Where's your personal feminist analysis currently at?

[HairyStorm]

Or, if you'd rather, how far have you travelled along the path from libfem to radfem? As this journey seems to be a pretty common experience around here (and indeed in any place where women are able to speak freely amongst themselves).

I've been reading about feminism, and philosophy and politics and psychology and all sorts of things, for years, gradually honing my understanding of the mechanisms by which people like me (women) get a shit deal compared to people who aren't like me (men). Others have honed their understanding through less academic means, but we're all still on the same journey.

Responses to the trans issue demonstrate this beautifully. How many of us started off liberal and inclusive and have taken an increasingly hardline stance as a result of an increased understanding of what patriarchy really means? We were sold a lie growing up, that equality had been achieved, and yet we see female rights expected to get to the back of the queue behind the rights of every group that includes males, time and again, and so the lie is revealed to us.

Where I'm at right now is understanding a unified feminist theory using the conceptual framework of memeplexes. Interlocking systems of ideas that replicate in human minds like a virus, seeking only to propagate themselves, with evolutionary pressure to privilege themselves only mitigated by the need to keep the host-mind alive and functional.

Religions are memeplexes. Ideologies are memeplexes. The concept of human rights is a memeplex. Memeplexes aren't inherently a bad thing; the capacity for them is what lets us coexist and create societies instead of just tearing each other apart in a survival of the physically-fittest free-for-all. Because when you're teaching your kid everything they need to know to survive in the social world as adults, what you're doing is installing the civilised-standards-of-behaviour memeplex in their minds.

Patriarchy is the sanitised name we give to the male-supremacy memeplex.

We agree female socialisation is bad for females - this is because female socialisation is the installation of the male-supremacy memeplex in the female mind.

We agree male socialisation is bad for females - this is because male socialisation is the installation of the male-supremacy memeplex in the male mind.

We agree rape culture is bad for females - rape culture is a manifestation of the male-supremacy memeplex. It's human minds collectively shitting all over females because they've absorbed the female-inferiority message.

We agree equal pay is good for females - because unequal pay is a manifestation of the male-supremacy memeplex. Educating females is good, because the only reason not to is the memeplex. Single-sex spaces are good, because the only reason not to have them is the memeplex.

That lie we were sold about having achieved equality? It's the latest evolution of the male-supremacy memeplex. It's in the interests of the memeplex to go stealth, to divert our attention from its presence, to naturalise itself so well that no one can even identify it - because if it can be identified it can isolated and destroyed. We've spent over a century collectively opening our eyes to the individual memes and we're seeing the shape of how they all interlock and the male-supremacy memeplex is on red alert and fighting back.

The underlying theme here is that supporting, reinforcing, and replicating the memeplex is inherently oppressive and damaging to females. The memeplex is both the purpose and the execution of female oppression. The purpose is our exploitation. Sex role stereotypes, social constructs of femininity, beauty standards and the male gaze, the devaluing of everything coded female while simultaneously coding devalued things as female - these are the execution.

Feminism isn't about equality within the memeplex. It's about liberation from the memeplex. It is about liberating ourselves from this mind-virus - our 'feminist journey' is the process of liberating ourselves.

Our evolving relationships with feminism are derided by minds infested with the virus because feminism is the cure for the virus. The virus identifies feminism as a threat and seeks to neutralise it.

Liberal feminism makes perfect sense within this conceptual framework of memeplexes. Liberal feminism is characterised as not real feminism, not really helping us but just making us feel better about being inferior etc - because liberal feminism is the male-supremacist memeplex repackaged and literally sold to us as empowerment. Because the neoliberal evolution of the capitalist memeplex is alive and well, and why give people a mind-virus for free when you can convince them to pay for it?

All of which makes me feel marginally less gloomy about the amount of otherwise decent and intelligent people who are wilfully blind to violations of women's rights - because they're not acting out of deliberate malice and they're not incapable of critical thought and they often even honestly truly believe they care about women's rights - but the male-supremacy memeplex has been colonising and co-opting their minds since the day they were born, and it's taken hold so effectively that their minds cannot always recognise violations of our rights.

