Surging Public Interest in Radical Feminism

[IMPress Polly]

A month ago, radical feminists organized a series of protests, talks, and events in the U.S. against the policy goals of the gender identity movement collectively called Women Stand Up. These actions were supported by the Heritage Foundation, which helped some of these women (such as a British organizer popularly nicknamed Posie Parker) fly in and also hosted a panel that included speakers from the radfem blogs 4th Wave Now and Feminist Current (including site owner Meghan Murphy). Much debate has ensued over whether it was okay to accept this aid from such a right wing institution (https://www.feministcurrent.com/2019/02/21/podcast-kathleen-stock-and-natasha-chart-discuss-the-issue-of-feminists-allying-with-the-right/), but I feel that the results speak for themselves: there has been more press coverage of and visible public interest in the topic of gender identity ideology and the radical feminist perspectives thereon generated in the last month than probably in the last two years put together. In other words, something has been started right here in this country as a result. To this end, it may be time to start familiarizing yourselves with names like Natasha Chart (especially her, for Americans), Posie Parker, and Meghan Murphy because you'll probably be seeing those names in the press more often in the coming years. Natasha Chart is the American in that list.

While the feminist movement against gender is now substantial in the UK and is getting underway in New Zealand and Canada, it's just getting started here in the U.S. Radical feminists are few in number here as yet, which is why the kind of visible platform that the Heritage Foundation can provide was important to have. Natasha Chart, who is with the Women's Liberation Front (or WoLF for short) and also writes for Feminist Current, has emerged as perhaps the most visible American activist for our movement. Here's a 10-minute speech that she gave at a Women Stand Up protest outside the Human Rights Campaign headquarters on January 27th, the YouTube recording of which currently has a rare 99% up-vote ratio:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obuInzqtX8k

(The black and purple flag with the ax symbolizes lesbian feminism.)

So now you have a face and a voice to put with the name Natasha Chart when you see it in the press going forward over the coming years as the battle over the so-called Equality Act (analogous to the proposed changed to the UK's Gender Recognition Act) and other policies in that vein begins to intensify (especially if a Democrat is elected president next year, obviously).

[slackercruster]

Well, people get more extreme as time goes by.

What exactly is it they want?

[Cletus]

What exactly is it they want?
There are only about 8 people in the entire country who care.

[Chris]

I think a lot of the interest comes from those of us watching identity politics turning in on itself. Seems to me it was only yesterday the third wave feminists were insisting gender is just a social construct, today they argue against it when the trans movement claims it.

[IMPress Polly]

Well, people get more extreme as time goes by.

What exactly is it they want?

Radical feminists have alternatively been known as women's liberationists or second wave feminists (as in second wave ideologically). This tendency was born out of the anti-Vietnam-War movement on American college campuses back in the late 1960s and achieved the zenith of its activism here in the Western world around 1973-5 and thereafter institutionalized (often in the form of women's book clubs and coffee shops, rape crisis centers, women's shelters, women's music festivals, the introduction of women's studies courses on college campuses, and so forth) before starting to really wrap up by the mid-80s. Although radical feminism as a tendency never ceased to exist, it became politically irrelevant in the Western world between that time and start of the current decade, wherein we have benefited from the advent of social media.

In the early 2010s, you could see a small revival of radical feminist activity headquartered in France led by groups like Femen, who made global headlines with their chosen tactic of employing guerrilla nudism. Here in the second half of the 2010s, the movement has become headquarted in South Korea (where it appears to be the dominant trend in the women's movement) and the UK (where it appears to be gaining the upper hand). The primary focus of the radical feminist movement in the English-speaking world at present is the goal of defeating the socially and politically ascendant transgender movement and ultimately gender as an idea. Radical feminism can and should be thought of as a separate movement from the mainstream, liberal/progressive "women's" movement.

There are many different schools of radical feminist thought, but to define radical feminism, it's core distinguishing quality is the view that oppression of girls and women is the deepest going, most entrenched, and most persistent form of social oppression on Earth. This conclusion is arrived at by our deeper-going analyses of what constitutes internalized misogyny. Radical feminists believe that many of the existing institutions of society intrinsically favor men, oppress women, and cannot be reformed, but must instead be done away with. Germaine Greer summed up our basic philosophical differences with liberal feminism this way: "I didn't fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover." We don't want to break the glass ceiling, in other words, but to build our own building, if you will. We want emancipation from patriarchal social conditions on our own terms because we regard those as the only terms on which it is actually possible.

Among the more strident of our thought leaders is second wave activist and retired university professor Sheila Jeffreys, who opposes marriage, religion, heterosexuality, gender, and capitalism, among other existing social institutions. Most adherents to our movement don't embrace quite that sweeping a view (many are married, many are religious, and few actually oppose heterosexuality, for instance), but I list these to show some examples of institutions that given swaths of the movement might oppose and/or favor replacing.

Because we oppose the existing political and social organizations of society in general out of the view that they are inherently tied to the patriarchy, radical feminists tend to be skeptical of political action within the current system and instead tend to focus mainly on trying to affect culture change that undermines patriarchy and associated hierarchical structures. We're mainly about the culture wars, in other words, more than battles in the legal arena really at the end of the day. We aim to be the class consciousness of our shared interests as women that is required to radically move society away from patriarchal conditions.