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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Is feminism a left-wing thing?

133 replies

HirplesWithHaggis · 04/08/2015 03:07

Inspired by a comment (is it the done thing to name the poster? I assume not, but it would be giving credit for inspiration/thought-inducing rather than slagging her) on the AI thread, that she is not a left-wing feminist; fair enough, we all self-define.

But I had kind of always rather assumed it was/is, perhaps because I've been vaguely lefty and always feminist (apart from moments here when I've been told that I'm not a feminist because I'm not radfem) for about 40 years now. Am I totally out of date?

OP posts:
ethelb · 08/08/2015 12:26

I would say the rejection of the patriarchy is anarchic.

BakingCookiesAndShit · 08/08/2015 10:50

As the thread about lefty men firmly established!

BuffytheReasonableFeminist · 08/08/2015 09:22

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OTheHugeManatee · 08/08/2015 09:16

Plus I think a lot of left wing types think the cause of economic equality for men everyone is more important than the oppression of women. That's the situation where you get told that pointing out feminist issues is 'not helpful'. The rape allegations in the SWP is a good example of this kind of thing.

BuffytheReasonableFeminist · 08/08/2015 09:12

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AskBasil · 08/08/2015 09:08

And Socialist Feminists.

And Labour Feminists.

YonicScrewdriver · 08/08/2015 08:39

Roy, your post makes no sense.

BuffytheReasonableFeminist · 08/08/2015 08:35

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RoyRants · 07/08/2015 20:27

I used to think feminism was left, but no, it's actually a right wing ideology, and has nothing to do with Marxism

caroldecker · 07/08/2015 17:20

There will always be inequalities - the more liberal and free a society, the less they become entrenched and the more individuals and groups can do to overcome thier specific circumstance.

OTheHugeManatee · 07/08/2015 16:23

Talking of utopias. This is possibly off-topic but a phrase I encounter quite often in lefty discourse, and almost never in its right-leaning counterpart, is 'not helpful'. As in, 'X made the following intervention in the Labour leadership debate; this should be condemned, as characterising X as Y is not helpful.'

I find 'not helpful' a really intriguing turn of phrase for a criticism - and it's always a criticism. It's a turn of phrase that gets used a lot in contexts where there is a lofty goal that everyone is assumed to be striving for but there's disagreement about how the goal is to be achieved. It implies that both the critic and the object of criticism have the same goals, but that the one being criticised is doing it wrong or - intentionally or not - somehow obstructing those shared goals.

Usually 'X is not helpful' means 'I don't like what you did or said' but it's framed in such a way as to suggest that by doing or saying X someone has fallen short of the whole lofty goal, rather than just annoying the person doing the criticising.

I realise this is a bit of a digression. But we've all become very sensitised to certain specific ways in which language articulates power and oppression, particularly around discriminatory treatment of minority groups. I think sometimes we hyper-focus on those (ab)uses of language to the extent that it creates blind spots elsewhere. I'm musing out loud a bit here, but I think what I'm poking at is my suspicion that trying to 'call out' linguistic uses and abuses of power does nothing to remedy those abuses, because they just move elsewhere and develop new protective camouflage. This has certainly been borne out by my personal experience (I'm a survivor of all kinds of anarchistic/communistic/women-only/collaborative social experiments during my twenties, most of which disintegrated into the noisiest and most vicious infighting imaginable). So with all that in mind I find myself exasperated by the business of 'calling out' supposedly discriminatory language, because not only do I see it as a waste of time (because the real bastards will just find new ways of encoding their bastardry) but also it becomes a new and unpleasant orthodoxy that brings its own forms of discrimination and easily-abused power.