Am I totally missing the mark on any of this? Would welcome constructive thoughts to hone my understanding further.

I'm between tasks and my initial thoughts are that I've travelled so much further along the path to radical feminism than I'd have believed back in the 1970s (but, I attribute that to a lot of the way in which radical feminism was depicted, even in notionally sympathetic media).

Liberal feminism is a simulacrum of liberation and has no real intention of scrutinising and addressing the harms of patriarchy and why it should be dismantled.

Intersectionality is a much-absused term that confers the imprimatur of respectability to those who have no wish to see the precepts of radical feminism become a vital political force.

Not particularly coherent but aside from the interesting lifestyle, I'm staging a reenactment of the more tedious parts of Manon Lescaut at present with a very annoying chest infection (the fact I can whine about it demonstrates my usual respiratory privilege :) ).

Yeah liberal feminism is about trying to get more comfortable with our oppression, make ourselves less offensive to them so they don't go to such lengths to make our day to day lives unbearable. Liberal feminism is about accepting male supremacy and then finding ways to be comfortable with it. Liberal feminism is about listening very carefully to what men say we need to do so they don't kill us, and getting really good at doing it.

I consider myself as much of a radical feminist as it's possible for a heterosexual married woman to be, which is a can of worms in itself I guess.

I wasn't even aware that there was something called Liberal Feminism until I joined the Green Party.

I couldn't understand where they were coming from. I couldn't understand the stances on things like prostitution and transgenderism. Neither could I understand the offensive labels that they hurled at women who took a different view: SW xx fs and t xx fs.

"OMG, like, you hate sex workers and want them to die, yeah?"

"OMG, like, you do realise that sex is spectrum, right and that there's loads of research on it? Educate yourself, update and reboot, ffs"

Discussion was impossible. Everything I knew and felt about womanhood was considered wrong-headed. My language was policed. My views were dismissed as bigoted and dangerous.

Guess what? I use my own language and terms now. I've grown in confidence and can challenge the unscientific quasi-religious batshittery, without fear of reprisals. I was always a radical feminist and never knew it - until I listened to Lib Fems.

I've never been a libfem. I went the back route to RadFem from Ladies Against Feminism. It's probably as important now to my motivations as my Catholicism, although I actually see my Feminism as a natural outworking of my faith.

I think I jumped straight from not bothered ta feminists for sorting out the world, to shit its not actually been sorted radical feminist

I have nothing coherent to say. The idea of memeplexes is totally new to me, I feel like I’ve just eaten something bigger than my head, and like a snake after swallowing a frog, I have to digest it quietly. I’m just getting my mind about replicating ideologies - it’s a whole new way of seeing things.

I read Germaine Greer as a teenager. Sheila Jeffries was one of my university lecturers. I was always a radical feminist.

What's a memeplex? And is it another way of locating misogyny in some abstract realm so that no one has to acknowledge that it's mostly being enacted by men?

No place. Not educated but know the feck between women and men
Also know how women are treated like shite in different countries
Being educated here. It’s tops education 😂😂🍺🍺💪

I’m kind of with Spasmodic I think, but I’d love to know what you’ve been reading OP.

I like the Spasm0dic journey. Very efficient!

Guess what? I use my own language and terms now. I've grown in confidence and can challenge the unscientific quasi-religious batshittery, without fear of reprisals. I was always a radical feminist and never knew it - until I listened to Lib Fems.

I'm in the lengthy process of recovering from early sexual trauma, trying to get the hang of identifying feelings in the body instead of just shoving them all in the box. This paragraph gave me an excellent opportunity to identify some really positive feelings which probably are best encompassed by the notion of sisterhood. Thank you, PamAyres, it is heartening to see how far you've travelled down the path to liberating yourself.

