Maya’s response to Radical Notion’s GC divisions

Ta.

I'm very grateful to this thread because it's evolved into a really interesting discussion, whereas the previous thread was complicated and bitter in a way unpleasantly reminiscent of the RN special issue itself.

Possibly this is because Maya (whether you agree with her 100% or not) is a really clear and thoughtful writer, whereas the RN writers disappear up their own overly intellectual arses.

Radical feminism is not popular and will never be popular because most women are mothers and most women are heterosexual and it's extremely difficult and painful to live happily with men who you love and/or are dependent on, while looking at things through the lens of radical feminism.

This is so true. I actually feel depressed sometimes thinking about this but I can't unsee this view. In fact it's my interaction with men that makes radical feminism all make sense. I fear the kind of relationship I desire with a man is not possible, and I fear the vulnerability of having children. I've seen video clips of Andrea Dworkin and want to read her books, but also I know they will depress me.

You're right, a lot has been achieved; maybe I should have quantified that statement with "recently". VAWG is the one issue I was actually thinking about as being well within the public and political conscience, despite it needing a lot more work.

Do you have any recommendations of second wave liberal feminism and straightforward radfem authors? I'm no expert on feminism and I associated liberal feminism with "choice" feminism.

Maybe it's just semantics because I, like many mumsnet feminists, support radical feminists' work on pro-abortion, anti-surrogacy, anti-prostitution and porn (admittedly gets murkier considering motherhood, domestic work and employment etc) and so if the work is getting done then does it matter if the goal is utopian or not? But actually I think Maya is right in that we need to acknowledge human nature both in relationship to the establishment of the patriarchy and our feminist activism. That the start and end point of radical feminism doesn't acknowledge this is in part responsible for its relatively weak position in society.

Not an expert so happy to be corrected. My understanding is that radical feminism (“radical” meaning “root”) aims to dismantle patriarchy – the social power structure of men as the dominant class over women – and essentially reorder society without a ruling sex class. However the word “radical” is also understood by many to mean “extreme” so people naturally recoil at that. Radical feminism knows that we are oppressed on the basis of sex but concerns itself with nurture rather than nature and says that the reason for our oppression is a socially constructed hierarchy; this is how our biology is used against us.

Maya is talking about biological essentialism, which is often talked about in a very negative way, because it can be twisted to justify the worst elements of human nature. But that’s not the point she’s making in the article – what she’s saying is that there is an element of nature and not just nurture that plays a part in our oppression. I.e. we don’t condone a “boys will be boys” attitude but we believe that some men will always want to rape women.

Thank you for this; I think it's roughly what I thought except that I thought radical feminism also included more basic biological essentialism. In that the nurture part is in the very early years mostly the woman due to biology.

I struggle to see much of a difference between radical feminism and Maya's basic root pov because I see it as nature and then nurture.

'Dismantling patriarchy' is idealistic on a large scale across modern society and some would argue that it's already starting to be achieved with more women climbing to ceo positions and prime ministers in some countries. But more via capitalism in reality.

I saw an evolutionary psychologist on triggermonetry (Google now informs me there's been a few, so not sure who) who'd led the way in the area and been smeared as a eugenicist in the early days. Now though it's recognised via all sorts of research, twin studies etc. (the book Love Matters looks at a lot of this through attachment theories.)

He said psychology/ behaviour/ who we are is roughly a varying mix of nature, nurture and accidental happenings.

As a side note, from observation and experience MLD send schools are usually around 8:1 boys to girls. A send register in mainstream usually includes more boys. There are clearly some biological differences between the sexes in how the xx and xy expresses some genes.

A study I've always found fascinating is that boys who coslept with mothers/ parents were identified by teachers at age 5 as being more socially amenable and able compared to those who didn't whereas it made no difference to girls. Who can tell what natural or nurturing forces are at play there, but it would indicate that rad fem nurturing ideals are important. Boys do need antidotes to toxic masculinity / gender stereotypes. (Seems to have been easier for girls to be non conforming from the 80s until the last decade.)

Ultimately though, women are left and right leaning and you are going to have both sides saying men can't be women. No one can ™ it though, we are half of the population.

Ah! Sorry about your thread, Retire!

does this refer to both men and women having multiple partners?

Yes.

If so doesn’t the community need to be limited in number somehow?

Being on an island in the middle of the Pacific sorts out that side of it.

What is the economic structure?

Can't remember, apart from the matrilineal inheritance part. But we're talking about non-industrial communities with a largely subsistence farming/fishing basis. So probably not a large economic gradient.

Do you know when these societies died out?

Haven't the foggiest, sorry - I'm working off memories of lectures last century.

Out of interest @HiccupHorrendousHaddock what was it that made you start a new thread, rather than posting MFs blog on the existing thread?

I see what you are saying, but my sense was that MF was reading the thread where everyone was saying words to the effect of “these RN writers are all a bit up themselves, thinking we have time and energy to read their long and tedious screeds replicating their twitter feeds”, and she thought “ah, I have some culpability there, I need to admit it was my suggestion they do it in long form”, so she wrote a blog post rather than saying it in the middle of the thread where it could get missed. That’s how it seemed to me.

I feel a bit weird saying too much in response to MF here, because I don’t think she is really adding that much to what mumsnetters were already saying in this instance, but I appreciate how this thread has taken a slightly different turn.

But I really don’t see why disagreement about any of this stops us uniting to demand single-sex jails.

Exactly.

Hear, hear!

I was a feminist long before there was any possibility of being a mother, and have remained the former despite never being (or wanting to be) the latter. I'm perfectly capable of understanding and caring about many things I have not personally experienced.

