User Tag List

+ Reply to Thread
Page 8 of 8 FirstFirst ... 45678
Results 71 to 75 of 75

Thread: The First RadFem Social Network

  1. #71
    Points: 15,626, Level: 30
    Level completed: 18%, Points required for next Level: 824
    Overall activity: 0.1%
    Achievements:
    VeteranCreated Album picturesSocial10000 Experience Points
    Rationalist's Avatar Senior Member
    Karma
    2002
    Join Date
    Dec 2012
    Location
    North Carolina
    Posts
    3,391
    Points
    15,626
    Level
    30
    Thanks Given
    2,742
    Thanked 1,992x in 1,378 Posts
    Mentioned
    6 Post(s)
    Tagged
    0 Thread(s)
    Quote Originally Posted by IMPress Polly View Post
    Examples would include...?
    The main thing that the sexual revolution eroded was the concept of discretion with sex. Promiscuity was looked down upon, not just toward women but also toward men. Women were expected to be sexually reserved, and men were supposed to respect a woman's reluctance and any rejection as well.

    Courtship changed a lot in the era of "free love." Most of the repercussions involved more sexual assault, rape, and venereal disease. Very little about it benefited women beyond more freedom of choice, so to speak.

    Yet, even the freedom of choice was really more about men having more power to encourage women to have sex with them. If you wanted to hold onto your virginity longer, you were seen as a prude.

    What people don't talk as much about is what it did to male culture. There was a time when monogamy was seen as the most desirable goal for a man -- not having a bunch of sexual partners. A lot of men and women got married young in the early part of the 1900s. Much of that was connected to tradition.

    Broadly speaking, you can see a vast difference in how men and women treated each other among the "greatest generation" vs. how they interact among baby boomers. Every generation is different, but ever since the sexual revolution, there's been a lot of pressure on young people to be promiscuous, and the results have been pretty negative. Mostly only religious types seem to be shielded from this (although some of them are secretly promiscuous).

    All that aside, there is an irony to all this. While gay men tend to be very promiscuous, lesbians tend to be more monogamous than most straight people. I'm not sure why this is, but I would assume that lesbians may see the value in being monogamous more than most and see the downsides of promiscuity.

  2. The Following 3 Users Say Thank You to Rationalist For This Useful Post:

    IMPress Polly (08-22-2019),Lummy (08-27-2019),Mister D (08-21-2019)

  3. #72
    Points: 100,746, Level: 77
    Level completed: 31%, Points required for next Level: 1,804
    Overall activity: 9.0%
    Achievements:
    SocialYour first Group50000 Experience PointsVeteran
    IMPress Polly's Avatar Senior Member
    Karma
    156220
    Join Date
    Aug 2012
    Location
    Vermont, USA
    Posts
    8,575
    Points
    100,746
    Level
    77
    Thanks Given
    10,232
    Thanked 7,643x in 4,358 Posts
    Mentioned
    634 Post(s)
    Tagged
    0 Thread(s)
    Quote Originally Posted by Retirednsmilin308 View Post
    When is your next scheduled march or protest.
    I will start making a sign now.
    ...and wear my steel-toed boots.
    Well...that's difficult to say. The truth of the matter is that radical feminism today is mostly a thing today in countries like South Korea and Spain. There are tens and hundreds of thousands of women who are clearly part of our movement in one sense or another in places like that. Here in the English-speaking world, radical feminism is the most prominent a phenomenon today in the UK, followed perhaps by Canada. The unfortunate truth of the matter is that here in the United States, the movement is presently weak, by which I mean that were we to say call a demonstration in a major American city, the number that might be realistically expected to attend might be in the single digits or in the dozens at best, not in the hundreds or thousands. It's simply not a mass movement here anymore. It's not the 1970s.

    We're in what you might call a rebuilding process, however, mostly motivated by anger over the popularization of gender identity politics in recent years and owing to legislative efforts to enshrine the corresponding principles into law. That rebuilding process has been underway for a couple of years now in the UK and really since the start of this year here in the U.S. More organizations and online venues are being set up regularly. (Spinster, for example, was founded by an American activist.) There's more activity than there used to be in our movement today, but most of it's online and in private as yet. There's just not enough of a point to calling a lot of demonstrations at this time. We don't have the numbers here in the U.S. to make that very potent and meaningful right now. We'd be outnumbered by counter-protesters easily. There have been a number of meetings and talks hosted by the Women's Liberation Front and such this year, and that's been sort of the re-starting of our in-person, autonomous activity. It's leading to small, new organizations being founded across the country. We're getting there! But it will take some time yet (perhaps another year or two) before there will be much of a point to women's liberationists here in the U.S. going for autonomous street demonstrations.

    If you're wanting to support the movement as an American at this time, joining Spinster might actually be the best way to do so. Men are welcome there too, particularly if they're supporters of the movement.

  4. The Following User Says Thank You to IMPress Polly For This Useful Post:

    Peter1469 (08-22-2019)

  5. #73
    Points: 100,746, Level: 77
    Level completed: 31%, Points required for next Level: 1,804
    Overall activity: 9.0%
    Achievements:
    SocialYour first Group50000 Experience PointsVeteran
    IMPress Polly's Avatar Senior Member
    Karma
    156220
    Join Date
    Aug 2012
    Location
    Vermont, USA
    Posts
    8,575
    Points
    100,746
    Level
    77
    Thanks Given
    10,232
    Thanked 7,643x in 4,358 Posts
    Mentioned
    634 Post(s)
    Tagged
    0 Thread(s)
    Quote Originally Posted by Rationalist View Post
    The main thing that the sexual revolution eroded was the concept of discretion with sex. Promiscuity was looked down upon, not just toward women but also toward men. Women were expected to be sexually reserved, and men were supposed to respect a woman's reluctance and any rejection as well.

