Radical Feminism is the Real Feminism
Radical Feminism is NOT the fringe of feminism.
Radical feminism is feminism's rotten core, and the source of feminism's life. Without it, feminism at large would amount to little, and scatter to the four winds.
That is the whole truth and nothing but the truth. However. . . it is a truth which plenty of people won't square up to. It is quite fashionable nowadays, especially in the wake of the Agent Orange scandal, to brush aside radical feminism as outdated and popularly disregarded.
When people do this, they are trying to change the subject and gain control of the conversation so as to remove the feminist project, at large, from the critical spotlight.
Radical feminism - by which I mean chiefly the man-hating kind - is a standard which sets the measure for feminism as a whole. All brands of feminism are either more or less relevant depending on how closely they approximate radical feminism.
Radical feminism is 100 proof, and a radical feminist takes her feminism neat.
All other feminists take their feminism watered down - but it's all the same drink.
People love to tell you that the radfems are "just fringe extremists" - as if we were standing in a field and the radfems were some tight little group clustered in their own world near the perimeter. What the speaker fails to consider is that all feminism is on a continuum whose unifying principle is disaffection toward men and things male. That's all it is, and if you study feminism objectively you can reach no other conclusion.
Hence, there is no gap, no discontinuity between radical feminism and the rest of feminism. For every foul man-hater, there is a slightly less foul man-hater, and then one slightly less foul than that . . . and so on down the line. Thus, for example, Amanda Marcotte is indeed a foul man-hater, yet she is only half as foul as Mary Daly.
In one way, the apologists and deflectionists are right: we oughtn't be so fixated on the extremists. After all, the rot extends clear through the feminist organism to some degree, and examples closer to home are not lacking. What we should point out every chance we get, is the pervasive anti-male bias - be this subtle or brazen.
Anti-male bias - whether in the form of hating men, or in looking the other way when evidence of man-hating crops up, or simply in the prevalence of double standards which favor women - may safely be described as the defining feature of feminism.
Anti-male bias - culminating in outright hatred of men - is the core principle which makes feminism feminism. This principle, more than anything else, binds the feminist project together, moves it forward, and explains the complex reality of its evolvement through time.
The feminist project seeks to expand the power of women with no limit, and anything like ethical regard for men and maleness would impose a formidable barrier to such expansion. Remove that ethical regard, and the frontier is wide open. Hence, so far as the feminist project is concerned, ethical regard for men and maleness has got to go - and what better why to shuck off ethical regard for anything, than to HATE it?
And since the world always contains X number of women who hate men. . .and even MEN who hate men, feminism's inner cadre always has a sufficient recruitment pool.
In the end, if feminism did not harbor a kind of moral black hole of infinite disaffection toward men and maleness, it would quickly reach the limit of its possible development. . . . and begin to dissipate.
So once again, radical feminism - to wit, the man-hating kind - is the CORE of feminism.
And it is the liberals, the moderates, the humanists, and the "fun" feminists who make up the fluffy fringe on feminism's outskirts. They are the useful idiots who serve mainly as camouflage and as ideological pack mules.
Those who say that radical feminism is marginal to feminism at large, are lying - either to you, or to themselves.
Fidelbogen . . . out.
Radical feminism is feminism's rotten core, and the source of feminism's life. Without it, feminism at large would amount to little, and scatter to the four winds.
That is the whole truth and nothing but the truth. However. . . it is a truth which plenty of people won't square up to. It is quite fashionable nowadays, especially in the wake of the Agent Orange scandal, to brush aside radical feminism as outdated and popularly disregarded.
When people do this, they are trying to change the subject and gain control of the conversation so as to remove the feminist project, at large, from the critical spotlight.
Radical feminism - by which I mean chiefly the man-hating kind - is a standard which sets the measure for feminism as a whole. All brands of feminism are either more or less relevant depending on how closely they approximate radical feminism.
Radical feminism is 100 proof, and a radical feminist takes her feminism neat.
All other feminists take their feminism watered down - but it's all the same drink.
People love to tell you that the radfems are "just fringe extremists" - as if we were standing in a field and the radfems were some tight little group clustered in their own world near the perimeter. What the speaker fails to consider is that all feminism is on a continuum whose unifying principle is disaffection toward men and things male. That's all it is, and if you study feminism objectively you can reach no other conclusion.
Hence, there is no gap, no discontinuity between radical feminism and the rest of feminism. For every foul man-hater, there is a slightly less foul man-hater, and then one slightly less foul than that . . . and so on down the line. Thus, for example, Amanda Marcotte is indeed a foul man-hater, yet she is only half as foul as Mary Daly.
In one way, the apologists and deflectionists are right: we oughtn't be so fixated on the extremists. After all, the rot extends clear through the feminist organism to some degree, and examples closer to home are not lacking. What we should point out every chance we get, is the pervasive anti-male bias - be this subtle or brazen.
Anti-male bias - whether in the form of hating men, or in looking the other way when evidence of man-hating crops up, or simply in the prevalence of double standards which favor women - may safely be described as the defining feature of feminism.
Anti-male bias - culminating in outright hatred of men - is the core principle which makes feminism feminism. This principle, more than anything else, binds the feminist project together, moves it forward, and explains the complex reality of its evolvement through time.
The feminist project seeks to expand the power of women with no limit, and anything like ethical regard for men and maleness would impose a formidable barrier to such expansion. Remove that ethical regard, and the frontier is wide open. Hence, so far as the feminist project is concerned, ethical regard for men and maleness has got to go - and what better why to shuck off ethical regard for anything, than to HATE it?
And since the world always contains X number of women who hate men. . .and even MEN who hate men, feminism's inner cadre always has a sufficient recruitment pool.
In the end, if feminism did not harbor a kind of moral black hole of infinite disaffection toward men and maleness, it would quickly reach the limit of its possible development. . . . and begin to dissipate.
So once again, radical feminism - to wit, the man-hating kind - is the CORE of feminism.
And it is the liberals, the moderates, the humanists, and the "fun" feminists who make up the fluffy fringe on feminism's outskirts. They are the useful idiots who serve mainly as camouflage and as ideological pack mules.
Those who say that radical feminism is marginal to feminism at large, are lying - either to you, or to themselves.
Fidelbogen . . . out.
posted by Fidelbogen at 2:37 PM
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