Radical Feminists vs Liberal Feminists

well personally i find liberal feminists fucking annoying. radical feminists i can stand, but liberal feminists strike me as being pretty self-obsessed and they don't really challenge the "system" as such.

As to the actual question, it all depends on whether the feminist walks it like she talks it. I have known way too many self-labelled feminists who are all too willing to sell other women down the river at the first possible opportunity, as long as someone with influence pays them a bit of attention. I've been involved with lots of feminist scenes (eg Riot Grrrl) where you had to constantly reiterate your 'right' to be there or face a lot of playground-level bullshit. I'm not a huge fan of Naomi Wolf etc. because they're so bourgeois and so apt to make these totally insincere apologies for being upper middle class. That bugs me, and reminds me of a time when some really PC Sarah Lawrence girls went to a pro-choice rally in Washington DC and disgustedly quit marching because they didn't see enough working-class women there (duh, they were * working*. You know, WORK? That thing cleaners do?) But on reflection I find all the bickering and hairsplitting about feminism to be counterproductive in a sort of divide and rule way.

oh, thats not how i meant it. well i kinda did in a jokey way but i was more looking for constructive debate such as that which you and ed have contributed, rather than a general slag-off of both camps.

Uh, it seems more like an backlashy, anti-feminist idea to me.

Difference of opinion is constructive, debate is constructive, but intellectual argument can so easily be turned back on both sides of the argument by those out to make black and white definitions to combat overall ideals.

I often wonder whether women 'police' other women more than men do. What do you reckon?

Funny, I met Kristin Hersh at the ICA in '93. I win.

Well, clearly, you win in a more general sense. But I'm clinging to my time/site-specific victory noted above.

Well, sure. The core of feminist thinking is essentially a collective bargaining mentality, insofar as it is at heart about women and not how men react to women -- in much the same way that Black Nationalism or Afrocentrism or Black Consciousness are about Africans and not some legalistic civil-rights petition (note the 70's parallel). Feminism as a movement has a lot to do with the fact that every woman's individual decisions about what roles she's willing to play add up to a greater cultural notion of what women in general want and deserve, a notion that's obviously going to have a great impact on how women are actually treated. Every "surrendered wife," right or wrong, makes it that much more difficult for differently-inclined women to demand something else; the initial flourishing of feminism was so successful, I think, because it set its efforts on gathering women to collectively assert certain things, and tried less to convince the culture at large of those things than it tried to convince women themselves that they'd be better off making those assertions. But -- as with any other sort of identity politics -- once those first few clear-consensus assertions are made, the infighting must begin, because the question arises of precisely what assertions should be made from then on out. Feminist splits are like union negotiators arguing tactics before meeting with management, only 100 times more complicated and unclear.

One could argue that these divisions make feminism less effective at addressing core concerns. But one could also argue that the fact that they exist means that significant progress has been made in terms of the core, consensus issues facing women, allowing feminism the freedom to concentrate on more nebulous details. One could also argue that it is very, very unfortunate that feminism has become an essentially academic industry -- meaning that today's full-time feminists are slanting their work not toward communication and consensus-building with the Everywoman, but rather toward trying to create splits by developing "radical" theories that will set them apart, get them published, and get them tenure.

Oh yeah and Suzy on the female mysoginist issue - I know what you mean, the constant backstabbing and internal fueds were what disappointed me most about the feminist movement on my uni campus. When I saw "If These Walls Could Talk 2" I was surprised to find the second story (set at uni) dealt with the exact same problems *I* was seeing, only they were perfectly inverted in a way.

But none of us trust you, Sterling. You're plotting against us in your lurking place in Chicago. ;-)