard growing up a boy as it is growing up a girl,soem experiences may differ, but are they all that different?

(((((((a little point to answer

I've got no problems with women only classes etc. In fact I've even taught some myself (Axing, (Chopping Wood)). It can be highly valuable to learn something in the absence of people who think they know what they are doing (but more often than not, don't).)))))))

I do apologise for the rambling and incoherent nature of this post. i had it all sorted out in my head as i was walking round london this morning but I was on my way to buy a new notebook so I neglected to write any of it down.

i disagree with this. i think it is important for politics to be micro and incremental, rather than overaching and universalist. also, specificities provide relevance for people, and meaning, and context, and something peple can relate to

i have no idea why you are suggesting that women and men face very little difference in the workplace, it makes me wonder if you have ever worked in the real world, the institutional sexism that keeps many professions overwhelmingly male is plain to see, especially if you work for a company and look who gets hired for what.

i dont agree with fighting the whole battle at once, politics is incremental and different people need to improved different aspects. fragmentation of politics neednt be a bad thing

I can't believe no one picked up on this... this piece o' post-feminist sloganeering actually comes from Billie Piper.

I would love it if I had more time right now, because then I could contribute something good to this thread, but as things are I'll just point out that Andrea Dworkin is incredibly, stupidly myopic and is only saved from her otherwise irredeemable bintishness by not being Catherine MacKinnon, and that emphasising difference and victimhood is a dead-end way to ultimately self-defeating self-ghettoisation.

I love my sisters and want to stick by them, but I also love my brothers too and also want to stick by them. I am a humanist. I want fairness for ALL and victimhood for NONE.

cultural feminism: can be utopian or liberal (in the classic sense, change within the existing social system is possible). if only you change our culture so that things are not constructed in such a violent, male-centered, war-culture way then all people would be liberated from chains that bind them. If government culture were changed to emphasize consensus decisionmaking rather than power and hierarchy; if single mothers were given social support instead of being branded sluts and welfare queens etc. A change in the culture, in how we look at things, construct things, think of things.

In terms of RG, mei, the separatist argument has been done to death, and there are several different takes on it. You can see the usenet type arguments by googling for Riot Grrrl chapters and discussion boards on the web. I really don't want to get into it here, it's just boring for me in a been, there, done that a million times kinda way, and no i'm not being elitist i'm just being honest and no i am not trying to put anyone down.

Ed, your position that women really don't have it much worse than men is completely mental. Men suffer from the normative nature of sexual roles, but women's suffering and oppression is still there. Look at any serious study of violence within relationships, look at any study on rape, on murder in the home, and it is unmistakeable that feminism has many battles still to fight and win. The fact that poverty is a bad thing does not mean that women don't have plenty of extra ground to gain.

saying you're more interested in issue a than issue b is one thing, but denying that issue b even exists and that issue a is the only one anyone should care is so arrogant and naive.

-- Orbit (cstarrcstar...), September 2nd, 2003.

So what should I do in this particular case?

Liek to add my support for the idea that feminism is not about gaining equality for women by standing on the heads of other groups that are discriminated against. It's just saying this is one issue I can identify and wish to address.

and bell hooks is TOP, I have always loved her writing, I will look up Dorothy Smith when I find the time..!

bell hooks is ace, i'm also big on judith butler, elizabeth grosz, coco fusco (who is an incredible performance artist), susan hekman, judith halberstam, and more specialised ones such as marcia citron (for music) and griselda pollock (for art history.)

[& engels' work was based on marx & they both paid tribute to fourier for saying that you could judge the level of a society by the condition of women]

krupskaya did too and she was great if particularly bonkers. but, y'know, provocatively so. i mean she was like valerie solanis without the *actual* man-hating and without the actually being literally bonkers bit. (which perhaps went together)

Mei regarding debates on separatism, you can literally Google for Riot Grrrl or Riot Grrrl yahoo groups and find the archives of these discussions. A brief sketch of them follows.

Please don't ask me to "defend" this, as I am just laying out the territory here, not stating a position. The separatist arguments boil down to this:

1. Separatism (along either gender or racial lines) is necessary because men (white people as a group for the racial version) will NEVER listen to women's voices, will NEVER genuinely allow them a part in shaping society, NEVER allow women into the old boys' network, NEVER take women nor their concerns seriously. You could call it utopian, and things like the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival are experiments in "what *would* a society that was centered on women's concerns and values look like?"

2. Separatism as a necessary step, not necessarily a permanent one: this view says that women have been so injured and silenced that they need a place to heal and deal with their own internal sexism/racism before moving forward in coalition with others. For example, it does no good for woman to talk about her rape experience if some guy in the back is going to say "what were you wearing?", which makes it a defensive and not a healing experience. Women can't work on the issues that are specific to them--for example feeling entitled to voice an opinion, feeling entitled to transgress the "whore (i'll show you my tits, i'm liberated!) / madonna (i'm sweet and emotional and supportive)" stereotypes that people use all kinds of rewards and sanctions to keep them into. This separatism is seen as necessary and temporary consciousness-raising and healing.