Floral your back round via Ladies Against Feminism sounds intriguing. I'd love to hear more about it.

What's a memeplex? And is it another way of locating misogyny in some abstract realm so that no one has to acknowledge that it's mostly being enacted by men?

I can see how it looks that way, but no, this conceptual framework doesn't let men off the hook.

What have I been reading? Tons of things! Which all end up fitting together coherently. The memeplex concept I learned about reading Dawkins; he conceptualises religions as interlocking systems of ideas and explores how they function - like mind-viruses - rather than the intent behind them. I find this framework particularly compelling because not only does it describe how religions and their members function in the world, it also offers a plausible account of how they'e enabled to function (basically, religions exploit the way our minds work in order to propagate themselves - but remember, this is a description of function, not intent). Which helped me, on a personal level, to draw a distinction between decent individuals and the fucked up ideas they've got lodged into the fabric of their minds and thus stop getting so angry at religious people, and also leads me to think we're not actually all doomed because we have the possibility of engineering mind-viruses that exploit our natural tendencies in order to make us behave better.

Lots of further interesting reading moving from here into the subject of minds, from a philosophical perspective and a modern psychological perspective, again looking primarily at accurate and coherent descriptions of function. Currently reading Cordelia Fine which ties in here.

Detour through the complete works of Pratchett, whose excellent grasp of how people and societies functioning and how this relates to the intent of individuals (a) fits in with all the above and (b) is bloody good satire. Particular focus on The Science of Discworld II, which introduced me to the concept of socialisation and provides a coherent framework for describing and understanding the function of socialisation and the recursive relationship of individual minds to society.

Which brings us full circle to "Is this a sneaky way of letting men off the hook?"

All my varied reading leads me to: I don't think men are biologically destined to be rapey entitled fuckheads. If they really were, we'd be better off rounding them up and doing away with all but a few we'd keep for breeding purposes. I think male bodies have an inbuilt capacity to dominate and exploit female bodies, because of sexual dimorphism (and here my reading list took in a variety of biologists and also Darwin).

I also think male bodies and female bodies, by dint of being human bodies with sophisticated minds, are perfectly capable of actively choosing not to exploit the inherent power imbalance of sexual dimorphism. I think society does something to baby boys to turn them into rapey fuckhead men. And I think - since rounding them all up and shooting them is not a viable option - our best bet for solving the problem of having to coexist with all these rapey fuckhead men is to identify the mechanisms of the male infant to rapey fuckhead pipeline, and then stop enacting them.

( Bloody hell, that was long. Sorry. My brain is too full of words and they need to come out somewhere!)

From this section being established in 2010 to now...
I've gone from being married to an abusive man and having a relatively liberal and pro-porn perspective to (chiefly thanks to dittany) a radical (or post-Christian radical lesbian feminist more precicely) viewpoint.
I've gone from working with mothers in the perinatal period (resigned from charity when a man became ceo and also the pay was so bad) to working as a development worker in the women's sector.
I'm now with a lovely woman who actually supports me and vice versa.
When living alone I managed to save enough for my part of a deposit on a house.
So I still have 3 DC but they all have their own rooma and I have space for the feminist library I amassed reading threads on here.

I'm studying public sociologies and gender and hunting down materialist texts acceptable to use on gender studies courses such as Nancy Fraser and stevi Jackson.

I became a radical feminist quite quickly I think but sorting my life out so I can make more of a difference took time.
And also I am at a point where I can talk quite comfortably to people about my views and respect theirs rather than shaking with rage at how misogynistic they are.

I still read books mostly by women but I can watch more media now. For a whIle I could only watch things that were relatively feminist.
It seems there are more of those now anyway -unbreakable kimmy Schmidt etc

Interesting thread OP, thanks for starting.

Honestly? I'm actually pretty ashamed to say that I'm now in my (very early) 40's and until the last 12-18 months feminism has only been on my peripheral. I mean I've always known very bad things happen to women and girls somewhere every second of the day however I've always let others try and fight that battle.

