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 started our mostly Rad but a bit afraid of the "label" as a teenager in the 80's.

Strayed more into liberal grounds when I wasn't paying attention.

Woke the fuck up swiftly after giving birth and have been positively proudly absolutely a Radical Feminist ever since.

Bit worried this might mean my daughters will backlash and become Lib Fems

I have never encountered the word memeplex before

On "Where would we be without the male-supremacy memeplex?"

Remember that it's not the only memeplex. There are tons of the buggers!

On the physical level, as Floral says we have still got the built-in exploitability of our sexually-dimorphic reproductive mechanism. Pair-bonding while shagging about on the side is a sound reproductive strategy for the Y chromosome. It's less great for women, because their shagging about translates to our being left with a kid but no pair-bond with which to raise it, which hampers our ability to propagate and raise the next generation of our own genes. But it works well enough, and evolutionary pressure isn't so much a case of "designing the best thing possible" but more like "does this bodge job work well enough for the meantime? Yes? Great, we'll go for it!"

But this all happened a loooooong time ago. Where are we at now?

We've still got pair-bonding, and we've still got men shagging on the side - but they're not all doing it. Why? We've got intelligent men who know full well they can "win" biologically speaking, propagate their own genes widely and successfully, by shagging about - but they don't do it. And if you ask them why they'll offer you lots of well-reasoned explanations.

These explanations are manifestations of the pair-bonding memeplex.

So when I say "what would happen if we neutralised the male-supremacy memeplex?" I'm looking to explore the phase space of the adjacent-possible (Pratchett yet again; if we really must have old white guys with big beards as deities then can I have him?) not in purely biological, physical terms, but in terms of the interplay between the physical world rooted in biology (aka genes) and minds/society (aka memes).

So: what would happen if we got rid of the "me dominant; you exploitable object" meme that is so fundamental to male socialisation, but retained the "mutual co-operation to ensure prosperity" memes and the "everybody has inviolable human rights" memes and the "would be kinda handy if we still have a planet to live on in a hundred years" memes that are integral parts of other memeplexes?

Aside: arranfan your strawberry analogy is excellent; the other day I was trying to explain to my fruit-averse child that no, she may like strawberry flavoured things but she can't say she likes strawberries because in five years I've yet to persuade her to try one - never would have thought to draw a parallel with liberal feminism!

As for Quentin's points about patriarchy and oligarchy - interesting! Will read and listen later when I have time, but my initial reaction is: we're using different conceptual models of what patriarchy actually is, or possibly applying the label patriarchy to distinct yet interlocking and mutually-reinforcing things.

I'd describe our society as patriarchal because the concept of malesuperior/femalesuperior is an integral part of it. When we're talking about how that concept manifests in the world, in social systems, in all the structures that comprise our society, we use the word patriarchy.

When we're talking about oligarchy, we're not talking about the malesuperior/femaleinferior concept or the injustices of its manifestations. We're talking about a different sex of power relations. In an oligarchy, the elite is the particular small group of people who get the superior tag added to their group. Everyone else gets the inferiority tag. And what we see in the real world is: within oligarchies, even the males at the very bottom of the power heap still benefit from malesuperior being infused in everything, because there are still women around taking on everything associated with the femaleinferior concept.

So these men who want to "dismantle the patriarchy" because they don't like oligarchy aren't actually proposing the dismantle the malesuperior/femaleinferior dichotomy [do I mean dichotomy or binary? Not sure; but you get what I mean]. They're proposing to dismantle a separate power structure - but they've learned that the name for The Elite, The Powers That Be, The People Who Run The World etc etc is "patriarchy".

I liketne concept of the memeplex, as I see it as very similar to the concepts of ‘narratives’ or ‘discursive resources’, although the memeplexes are, as I understand it, more patterned.

This raises an 8nteresting question of whether our tendency to look for organised patterns is itself a memeplex, or maybe looking for patterns is just an extremely useful way of making sense of the world.

Certainly, it is useful for radical feminism to recognise phenomena in the world as linked with patriarchal ideas, and allows us to group disparate phenomena together and see how theyall relate to basic patriarchal ways of viewing the world.

