Opinion of radical feminism

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Of course this thread would be a colossal trainwreck.

If Nathan wants to start a feminism thread with actual thought in it, I'm ready to participate.

I'd be glad to. Give me a bit of time, since I'm feeling a bit sluggish and diffident but also have a lot that I'm supposed to get done. I should be able to have it up this weekend.

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Freedom ideology conceptually, but horrible ideology in the terribly gender-essentialist and at times obnoxiously anti-religious forms in which it's most vocal. Morgan put it...okay, though I wouldn't use Jane Fonda as my preferred example.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Freakish vision bound up in a bundle with radical atheism and anarchism.

You haven't been hanging around the right kind of radical feminists. Radical Christian socialist feminism is very much a thing, but I suspect you'd like that only marginally better (assuming you're Christian; if you're not versions invoking most other major religions are available).

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Radical anything is the opponent of progress. It shuts out the exchange of thought and understanding. How can you attempt to change the way people think if you're not even interested in how they think already?

That isn't what 'radical' means in this context.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Except that isn't prescriptively what 'radical feminism' is supposed to describe, and it's highly tendentious to restrict the term to what you're talking about even descriptively. The 'radical' in 'radical feminism' refers to an effort to find the root (radix) of the disorderedness of gender relations, either in a given society or throughout human history (I think the latter is a fool's errand, to be perfectly frank). Everything that comes after that depends entirely upon how that root ends up being perceived.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

As far as it's analyzable as one movement, I'd say that's a reasonable analysis. The attitude towards trans people for example can get particularly awful.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

As far as it's analyzable as one movement, I'd say that's a reasonable analysis. The attitude towards trans people for example can get particularly awful.

There's no doubt, but it does come from a reasonable place, namely the contention that trans women have the ability to "pass" for men and therefore don't have the same consistent experience as women do.  Many do turn that into some pretty fierce anti-trans bigotry.

Oh, I know. I've taken a class in a women's studies department that employed Janice Raymond as recently as a decade ago and is still trying to exorcise her, so I've been through all these arguments and they're certainly internally reasonable and come from understandable places. They just fail to account for huge elements of the experience of others, in a way that, for me, hits pretty close to home.