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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 Am I totally out of date?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:
BuffytheReasonableFeminist · 07/08/2015 11:05

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BuffytheReasonableFeminist · 07/08/2015 11:05

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OTheHugeManatee · 07/08/2015 11:31

I suppose what I posted above comes at least in part from doing quite a bit of reading lately about speech codes and 'call-out culture' and particularly about the ways they are being applied in universities today - ways that in my view are worryingly inimical to free speech, academic freedom and education generally in any sense that is meaningful to me. I find it very strange. Also when I think back to a time when I was very preoccupied with structural inequalities and (I suppose) misogynist microaggressions (though I didn't call them that), I don't recall that the heightened awareness I had of these things translated into anything that was of practical benefit to me as a woman or even just as a person. Certainly my life as a woman and as a functioning individual has got easier in inverse proportion to how chippy I am about interpersonal relations.

Mostly, hyper-awareness of interpersonal micro-conflicts just made me miserable and angry. Or perhaps it was a channel for misery and anger I already had. I'm not sure. What I do suspect, though, is that these kinds of critiques are all very well as ideas but when people try to apply them practically the results do not seem to me demonstrably any better for the people supposedly being protected from oppression. Or, indeed, for the society within which they and others are all trying to function.

What you say about practical experiences of discrimination also resonates with me, albeit from a different angle. Recently, going through early pregnancy and then MC has led me to re-evaluate pretty radically my stance toward a number of areas of feminism. Prior to that being female-bodied seemed to me a minor detail which obviously it was absurd to discriminate against as what difference does it make in a non-manual workplace? But suddenly when you're facing morning sickness, trying to figure out how to handle time off for childbirth when you're working freelance, then needing time off to recover and grieve after miscarriage all kinds of practical/pragmatic things hit home to which there are no easy solutions. Though in general I'm not a huge fan of statist interference I find myself newly appreciative of the regulatory situation we have in the UK, which is massively better than many other countries for working women. But still not perfect - because the situation itself is inherently full of conflicting needs and wishes.

Pregnancy itself also throws up all kinds of interesting and difficult questions around bodily autonomy which intersect in quite complex ways with different political strands of thought. For example, the statist instinct to interfere in and regulate everything including health choices has an impact on how pregnancy and motherhood is discussed and handled from a public health point of view. Similarly the right-wing/libertarian stance of pragmatism, autonomy and personal choice comes into conflict with (also perceived as right-wing) socially conservative antipathy to abortions: should women be free to choose, or is a foetus a person and if that is the case what is the woman's rights in relation to this person who cannot survive independently of her body? Not easy questions and again not straightforwardly left=profeminist and right=anti.

I'm rambling a bit, I think, but I really enjoy unpicking the interrelations between political viewpoints and feminist ones because I just don't think it's useful to assume (as I think many do) that feminism is automatically a left-wing thing.

BuffytheReasonableFeminist · 07/08/2015 11:36

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DirtyDeedsD0neDirtCheap · 07/08/2015 11:39

interesting thread

i definitely identify as left wing

and am definitely a feminist

interestingly, the friends I have who are feminists and loud and proud about it (as am I) are also left wing

the friends i have who either don't really get feminism are usually the ones I would call right wing

I have more friends in the first category ;)

caroldecker · 07/08/2015 11:39

On the colour issue, I have just gone into customise and changed back to how it was - and also removed TIO from TIW.

My problem with Grand Unifying Theories is that they force people into boxes and remove choice. Barriers are set-up by the State and large corporations to protect thier postion and restrict choice. These barriers need to be minimised as much as possible, and only the right can do this. However, the modern right, particularly in the US is very socially illiberal, so is not much better than the Left in removing barriers.

BuffytheReasonableFeminist · 07/08/2015 11:42

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Coffeemarkone · 07/08/2015 11:42

Seems a really simplistic question really.
What is 'left wing' and 'right wing' anyway? Arent most people somewhere on either side of the 'divide'.
I dont think you need to be a socialist to want equal opportunities for women do you?
All those nice private schools in N London eg NLCS - hardly hotbeds of socialism are they? Yet they have been offering equal opps for girls for decades.
Silly question sorry.

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

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.

BuffytheReasonableFeminist · 07/08/2015 11:46

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BuffytheReasonableFeminist · 07/08/2015 11:49

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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 12:14

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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 14:49

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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 15:01

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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 16:09

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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)

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.

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.

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.

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