Both the conecpts of memeplexes and discursive resources allow us to understand how meaning making never happens in a vacuum, but is inflected by how we already assign certain meanings to people, things, power relatiosn, anything at all, really.

If we understand everything as already situated within meaning making systems, it becomes untenable to hold with a lib fem interpretation of feminism. We could say liberal feminism is characterised not only by being man-pleasing, but also by a refusal to see any patterns in how men and women are positioned relatice to each other at all.

I am currently on the path of having moved away from liberal feminism to radical feminism, and now considering whether it would not be better to abandon the term ‘feminism’ altogether, and talk instead of ‘women's liberation’.

I would also like to move away from using the terms as identity labels, such as describing ourselves as ‘a feminist’ or ‘a women’s libber’.
We should remeber that women’s liberation is an ideology, a set of politics and a movement, rather than a description of individuals.

Feminism should never have become a badge, in the style of ‘pronoun badges’. It should always be a movement and a struggle for women’sliberation.

I asked "what's a memeplex" and you didn't really answer OP. I take it 'virus' is a metaphor? What's it a metaphor for?

I've always shared rad fem beliefs on sex work , gender, transsexuality, reproductive rights, patriarchy.

My major gripe with feminism, including rad feminism, is that beyond provision of child care, it neglects maternal feminism.

My feminism is strongly bound up with the rights of the the child, and I feel that no branch of feminism truly centres children alongside women.

I am not particularly active, so although I have rad fem beliefs (many) and Marxist feminist beliefs (some), I would not describe myself as a radical feminist or a Marxist feminist.

I’m at a crossroads of understanding at the moment and I’m finding my own views in the context of wider society/politics/media don’t seem to have a place at all, specifically in relation to this huge trans rights subjects.

My own stand point is on the one hand, I really don’t have any sort of problem with people identifying as trans, being gender fluid etc. My personal opinion is that a fair proportion of people who feel that way these days identify more steadily as trans or non binary because they’re fed the idea that if they don’t fit certain stereotypical behaviour then they aren’t confirming to that gender and therefore shouldn’t identify as that sex - which in my opinion is wrong but I completely understand that sexuality can be complex for people and I do empathise with that and think that people should be able to live what life they feel best suits them.

On the other hand though, I’m naturally a strong believer in the pretty obvious and significant differences between males and females. I’m very confused and alarmed at the sense of entitlement that seems to have emerged over women’s rights and spaces and am alarmed at the sheer force and rate at which these unchallenged and IMO ill thought out law changes, policies and ways of thinking when there is a clear concern from women about the effects this will have on women. I really struggle to see why coverage for women’s arguments seem to be limited to outspoken feminist advocates on social media and forums like this one, while it feels like trans activists have entire monetised organisations behind them that are swiftly influencing law and education.

I also (candidly) feel like there are only these 2 very distinct sides, and that any acceptance of a male living as a female is shot down in discussion by feminists and that any mention of a middle ground e.g. third safe space is met with a surprising (to me) amount of aggression and vitriol by trans activists. I’m having to reconsider my entire political following because of Labour’s complete lack of support for women and what feels like they’re unthinking and unbalanced unwavering support for any type of trans activism.

I don’t know what to do or think for the best and the increase in incidences like people who have spent almost their whole life as women being able to compete and obviously win women’s sporting events seems ridiculous and almost like a parody of political correctness.

It’s a difficult place to be on the fence on and I’m really finding it hard to understand why there’s seems to be absolutely no middle ground.

Sorry that should say whole life spent doing biological men

Sorry to spam the thread but ContentiousOne that is really interesting and I really agree with you about the idea of maternal feminism and I’ve never heard the term before, but it seems to represent something I’ve struggled to articulate about my own beliefs too. Going to give it a google :)

Fallin you’ve said what I have been struggling with trying to put into words: We could say liberal feminism is characterised not only by being man-pleasing, but also by a refusal to see any patterns in how men and women are positioned relative to each other at all.