The last year or so and to be honest being on MN has opened my eyes and now I can't stop talking about all the bad shit, I'm starting bit by bit to call others out on their attitudes and behaviour. And every day I try and have small, light (a drip drip effect if you like) conversations with my daughter, the kind I really wish my mum had done with me so she grows up knowing she doesn't have to take all this crap do many of us have had to.

So I've gone from pretty much asleep to galvanised (and often now, angry) in a very short space of time 😊

I'm aware this had been an incoherent ramble!

I love Pratchett beyond reason. Hogfather contains one of the most brilliant and honest examinations of how abstract concepts of justice and love and beauty fit in a purely material universe. I wish he was still around.

I started out in a dysfunctional family setting. Abuse, abandonment, divorce, financial distress, the works. Ended up finding religion in my very late teens/early twenties and settled into the most strict extreme versions which were hugely comforting to someone with my background. Eventually the straightjacket started to itch, though, and, as I've written elsewhere on here, a woman either rebels and becomes a heretic, or finds a way to exist in the strict system.

I got involved with groups that promoted Ladies Against Feminism, which you can still find on the web now. Other groups like Vision Forum which were connected to it have folded because of the sexual impropriety of the owner. I can see the surprise on everyones face.

I kept a reasonably well read blog that spoke out often against 'Feminism' - which I now realize was a strawman, largely based in LibFem ideas.

Eventually reality couldn't be ignored, though, and in the midst of sexual scandals, I was dealing with the consequences of doctrines like Quiverfull on my own body, and that bodily reality set me on a path out of fundamentalism entirely.

I'm still religious - discovering things like the Catholic Theology of the Body was very helpful to me - but I'm not an automaton anymore, desperately needing the solid walls of a closed mind around me.

And given that it was the physical reality of my female body that eventually led me out if cultish religion, it seems more than appropriate to end up at Radical Feminism.

Interesting thread! I’m massively not well read but I have collected a variety of female-physical-based life experiences (many not by choice) that make me instinctively gender critical before I even had any words to describe that idea.

Plus a dawning that the lib fem thing (in practice at least) seems based on some women ‘not being like other women’ and being so much more cool girl than those other women- which is basically self deluding while they are performing for male approval. What things do Lib fems argue for that’s different from what men already want women to do?

The women I know who post on social media that TWAW or that TW are their sisters are women who have always been keen for male approval and quite insecure about things. They were all over that whole ‘sex-positive’ thing way back when.

It’s depressingly consistent. It doesn’t seem to sit well with ‘feminism’ as I would recognise it but as I say I am not well read in this so I may well have the terms wrong.

Also important to mention that MN has been a real education for me as a lurker and poster btw to so many posters!

I'd consider myself a radical feminist if I'd ever read any radical feminist writers. I haven't, so I just tag along and pick up snippets of information here on MN as it's presented in a way that I can understand 😁

Love this discussion and gonna come back to it - my husband once told me I was a radical feminist and I told him it’s one of the nicest things he’s ever said to me :) the idea of the memeplex is interesting as it does help explain why otherwise very switched on people can’t understand or see structural inequality when it’s right in front of them. What I’m less certain of is how to talk about it - difficult not to hace it feel like a sentient entity - in Pratchett it would be - a memeplex snaking its way invisibly through minds and around the eyes....how do individual actions and the development of independent thought fit within the concept?

I got told I was a feminist at school for arguing for womens equality and being pretty upfront about womens sexuality/sexual pleasure being as important as men.
I don't regard myself as a liberal or radical feminist. I'm just a feminist- for me that means focussing on womens rights.
I think historically I would be closer to.liberal feminism as it was about acting in existing laws and structures rather than reimagining society to remove barriers to women.
However I think the modern lib fem movement has been perverted by allowing men to become involved and influence the lib fem discourse. Hence it's now all about penis power (prostitution as "Sex work", porn as harmless choice, sex positivity becoming less about female pleasure and more about men indulging their kinks etc).
I think "intersectionality" (not as defined by Crenshaw but the recent interpretation of it) and the lefts tendency to split everyone into smaller and smaller groups bases on political nuances, plus identity politics, has really damaged feminism too.

