I am writing an article

[Sasha]

on the failure (or success) of radical feminism.  I would like to have your input on how successful or not it has been thus far, of where you expect it to go, and of improvements  you would like to see in theory or practice.

Please.

[Tigs]

ooh, ooh, I'd love to talk about this, but I'll have to think.

Sounds cool though.  I keep getting warned off writing about gender (I'm a political theorist and in Political Science the party line is: gender or theory, do both and you'll never get a job).

I have some theory things I'm thinking about, particularly with the problem of postmodern analysis and politics, but I'm not all that well-read in the area.

Anyway, I'll think about it and post something tomorrow or Thursday.  I'd love to hear which direction you're moving with all this.

[Nausicaa]

Frankly I think radical feminism will never become a widespread ideology. That's because it incorporates many general ideas about society's structure together with the initial core idea of equality for women. Many people support the latter idea (whatever meaning they actually put into it), but how many of those people also think that society is rotten to the core and needs to be rebuilt by some drastic means ("the revolution")? Really, most people are relatively comfortable in today's society and don't dream about drastic reform. To support such ideology one generally has to be pretty unsatisfied with his personal life and/or feel really out of place in today's society for whatever reason. Such people are material for revolutions and consumers of radical ideologies of whatever kind. But there aren't too many women like this right now.

Disclaimer: I don't consider myself a radical feminist after learning it more in depth, partly from this board. It's realy not my cup of tea, so consider it as an ousider input :-)

Edited to correct english, LOL   

[Jezebella]

Sasha, do you even have a working definition of "radical feminism"?  I can't quite figure out what it might be.  Recent kerfuffles here (which Shall Not Be Named) have made it clear that I am not in possession of a working definition that separates "feminism" from "radical feminism."  I am quite certain that I am not radical enough for many radfems, but by the standards of my particular location IRL, I'm beyond radical.   

It's kind of hard to assimilate and figure out what the spectrum is and whether there is a clear dividing line.     

Help? 

[Nausicaa]

Jezebella, I don't think it's really about being radical enough, but more of having some particular outlook on the issue of women status in society(which cannot be defined in any exact way, of course, but I believe can be gleamed from speaking with radfems/radfem literature). I can tell you that I wasn't able to understand if I'm a "radical feminist" from reading short descriptions of the concept elsewere. But after coming to this board and reading for some time I understood that there simply isn't to much common ground between me and people here (who do represent the ideology pretty well, I guess). This realization was quite shocking, as I also considered myself pretty "radical". There are different kinds of "radical", I suppose :-)

[funambulator]

It seems like there's the traditional school of thought put forth by radical feminist authors and scholars, which is generally accepted as the radfem canon, and then there are the positions of women who consider themselves radical feminists.  And of course, their positions are as varied as they are.

[Jezebella]

I guess I'm not clear on which canonical feminist authors are "radical" and which are "merely" feminist.  (as if being feminist isn't radical enough....)

[Sasha]

It is my personal opinion, shared by some and not shared by others, that the distinction between radical feminism and feminism without the modifier (what a convoluted sentence this is becoming) is about changing the structure of the social system v. making changes within the existing system. 

In my view the radical feminist believes that gradual change within the existing system will never represent real change because the basis of the system is flawed -- some might say patriarchial.  Feminists (without the modifier) are seeking equality, fairness, and the rest of a list too long for this place but believe that our current system is solid, such changes can be made within the current system, and that those changes will bring about sex equality.

I'd like to hear other opinions though.  (I'm responding to the Help? request by Jezebella.)

[Nausicaa]

to Sasha,
I think it's a good distinction, not sure if indeed it's accurate. To me (however scarce my knowlege about the radical feminism) it seems like it is.

But what do you mean by "the current system"? Which things in your (or radical feminism(?)) opinion should be changed?

[Vera]

In my view the radical feminist believes that gradual change within the existing system will never represent real change because the basis of the system is flawed -- some might say patriarchal.  Feminists (without the modifier) are seeking equality, fairness, and the rest of a list too long for this place but believe that our current system is solid, such changes can be made within the current system, and that those changes will bring about sex equality.

This is more or less my definition, too. I see myself as a radical feminist because I do not accept the idea that it's possible to achieve equality for women within the current system in place anywhere on the planet. I see the radical feminist struggle as a struggle not so much for equality as for personhood. The culture in which we are all inculcated from birth teaches us that the default human is MALE; females are not as truly and fully human as males. It is hard to accept that we must live out our lives in a system that teaches this and where most people believe it, but there it is.

The job of radical feminism is find ways to expose the patriarchy and make obvious to everyone what is already obvious to us: that the violent dominance hierarchy that is the patriarchy has got to go.

The work of demanding equal pay, equal access to resources, reproductive freedom, [insert additional just demands here] must also be done. But it's not enough.

And thinking that women can be equal within the current system once we've got enough female CEOs and Senators is, I believe, barking up the wrong tree. That's the liberal tree; I'm in the radical one.

(Edited to remove corrections apparently inserted by spell checker ?!.)

[Jack-Booted Thug]

Radical feminism has failed to "catch on" in the mainstream (some might say, predictably) but one must consider that radical feminism had its genesis in consciousness-raising groups and collectives - perhaps that ethos was what Twisty intended when creating this forum. Unfortunately, the type of collective action that led to the picketing of the Miss America pageant (which featured a giant sheep around which women chanted, "See them bleat and strut their meat!") is no more. If this sounds like a longing for the good ol' days, it is.