That’s it isn’t it. It’s this naive kind of starting point of needing to ignore the obvious and pretend all things are equal when they are not. And refuse to acknowledge generalisable patterns of behaviour that can be observed about men or women. It’s a wilfully blind kind of individualism.
I think that’s why for a lot of women it no longer works as a framework for understanding the world after you’ve had a few years of living in the world (and especially once you have kids) because it just doesn’t fit with all the patterns you can easily observe for yourself as a woman over a relatively short time.

I’ve not heard of memeplexes before but it seems an interesting idea, although an awful name which makes my brain slides over it!

I know from myself it took being a mum to become aware of how utterly unjust things are and that led to an awareness of radical feminism. Prior to that, all the shit that had happened to me because I was a girl/woman I’d put down to bad luck or it being somehow my fault or my failing. I realised the pattern was there and it wasn’t my fault but I’m still angry because I don’t understand why I seem to have experienced so much shit.

I think in general we’re encouraged to put thinking about men’s issues first which always leaves less thinking time for women’s issues and how much easier it is to assume once we’ve sorted it for men then it is automatically sorted for women and then we don’t have to think anymore at all!

I think being a mum and feminism is really important. As I said, it’s what led me to an awareness of radical feminism but I can see that even here (when we get a little chance to talk about feminism and not men ) posters are not kind to mothers who are not doing it a certain way. Just acknowledging we don’t all get to choose our circumstances would be a start.

ContentiousOne I’m an aging radical feminist who was active in the old days

I don't think either radical feminism or liberal feminism are quite the same now as they were then. For a start, it was terribly untrendy to be a lib fem and most women who were were very conservative.

I've never really been either. I'm closest to socialist or materialist feminism (old style, not new).

Posted too soon - I think that one of the most fundamental issues for me is domestic labour, which I think should be equally shared. I walked away from feminism in the 90s when all I found was post-modernism and calls for flexibility and family friendly policies for women (and not men). I've always been vigilant around reproductive rights though, particularly to abortion - again I find this best expressed via socialist feminism.

Wow! This thread is fascinating. My weekend reading is sorted!

Sorry for disappearing temporarily; I had to name-change to post about a personal crisis and knew I'd cock up eventually if I kept switching between usernames so I've been lurking.

And also having an existential crisis, apparently.

I've been rereading this thread, and only managing to get through a paragraph at a time - everything everyone else says, everything everyone else reports experiencing, is all being fitted into the analytical framework that informs my own thoughts/mind/identity/self. If it fits I know my analytical framework is serving me well as a protocol for interaction with the world, and if it doesn't fit I know the protocol needs adjusting to accommodate. So far, everything fits. I like this. It means we really are all talking about the same concepts and the same observational data on material reality - and that closes off one avenue by which my brain may get lost in a paralysing solipsistic spiral. Phew!

It's all been getting a bit meta in my head, in terms of my OP. Because some people aren't clear about what the phenomena being referred to with the label memeplex is - and while I was exploring those phenomena in my mind in an attempt to find a concise and accessible explanation, my brain got distracted by the realisation that: I've got the conceptual/linguistic analytical framework used to describe and process that phenomena incorporated into the analytical framework/protocols that comprise my own brain/mind unit.

And some people don't have that analytical framework incorporated, so they don't quite understand what I'm talking about and probably think I've lost the plot. By trying to find the words, I'm trying to find a way to begin incorporating the analytical framework of memeplexes into someone else's mind - and that starts to look like analytical frameworks function in a similar way to memeplexes, and then my brain's off down another rabbit-hole of analysis -

• But then I drag it back to this thread. How does this all fit in with the fact that Libfems Don't Make Sense?

This looks like a derail, but it's not: try to really think about how you'd identify "your gender" if the analytical framework underpinning the ideology of gender identity had been successfully incorporated into your mind.

From listening to libfems and the queer/snowflake crowd talking about their genders, and analysing all this observational data, I surmise that they believe the label "gender identity" attaches to the nature of the dominant analytical framework of their mind.

(Which, coincidentally, appears to be the phenomenon that the conceptual framework built around the notion of "identity" ties into.)