I'm just a hairy arsed, dungaree wearing, bra burning old school feminist who believes there is a lot to do to liberate cunty people from male supremacy I guess.

I used to think feminism was about everyone and for everyone. I now think that feminism must be about and for women only or it is doomed to be meaningless and ineffectual.

I realised it's actually pathetic to beg men to care about women by pretending that feminism is also for them. The most bizarre example of this I ever saw was an article about how 'male feminists' have better sex because feminists are all liberated and sex-positive, as opposed to the prudish and repressed non-feminists. Feminism should not be about being sexy for men. Men, please please support women's rights, it will be good for your penis! So cringe worthy. And not only is it pathetic, but it will never work. Some men will get on board with the man-friendly feminism in order to look cool, but most will continue to resist wherever their privilege is actually challenged.

I also realised that doing exactly what the patriarchy wants you to do whilst claiming that this is empowering, feminist is just a huge analytical error. Like women claiming that they are 'expressing their sexuality' by catering to the male gaze. No, you're expressing men's sexuality. It slowly dawned on me that feminism had been hijacked and a lot of it was now just patriarchy-approved bullshit that had been cleverly rebranded. The extreme example for me is women calling themselves feminists arguing in favour of prostitution, which even in the depths of my libfem confusion I recognised as the most vile manifestation of everything that is wrong with our sexist society.

So now I'm in the process of going back to basics and everything makes so much more sense.

This article from the wonderful Meghan Murphy basically nails it for me when it comes to where 3rd wave feminism went wrong:

i-d.vice.com/en_au/article/zmn9b4/on-international-womens-day-lets-remember-what-feminism-is-really-about-women

Definite theme here that fits nicely into the memeplex framework.

The individual memes are implanted into our minds on a subconscious level, and as we go about our lives constructing narratives of reality based on empirical data and fundamental truths in order to navigate both the physical and the social world (Pratchett again), our brains interpret these memes as fundamentally true. We weight them as though they were based on solid empirical data.

SuperLoud's charity work, Floral's immersion in religion, all of ChattyLion's female-physical based life experiences serve the same function, in this context.

They all highlight the fact that the relevant individual memes are not true. Not fundamental, not innate, not universal truths, not worth weighting accordingly. The life experience reveals the lie of the meme.

If we're only talking one meme, this isn't a major problem from the perspective of the memeplex. It's still stealth, it's still buried in your subconscious, and all its other tentacles are still firmly wound around your thought processes, so you're still going to facilitate it being transmitted to other minds.

But the individual memes are like jigsaw pieces. And your brain has some fucking awesome pattern recognition software built in. One meme: no pattern here, just some random sexist crap accidentally picked up from somewhere. Two, three, four memes - the pattern recognition software registers "random sexist crap floats around." Still no real pattern here. The mind-virus is still camouflaged.

More life experiences happen. More empirical evidence is collected, revealing further fundamental truths to be nothing more than sexist memes that have got lodged into the subconscious.

Eventually, that pattern recognition software is going to spot the pattern. It's going to recognise the underlying principles tying all these memes together. It's going to recognise how they fit together functionally. It's going to recognise the mind-virus.

All these disparate lived experiences that have shown us the reality of women's lives lead us to the same place. They give us the hard empirical data our minds need in order to see that all the individual random-sexist-crap ideas are lies.

And that leads us to question why we're being fed this whole memeplex of sexist lies in the first place.

One thing I learned from reading about how we use the principles of evolution to inform our understanding of why biological features exist - always ask "what would happen if this were different?" Like zebra stripes - why do they have stripes? Because if they didn't they'd be more likely to get eaten by lions.