Just looked and Retire was the OP.

This leads to the question of how to reconcile feminist theory and activism with reality to create a powerful and effective feminist movement.

This deserves its own thread @thedankness

Ultimately radical feminism is not that popular, and it hasn't been effective. Is it too far removed from individuals' realities, too heavy on analysis even if it is entirely correct?

Radical feminism is not popular and will never be popular because most women are mothers and most women are heterosexual and it's extremely difficult and painful to live happily with men who you love and/or are dependent on, while looking at things through the lens of radical feminism.

Nevertheless, radical feminism has achieved a lot. In practical terms the whole DA sector was built on their work. They have given us extremely clear analysis on MVAWG.

Women who are able to centre women and girls wholeheartedly, without any distracting concerns about men, bring a different perspective because they can see the problem more from the outside.

Rad fem literature is usually very straightforward to read. It's not an academic tradition.

A lot of second wave stuff was old school classical liberal feminism (not to be confused with the more recent 'libfems').

It was all perfectly readable until the 1980s when the pomo gibberish started to be popular.

I would be interested to read the insights on the other thread but it’s massively long and inevitably long threads get derailed.

Thank you Biturongs and Warrior for your anthropological insights. I’m a bit confused by the polygamous societies – does this refer to both men and women having multiple partners? If so doesn’t the community need to be limited in number somehow? What is the economic structure? Do you know when these societies died out?

I made mention of Steinem because earlier it was mentioned that maybe some rad feminists from RN didn't have children and didn't understand issues for mothers. I wanted to highlight a prominent radical feminist who broke that stereotype.

Thank you to @ShireWifeofNigelFarage for those screen shots yesterday; there's a lot of tenuous links and jumping about to construct a divisive narrative from my pov.

Any 'Populism' that's occurring now is not at all like past historical populist movements. We have the most instant, far reaching form of communication we've ever had via phones and the internet. I'm not sure it's necessarily populism. Afai can tell, women on the left and right are saying men can't be women.

The whole premise is initially
based on the initial assertion that "populism is mostly right wing" - this is not the case. Some academics don't even think the term is accurate, useful or relevant.

I didn't see your posts on the other thread either, Retire. It was a train crash of a thread so you can't really blame people for not getting involved. We mostly ended up talking about crocheting speedos for Nigel Farage in the end. I was glad to see a new thread pop up, tbh.

Interestingly, Steinem is not a mother, but this hasn't stopped her from recognizing the harms to women on an issue she has no personal experience with.

Is that interesting? Do you think that women who don't have children don't see what other women are going through — don't have friends and sisters with children, don't sit in cafes and see how exhausted and unhappy so many women are, don't read Mumsnet and sympathise with so many of the stories we see. I was the go-to village babysitter from the age of 14. By the time I went to university I'd had more experience of looking after children, including babies, than most women have when they have a child. I'd also got an idea of the dynamics of the average heterosexual relationship. I grew up with my mum doing considerably more domestic work than my father on top of her paid job. My experience of other families indicated that this was pretty standard. I was a feminist at 16 and had decided pretty much by then that I wasn't going to have children. I never regretted that decision.

It's a bit othering that women with children might think we childfree women have no idea what they're going through. We don't know it all, we can't. But we have eyes and ears.

Just did a Google to catch any new relevant Nicola Sturgeon news.

Came across this:

thinkscotland.org/2023/02/the-link-between-dietrich-misogyny-and-sturgeons-folie-de-grandeur/

Author is a local councillor who sits as an independent, website says it’s primarily conservative.

The goal should be as many people discussing from as many different angles as possible

Another view of 'Mumsnet Feminism' is the opportunity to do so without judgement.

The name calling (eg domesticated zombies) is seriously undermining decent debate.

Not everyone is here all the time. Sometimes you don't want to catch up on hundreds of posts - you want to get involved in a thread relatively early

But tbh that just feels like another ticking off for doing it wrong - how dare we not engage with the thread that was there on a related topic but instead engage with a fresher one with a different slant.

The goal should be as many people discussing from as many different angles as possible

I rarely go onto threads after 500 posts as they just don't load.

Sorry we missed your posts on there with your insights what with all the nonsense. I genuinely didn't see them.

Culturally humans have had some v silly fashions in the past so I have no beef with men wearing clothes currently stereotypically made for women (capitalism, consumerism, culture or patriarchy?) as long as they don't claim to be one.

I do have an issue with the the way that men dressing up in stereotypically fetishistic ways currently feeds into the ideological stance of TRAs and a whole host of child and woman harming shite.

My position exactly.

TBF that thread had become a train wreck!

If I wasn’t in the thick of it early on I definitely wouldn’t have started contributing by page 3 or 4.
At least Maya’s blog gave us a reason for a fresh start without all the insults.

How does that work out on a societal level when babies are usually born more or less 50/50 m/f?

They tend to have a lot of nuns (and monks, for the men who aren't keen on their brother's choice).

I don't know of other societies outside group 1 that have anything quite like the kibbutz system, but there there are a lot with shared parenting arrangements on a more or less formal basis. Communal women's huts and men's huts, with women raising the children on a largely collective basis and male children moving to the men's hut at about age 12. Grandparent (usually grandmother) daytime care while both parents go off hunting and gathering. Rota systems with mothers taking it in turns to stay home and look after several children while the rest gather or farm.

Unlike the kibbutz they aren't designed to equalise the sexes, or to prioritise the collective bond over the parental one, but they do free up a lot of maternal time for other tasks in a broadly similar way to the kibbutz. But all the ones I know of have children with at least 1 parent at night rather than sleeping separately.