So, if I conceptualise "myself" as "the dominant analytic framework my mind operates on", and phrase this as "my gender identity", I can honestly and truthfully say: I am wankypomowordsaladgender, and this is a verifiable and fundamental truth as documented by observational data including the entirety of my posts in this thread - and yet I am also Stibbonsgender, because the observational data I have acquired throughout the entirely of my lived experience demonstrates that I am indeed cursed with the utter conviction that the universe is somehow solveable (and also that Pratchett has been very effectively incorporated into my mind).

How can I be two "gender identities" at once, and both of these "genders" be true/real/accurate interpretations of the observational data? Because I'm interpreting the data using two different frameworks.

And then, analysing aaaaaaall of that together, I'm looking at the pragmatic, how this is all playing out in the real world as a massive clusterfuck and how do we solve it, level of things, and concluding:

The people thinking and behaving in a way we scathingly refer to as libfem differ from me/us in one fundamental way, and it is as follows:

They have functionally incorporated an analysis of how observable phenomena (real world) and protocols for processing data on that phenomena (minds) integrate and operate, and it has mostly served them well - and then they've integrated the conceptual framework of gender identity into the protocols - but this is proving incomplete/not sufficiently usefully accurate for processing data about observable phenomena like retention of male-pattern criminality or the fact that TIMS dominate while TIFs have babies.

And then, instead of working out how to adjust the protocols to fit the available data, they're insisting the data is wrong.

Which (a) breaks all of the accepted "scientific method" protocols and (b) ties right in with my current reading material A Mind of its Own by Cordelia Fine.

Right. Now going to shut up and try to catch up on the rest of the thread!

I asked "what's a memeplex" and you didn't really answer OP. I take it 'virus' is a metaphor? What's it a metaphor for?

Trying to answer this sort of question truthfully is what's prompting my existential crisis! It feels like you're asking me what a memeplex is constructed out of in the real world and I can't actually tell you - because there's not necessarily a real physical material unified thing here; the thing exists in the reality collectively created by minds.

We have some pretty solid frameworks for understanding physical-world level stuff, and particularly for understanding the evolution of things within it, and for drawing out principles to describe it. And if you apply the principles of How Matter Evolves Into Living Organisms and How They Function and Replicate from the physical world to the collective-minds world, you can identify collections of ideas functioning together following the same principles we use to describe physical-world viruses.

Does that make sense?

I would also like to move away from using the terms as identity labels, such as describing ourselves as ‘a feminist’ or ‘a women’s libber’. We should remeber that women’s liberation is an ideology, a set of politics and a movement, rather than a description of individuals.

Just looking at this against my musing a little while ago about identity/self labels attaching to the analytical frameworks and protocols that comprise the mind - hm. I need more observational data on your views in order to incorporate them properly into my functional understanding of the world. What's your take on why it's important to move away from identity labels?

Would it not also be important to remember that there's an ideology called women's lib, there's politics called women's lib, there's grassroots activism called women's lib, there's a section of the library called women's lib, there are people doing women's lib in the real world, there are individual women doing liberation of their own minds - there are lots and lots of different but interconnected real-world things that we label women's lib - and we need to remember that they're facets of one unified thing on a conceptual level, but they're not all the same actual thing on the physical-world level.

Prior to that, all the shit that had happened to me because I was a girl/woman I’d put down to bad luck or it being somehow my fault or my failing. I realised the pattern was there and it wasn’t my fault but I’m still angry because I don’t understand why I seem to have experienced so much shit.

On a psychology level, this is interesting - identifying a pattern of real-world behaviour and locating its cause within rather than without. And it's interesting on a feminism level - eg the phenomena we've no doubt all seen where if a liaison fails because he doesn't like her they both think there's something wrong with her, and if a liaison fails because she doesn't like him they both think there's something wrong with her - women are socialised to internalise versus men are socialised to externalise the sources of problems.

That’s it isn’t it. It’s this naive kind of starting point of needing to ignore the obvious and pretend all things are equal when they are not. And refuse to acknowledge generalisable patterns of behaviour that can be observed about men or women. It’s a wilfully blind kind of individualism.