3. Selective separatism: when events and organizations are structured so that women get to experience the roles that they are largely left out of: decisionmaking and learning technical skills (like say running a sound board) and guys can participate in certain events but cannot run things and can't be in sensitive workshops or meetings that involve issues that women want to discuss without men telling them "what's the big deal", "prove it", "get over it", or having guys take over, interrupt and do all the other things that they have been socialized to do.

4. Feminist Inclusionist organizations and events where men and women work together in varying states of contention and chaos.

I should also throw in here that "false conscioussness" is also a big issue for stirring usenet-type debates. Saying you are a feminist doesn't make you one; being a woman doesn't make you one. Being a feminist is a political decision and it means more than "i like myself". This one is such a usenet-flame issue that I don't even want to bring it up, but it has to be mentioned in the same breath with separatism because it needs to be pointed out that being a woman doesn't mean you have a feminist political consciousness, just like being a lesbian doesn't mean you have a lesbian-feminist political conscioussness (see Arlene Stein for more on that).

A caveat: I am a sociologist who did a dissertation that crossed fields: social movements, gender, culture, and music. My take on all of this is based on very different concerns and literature than people who are coming from a largely film/literature/women's studies per se perspective. In academic feminism, women's studies is a bit different from feminist sociology so you might see me gloss over some stuff that you would expect to see here--it's not that I don't know about it, but in what I did I was speaking to a different literature.

Ok, well I think I caught up on everything I was supposed to catch up on!

I didn't go to the drumming workshop, or even try.

It was limited to ten people for logistical reasons so it was totally fair to limit it to girls/ladies/whatever because that's who the whole event was primarily for.

Hope there's another ladyfest sometime soon around here.

On the first day when we turned up there was nothing much going on so me and my 3 friends went to a talk "Women, conflict and resistance". None of us are particularly political but I enjoyed the talk/discussion and the enthusiasm of the speakers. It's the first talk of that kind I'd ever been to (kind of a rally almost) and I was fascinated by how it proceeded, with the talkers and audience cooperating so well and being generally supportive of each other.

Then after about twenty minutes I was looking around at the audiences' faces (I like to see the reactions wherever it is, rock concert, classroom, wherever) and I realised that I was the only man there out of 40 or 50 people. It wasn't just the fact that I happened to be the only male that made me stick out a bit, if this had been somewhere else it would have just been an odd coincidence, but here the event was set up for women and the speakers were obviously used to mainly addressing women and all the things they were saying played off male roles against female ones - eg they were talking about being all female groups of protesters in Israel, about the women of Greenham common and about women being paid for the housework they do and about a women's strike day.

After I realised this I started to think a little differently about why the whole event was run as it was. For example, as usual in public spaces people from the audience were not greatly forthcoming during the question and answer section. I've got over that in the last year because I've had to, being a teacher. I had lots of questions but I only asked a couple because I didn't want to dominate things in any way - I would never feel like that normally, I'm not a very 'manly' man and don't usually dominate _anything_, but I'm naturally very inquisitive. I made sure I wasn't going to interrupt anyone else before asking my questions.

One thing I asked was about one speaker's use of the word 'censored', she said that every time they tried to get their cause covered in the media they were 'censored'. It wasn't a particularly controversial cause so I asked who had censored them and it turns out that she meant editors weren't interested largely because they thought their readers wouldn't be.
To me that's a very different problem to censorship and her answer did leave me curious as to why no one had pointed this out to her before. I think maybe that without males around to intimidate/dominate/out-shout the women (I'm not convinced that is what happens, but it seems to be an axiom of ladyfest) it just ends up that the most bossy women assume that role.

Afterwards my 3 friends, all women, said that every time one speaker in particular mentioned men she looked at me, as if she was addressing me directly, as if I somehow represented all men. I hadn't noticed it really. At one point she said something about women and the caring professions and tacked something on the end like '...of course men do some valuable work in this area too...' then something about gay men. I got the impression that this was added for my benefit. Maybe she assumed I was gay (I'm not) because I was there at all.

It was very nice being among such a high proportion of women, and I always felt welcomed.
I'll try to write more later.

anybody ever read any Luce Irigaray or Monique Wittig? where is a good place to start, i will admit i am completely clueless on this except for parts of where they have influenced Butler/Pollock etc.

irigaray - may as well start with 'this sex which is not one'. dunno wittig

http://tshirthell.vo.llnwd.net/e1/shirts/products/a1199/a1199_bm.gif

Sorry, I've nothing else to add to this conversation.

Je, Tu, Nous is the one on Routledge classics. Kinda sounds like it might be REALLY about French.

read Irrigary in school like 20 years ago and have vague memories of digging it but that's all I got

not sure where to put this but my office had a nice cathartic moment with this today

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqHYzYn3WZw

Radical feminism has come to be identified or usually aligned with the gender critical movement. The UK in particular seems to be very much thus.

Probably because "radical feminism" is part of the phrase "gender critical" is a euphemism for...

haven't heard the phrase gender critical before, but I like it

no, you're not supposed to

i mean unless you wanna be history's greatest monster who is only defending a principled position for the sake of women and female-only spaces, then you're supposed to

ok :)