So I suppose this is all a roundabout way of saying I have some difficulties with the 'structural analysis' approach to feminism as to other 'social justice' themes. Not because I disagree with the analyses necessarily, but because they seem often to lead, in practice, to a hyper-focus on language that serves, in my experience, more often to obscure than to reveal and eliminate abuses of power. As I've got older, I've concluded that really quite old-fashioned theories of human nature and interaction (imperfect, imperfectible, prone to outbursts of utter dickishness as well as flights of glory) make much more sense and, in the long run, do more to promote tolerance and courtesy. Slightly to my surprise I discovered that this left me in many respects more in sympathy, philosophically speaking, with The Spectator than with The Guardian.

OTheHugeManatee · 07/08/2015 16:18

vesuvia I suppose if you're a market fundamentalist, market forces does qualify as a Grand Unifying Theory. In fact, hat's another perfect example of why I dislike Grand Unifying Theories: it's clear to anyone but the wilfully blind that market failures do occur and need to be corrected for.

I don't think 'strivers and skivers' is a grand theory of anything, just a populist soundbite.

As I said, I don't think right-leaning thinking is devoid of Grand Theories, just that utopian Grand Theories are more commonly leftish than not.

YonicScrewdriver · 07/08/2015 16:13

Market forces is not left wing or right wing, unless we are discussing control economies and Five Yeae Plans.

Both Tory and labour believe in free markets with constraints, though they may differ on the choice and size of those constraints (eg agree on no child labour, disagree on level of minimum wage)

BuffytheReasonableFeminist · 07/08/2015 16:09

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caroldecker · 07/08/2015 16:06

Freecycle, charities etc all work as part of market forces - not always a profit.
Not sure what other freedoms you want that don't exist under a socially liberal free market.

BuffytheReasonableFeminist · 07/08/2015 15:01

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caroldecker · 07/08/2015 14:59

I struggle to accept that any left wing ideology allows the freedom required for equality to follow.
Market forces are nothing but the wishes of the people as expressed by thier actions, ie thier genuine wants.

BuffytheReasonableFeminist · 07/08/2015 14:49

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vesuvia · 07/08/2015 14:14

OTheHugeManatee wrote - "to me more right/libertarian thinking doesn't really go in for Grand Unifying Theories in the same way."

Does "strivers and skivers" qualify as a right-wing grand unifying theory?
How about "market forces"?

BuffytheReasonableFeminist · 07/08/2015 12:14

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OTheHugeManatee · 07/08/2015 11:59

Risky, calling it a whole new ideology - though I agree that it doesn't fit neatly into either political spectrum. But if you call it a whole new ideology you've carte blanche to start coming up with new Grand Unifying Theories, with all the sectarianism that tends to follow on those. I suppose I think of feminism as a filter that can be applied to all kinds of things. I suppose the broad question I'd apply is 'In practice, does X generally make things better or shitter for people in the normal course of life, from the point of view of gender?'. From that point of view, the porn industry pretty obviously makes things shitter for lots of people in lots of ways, and I'm unconvinced that this is outweighed by arguments from personal autonomy. Workplace discrimination and maternity legislation generally makes things better - though this can be nuanced, as I think there are situations where it just shifts the discrimination to more hidden places, such as the choice of contract type or the decision process in personnel recruitment. And so on. And of course my assessments are limited by my own perspective, and the information I have to hand. I suppose what I'm trying to say is I tend to treat feminism as one among a number of filters all of which will inform my judgement about this or that, rather than being a distinct and self-contained ideology.

BuffytheReasonableFeminist · 07/08/2015 11:49

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BuffytheReasonableFeminist · 07/08/2015 11:46

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Coffeemarkone · 07/08/2015 11:44

" the friends i have who either don't really get feminism "

says more about the intellectual level of people you choose to hang around with than anything else tbh.

OTheHugeManatee · 07/08/2015 11:44

Thanks Buffy Smile Nice to see you posting, btw - am I right in thinking you took a break? Or have I just not been in FWR for a bit?

carol yup, I'm broadly with you. It seems as though whichever 'wing' you sign up to, you get either one flavour of authoritarianism or the other. If you swing left, you get state authoritarianism; if you swing right, you get the social kind