What would happen if we didn't have this male-supremacy memeplex implanted into all our brains? Well, we'd not be being raped and exploited and expected to wipe the arses of the world, for a start. Which is a pretty good indication that this particular memeplex is not benign, and needs rooting out.

And I think it leads us to an articulation of the commonality of the female experience, which includes all females (including transmen) and excludes all males (including transwomen).

We take the female-phenotype-specific route to identifying each sexist strand of the memeplex, weighing it against our first-person lived experience of female-phenotype reality, and see that it is a lie.

The ultimate aim may be for every mind to identify and neutralise this mind-virus within themselves, but this virus comes in male and female flavours - females get "you are inferior / they are superior" implanted; males get "you are superior / they are inferior".

The thing that unifies us psychologically is the flavour of the mind-virus that infected us. And you cannot neutralise one flavour and replace it with the other simply by declaring it to be so. You have no element of choice over which flavour of the mind-virus you get. You're going to be affected by the flavour of mind-virus that has evolved over millennia to most effectively and efficiently infect minds in the social and biological context of your phenotype.

That is a brilliant article magic

After listening to the patriarchy programme yesterday (thread about it www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3403876-R4-Key-Words-for-Our-Time-The-Patriarchy-with-Natalie-Haynes), I wonder if we need to somehow make a distinction between wanting to dismantle patriarchy and being feminist.

The podcast argued that patriarchy is another form of oligarchy where power is concentrated in the hands of a few. In a patriarchy, it's concentrated in the hands of some men.

Men who are uncomfortable with oligarchy as a concept, who feel disadvantaged and oppressed themselves by the patriarchy, should organise to dismantle the patriarchy and in that case, would have common ground with feminists.

But wanting to dismantle the patriarchy doesn't in and of itself make them feminist. I think that misconception may be why men have got a toe hold in liberal feminism. Time to tell them to set up their own anti-patriarchal movement. Feminism is for women.

I'm following you, but I'd just like to pick up on this;

we'd not be being raped and exploited and expected to wipe the arses of the world, for a start

I'm not sure that in the scheme of thought you're describing, these things would all be the case. Yes, there may well not be the expectation that it's a woman's lot to do the arse wiping, because that's a socially conditioned expectation, but the rape and exploitation are largely based in physical realities - men being bigger and stronger and so on - and I can't see how that would necessarily be challenged by recognizing patriarchal 'memeplexes' in our minds.

Whats feminist about liberal feminism?

What would happen if we didn't have this male-supremacy memeplex implanted into all our brains? Well, we'd not be being raped and exploited and expected to wipe the arses of the world, for a start. Which is a pretty good indication that this particular memeplex is not benign, and needs rooting out.
Ah but this is where you need to consider where we were, not where we are.
Human infants can't be raised by the mother alone and we have pair bonding to assist with raising children.
We also appear to have a cat and mouse game of hidden ovulation making it so the most successful mating strategy for a man to be monogamous and therefore put his resources into that relationship. This benefits the woman as she doesn't risk her own life and spend time gestating a baby that might die if the father fucks off. But the man doesn't want to put his resources into another man's child and with the advent of resources that can be passed between generations (money, land, etc) that fear is increased.
So the driver for the man is to guard the woman to prevent his resource/effort being spent on genes that aren't his.
I'm pretty sure that the higher risk of women dying in childbirth affects whether from a genetic sense it is more effective for resources to be inherited via the paternal vs maternal line. When I have time I will do a computer model.

But anyway, I think the fact patriarchy is so well embedded probably has biological roots rather than just being a cultural thing. The memeplex grew from the biology. Same is true of religion.

It's a shame really that most people writing about this are men because that will definitely be affecting their perspective.

Whats feminist about liberal feminism?

It's like the difference between strawberry flavour and strawberry-flavoured in purchased foodstuffs.

Legally, one doesn't have to contain strawberry, just give a facsimile of the experience of tasting strawberry: the other actually has to contain strawberry.