Working on a university campus has disheartened me: the Stepford Sluts reign supreme. The strictures patriarchy places on these girls seem to have tightened severely, but they are ignorant. Some tell me, "I can do what I want!" I know that some of this foolish attitude is a function of youth: "I'm invincible!" but consciousness-raising is definitely in order, though perhaps impossible to achieve. I think that Gail Dines describes the situation very well in terms of moving from a print media to a visual media. It is hard to counter the visual message looking out from every source. Many young people cannot be bothered to attend to what doesn't come easily. A concrete example of what I'm attempting to describe: - skip to next paragraph now if you do not possess a strong stomach - I go into an exam room where a new Army enlistee tells me that she has a "stuck tampon" that she can't get out. It seems that the situation came about because her boyfriend "just couldn't stop."  I asked, "Don't you have a right to ask him to stop? This is your body we're talking about." She just shrugs. When I put her on the exam table, I discover that boyfriend rammed the tampon into the girl's uterus. No wonder she couldn't fish it out! I said, "Weren't you in pain while he was humping away?" She said that indeed she found it painful. "Why did you not ask him to stop?" She shrugged. I gave her a stern lecture on toxic shock syndrome, as well as telling her that she had better learn quickly to stand up to males if she wanted to survive the military culture. She shrugged and reported me to the CO for "coming on to her." So many consciousnesses seem resistant to raising, even with a crane (or with ring forceps).

My response has been to retreat to my own collective. None of us has much success with consciousness-raising in the wider world, but I think our time will come again.

[Jezebella]

JBT, I thought I had a strong stomach, so I read your story.  My stomach is not as strong as I think it is.  It just kills me that the young woman so casually shrugged off that violation.  By her "boyfriend."

[Jack-Booted Thug]

I'm just lucky that the nurse who was assisting me backed me up by telling our commanding officer that I did not "come on" to the patient. Here I was, trying to convince this 18 year old that she has a right to her own body. In my wildest dreams, I could not have conceived of so much ground lost. I would like to believe that she was a one-off, but no, I see her clueless compatriots daily - these fluttery, slutty, giggly children literally competing for male attention. When I'm playing librarian [I trained as a librarian before med school; now I'm doing it part-time for medical insurance. You would think that by providing my services to the DoD, they would give me coverage, but nooo], I've sometimes asked these young women, "What do you win if you get his attention?" Shrug. They lack even the vocabulary to express what is happening to them. They don't even say, "I'm not a feminist, but..." There is no longer a "but."

[Q Grrl]

I feel like crying now. 

But how 'bout her conflation of your criticism of her boyfriend raping her with you being a dyke because you weren't lock-step down with her boy's sexuality/actions?  How scary is that?  You must be a dyke, not because of your relation to other women, but because of your criticism of men.  Damn.


Weird. "dyke" isn't in the spell check.

Now I'm really depressed.

[srastro]

I've read this thread several times and thought very hard about Sasha's question, and now I'm finally ready to try my hand at answering it.  I'm going to start first with feminism, then proceed to radical feminism, as defined by Vera and Sasha.

I don't like to think of feminism itself as having failed, because then the blame falls on feminists.  My conception is of a society that has failed to keep up with feminism; to respond to women's just demands.

Betty Friedan and other second-wave leaders were unhappy with radical feminism.  They thought the radicals were moving away from the real work of feminism; they were taking on porn and sexual violence with "Take Back the Night," when the battles for equal pay, access to credit, and safe, legal abortion were far from won.  (Here I'm paraphrasing The Second Stage as I remember it.)  Friedan and her compatriots thought women should unite against economic injustice and leave the messy world of bedroom politics alone.  It's certainly easier to talk to Congress about equal pay than domestic violence.

I think I understand where these women were coming from.  They wanted real policy change, and to a certain degree, they got it, but not enough.  Had Richard Nixon and his minions not fought the feminists at every opportunity, had full economic equality for women been won, had the ERA passed, we would be living in a very different society.  The patriarchy would still be there, but would-be exploiters of women would fear the power of women's wallets and edit themselves.  As I see it, this was the promise of non-radical, second-wave feminism: a world where the full personhood of women was reflected in their access to all the opportunities men have.  In the US, access to opportunity is determined by economic status, so feminists fought for women to have economic and political power.

Unfortunately, the patriarchy is not just reflected in economics and politics--it lives in the minds of all human beings and infests personal relationships.  The radicals realized that they were dealing with much more than lack of economic power.  It's great for women to become doctors and lawyers, but what if they still come home to abusive husbands?  Personal degradation is alive and well, and the systematic devaluing of women in private life most definitely inhibits our ability to function fully in the public sphere.  So the radicals were right--the personal is political.

In fact, the 1970s radfem focus on pornography and violence was prophetic.  Had other feminists, had society at large, taken the rads' concerns seriously, they could have saved us from the free and available internet porn that's poisoning our conceptions of sexuality.  Seriously, has there been any generation in the past that had free and easy access to hard-core porn?  Now we see young high-school girls with bare bellies and thongs showing over the tops of their jeans, their sexual consciousness shaped by Girls Gone Wild.

The sexual revolution was most definitely not a revolution that served women.  It left us free to be used, with no consequences for the men who use us.  I think the rads realized that once the genie of sexual freedom was out of its bottle, it would immediately be co-opted by the patriarchy to demean women.  If only their concerns had been heard.  The sexual revolution called for an immediate re-evaluation of personal relationships, which did not happen.  That was society's failure to listen to hard-thinking women who told uncomfortable truths.

I don't know where radical feminism should go from here, but I agree with Jack-Booted Thug that consciousness raising is a necessary first step.  Young women need this more than anything.  They absolutely have to have some intervention from the pornsick culture if they're going to grow up respecting themselves at all.