How many thousands and thousands of words has my brain and my keyboard gone through trying to encapsulate this, and you've got it down to three sentences. Nice one. Am totally using this as evidence that I'm not going mad (or if I am at least I'm not going there alone).

I'm just thinking about it along the lines of: pretend all things are equal - a fundamental part of quite a few memeplexes is the idea that "we are all equal" and I think people incorporate that particular meme without really considering exactly what it means. Because on the real-world level we're clearly not all identical, not the same, we have different bodies that work differently etc etc - so "we are all equal" must be operating within the collective-minds world of concepts. And I think it's part of a memeplex of progressive forward-thinking 'let's be the best humans we can be collectively' ideas.

And then the problem of people not always being able to articulate the distinctions between physical-world and collective-minds world comes into play again. Because people accept "everyone equal" as a fundamental truth without stopping to consider how that translates from collective-minds reality to play out in physical-material reality - so then we end up with people who don't yet quite grasp that "everyone equal" doesn't mean "let's treat everyone the same and let everyone pee in the same room" but rather "everyone has equal right to a safe peeing room; let's analyse the observational data to determine the operational parameters of 'safe'."

Radfem all the way (and getting more so as time goes on, if that’s even a thing). The same as a previous poster, I think Meghan Murphy has some amazing analyses of the thinking behind radical feminism in the present. I don’t have a lot of time for the choosey-choice libfem crap. I think pornography and the patriarchal desire to use and abuse women underpins everything feminist.

This is a fantastic thread! Marking my place though, as my children (who are interrupting every five seconds) are not helping me to read it properly atm

Beyond I just sent mine to her grandma's for a few days - I'm going to be word-vomiting all over your screen for days.

you can identify collections of ideas functioning together following the same principles we use to describe physical-world viruses

Hum. I think it's an interesting take, and perhaps fair enough as long as you never lose sight of the fact that you are using a metaphor and that with that metaphor come all sorts of (implicit but probably inaccurate) assumptions about the mechanics of the process and its causality.

I have 2 worries about it. First, that by conceptualising male supremacy in terms of the impersonal raison d'etre of a virus rather than by the functions it serves for those who enact it, we lose sight of vitally important aspects of feminist analysis. Second, that it's a very dualist / postmodern take and I feel we have already got too far away from an acknowledgment of material reality in our thinking about disadvantage.

I do appreciate you engaging with my questions though - thanks.

as long as you never lose sight of the fact that you are using a metaphor

This times infinity!

I personally am aware that I'm operating in the realm of metaphor and it's not going to line up perfectly with reality; that's one of the points I was rambling obliquely about earlier. Whatever metaphor or conceptual framework or analytical protocol or whatever you want to call it that's being used to understand the world needs to be continually refined in order to describe new real-world data coming in - if it doesn't, it rapidly becomes less and less useful as a means of enabling effective navigation through the world.

But pretty much no one is doing this! We see it in the trans movement, we see it in the way Democrats are reacting to this recent Title IX thing, it happens all the bloody time throughout history - real-world stuff doesn't fit the metaphor, but people reject the truth of the real-world stuff in favour of clinging extra-tight to the metaphor, and then everything progressively goes to shit.

It's a major problem for humanity, this tendency, and I think we'd have a better chance as a species going forward if we were all a bit more of aware of the possibility we're doing it.

Second, that it's a very dualist / postmodern take

I need to do some more reading up on precisely how "postmodernism" works before I can comment on that part. Dualism seems to be an inbuilt feature of minds though, and I'm not entirely certain we're each understanding the word to mean precisely the same thing here. My whole position's actually informed by the need to account for that tendency towards dualistic thinking when navigating the world. And I'm not actually sure if I'm making sense, or if we're basically saying the same thing just in really different (and in your case much more concise!) words.

And I kind of... have to engage with your questions, I think - because your questions are indicative of the parameters of whatever frameworks and metaphors are going on in your mind - and that right there is some observational data about how a particular manifestation of a mind/body unit navigates the world, so I really need to collect that data and work out if and where my own frameworks need to adjust to accommodate it. You're helping me by asking questions, and it's helping me to answer them - from my perspective this is win-win.