Feminism is dead in the water

[Gahr]

At least two major political parties can't agree on what a woman is. The major cultural force expects women to stay barefoot and pregnant. A lot of intelligent and enlightened women are politically homeless. I am myself. I am GC, but I would never ever vote Reform. I know that this discussion seems centered around party politics, but I see the same divides outside of politics. I have a shaky relationship with feminism at the best of times, as it seems absolutely chewed up with these internal issues and also seems too much focussed on how awful men are. How can we all go forward?

Why is this the fault of feminism?

I think a refreshing hooley of Second Wave Feminism is just what is needed.

Any '-ism' will be concerned with internal issues if you frame it as such. It can also be concerned with the fundamental issue it's principally concerned with - at the same time!

Every individual that feels strongly about any broad concept - stopping the planet burning up, women being seen as humans, social inequality - will always disagree with other people concerned about the same thing as to the best strategies to achieve this and goals to prioritise. This isn't new, or exclusive to feminism - it's baked in.

I think we all go forwards in our own way. I don't have the winning formula, and if I did know how to win hearts and minds on a huge scale I'd probably have to be a populist and get the votes of people who find critical thinking uncomfortable....

On the contrary - in the middle to late 90s 'ladette' culture feminism was hopelessly uncool. In the early 2000s so many women (that I knew) thought feminism was old fashioned and irrelevant.

I was an outlier being an argumentative 2nd wave feminist in my middle class Northern city.

After the #MeToo movement and the transgender nonsense, so many more women are outspoken feminists. It's brilliant.

Feminism will live as long as there is sex-based injustice and violence in the world.

It hasn’t gone anywhere. Trans activism has attacked, it’s just a new form of male aggression.

It's not that feminism is dead, it's that the backlash from men has been so devastating that it makes many women feel powerless. At the height of 2nd wave feminism, there were women only university courses, women only bars, clubs, discos, marches,places where women could gain strength from each other. All gone now. I don't think we even began to realise how hard men would fight back whenever women made a gain. So most of what women fought for - women's refuges, rape crisis centres, equal pay, equal opportunities, equality at work has been trashed. We assumed men would come around to our point of view, when in fact they are fighting more and more viciously to hang on to their privilege. So young women will have to start all over again. It's just a shame that they don't always seem to appreciate that you cannot overthrow oppression when your oppressors are in the room.