    Courtship changed a lot in the era of "free love." Most of the repercussions involved more sexual assault, rape, and venereal disease. Very little about it benefited women beyond more freedom of choice, so to speak.

    Yet, even the freedom of choice was really more about men having more power to encourage women to have sex with them. If you wanted to hold onto your virginity longer, you were seen as a prude.

    What people don't talk as much about is what it did to male culture. There was a time when monogamy was seen as the most desirable goal for a man -- not having a bunch of sexual partners. A lot of men and women got married young in the early part of the 1900s. Much of that was connected to tradition.

    Broadly speaking, you can see a vast difference in how men and women treated each other among the "greatest generation" vs. how they interact among baby boomers. Every generation is different, but ever since the sexual revolution, there's been a lot of pressure on young people to be promiscuous, and the results have been pretty negative. Mostly only religious types seem to be shielded from this (although some of them are secretly promiscuous).

    All that aside, there is an irony to all this. While gay men tend to be very promiscuous, lesbians tend to be more monogamous than most straight people. I'm not sure why this is, but I would assume that lesbians may see the value in being monogamous more than most and see the downsides of promiscuity.
    While we're not exactly traditionalists concerned with the ostensible merits and preservation of the patriarchal household, much of the above thinking more broadly actually isn't so different from that of radical feminists. The radical feminist movement was started as a rejection of the '60s era sexual revolution.

    I can't help but think you might actually find some of the literature by lesbian feminist Sheila Jeffreys (currently a prominent thought leader in our movement...and kinda my favorite of them) to be of considerable interest, such as her 1986 book The Spinster and Her Enemies and her 1990 follow-up, Anticlimax. Those books are centrally about the history of sexual revolutions and their hostility to the women's movement. You might be particularly interested in the historical origins of sexology as a "scientific" field and how it has used prostitution as a going model of how "normal" sex is supposed to be.

  6. The Following User Says Thank You to IMPress Polly For This Useful Post:

    Rationalist (08-22-2019)

  7. #74
    Points: 15,626, Level: 30
    Level completed: 18%, Points required for next Level: 824
    Overall activity: 0.1%
    Achievements:
    VeteranCreated Album picturesSocial10000 Experience Points
    Rationalist's Avatar Senior Member
    Karma
    2002
    Join Date
    Dec 2012
    Location
    North Carolina
    Posts
    3,391
    Points
    15,626
    Level
    30
    Thanks Given
    2,742
    Thanked 1,992x in 1,378 Posts
    Mentioned
    6 Post(s)
    Tagged
    0 Thread(s)
    Quote Originally Posted by IMPress Polly View Post
    While we're not exactly traditionalists concerned with the ostensible merits and preservation of the patriarchal household, much of the above thinking more broadly actually isn't so different from that of radical feminists. The radical feminist movement was started as a rejection of the '60s era sexual revolution.

    I can't help but think you might actually find some of the literature by lesbian feminist Sheila Jeffreys (currently a prominent thought leader in our movement...and kinda my favorite of them) to be of considerable interest, such as her 1986 book The Spinster and Her Enemies and her 1990 follow-up, Anticlimax. Those books are centrally about the history of sexual revolutions and their hostility to the women's movement. You might be particularly interested in the historical origins of sexology as a "scientific" field and how it has used prostitution as a going model of how "normal" sex is supposed to be.
    I'll have to check those out. A lot of my initial understanding of the downsides of the sexual revolution came from the observations of Mona Charen in her recent book "Sex Matters." She is very much a traditionalist, but she cites a lot of the ideas of feminists. I'm somewhat traditional myself, although where I disagree with her and many feminists is regarding porn and prostitution.

    It may seem odd that I look negatively at promiscuity while supporting the legalization of prostitution, but there's a market-based reason for this. First of all, like a lot of other things, if there is a demand for something, it will be sated by legal or illegal means. Obviously, we can't legalize everything, but I think sex work can be a legitimate profession for both women and men if the right regulation is in place.

    If we were to legalize prostitution, it would have to require an age minimum of 18 (for the worker and the consumer) and regular checkups for the workers. Clients would likely be screened as well, and legal action would have to be taken against clients who knowingly infected any sex worker. And of course, by legalizing sex work, these workers would have the same labor rights as any other worker.

    Doing all of this would likely decrease the spread of venereal disease, protect sex workers, and allow police to focus on things like sex slavery, human trafficking, and underage prostitution.

    As for porn, I think most versions of it should be protected by the First Amendment.

  8. #75
    Points: 100,746, Level: 77
    Level completed: 31%, Points required for next Level: 1,804
    Overall activity: 9.0%
    Achievements:
    SocialYour first Group50000 Experience PointsVeteran
    IMPress Polly's Avatar Senior Member
    Karma
    156220
    Join Date
    Aug 2012
    Location
    Vermont, USA
    Posts
    8,575
    Points
    100,746
    Level
    77
    Thanks Given
    10,232
    Thanked 7,643x in 4,358 Posts
    Mentioned
    634 Post(s)
    Tagged
    0 Thread(s)
    I love Spinster. Only on this social network would the owner re-post entries like "That being said, throw away your makeup! Throw away your razors! Be free from the male gaze!"

    Anyway, for a Fediverse statistic update now that we're two weeks in, Spinster went from being the 55th largest instance in the Fediverse this same time last week to 47th now, so now officially in the top 50.
    Last edited by IMPress Polly; 08-27-2019 at 05:55 AM.

  9. The Following User Says Thank You to IMPress Polly For This Useful Post:

    Peter1469 (08-27-2019)

+ Reply to Thread

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts