If I'm a feminist but not radical or liberal, what am I?

[itsnotawatercat]

I'm gender critical, and radical feminism is much more up my street than liberal/intersectional feminism. (eg I think porn and prostitution are harmful to women).

But I don't agree with the rad fems who say all heterosexual relationships and motherhood are both, by nature harmful to women, and, ideally, best avoided.

Is there a branch of feminism that celebrates motherhood? And recognises that it is at least possible for a women to be (shock horror!) happy in - and not oppressed by - her individual heterosexual relationship, despite the societal background of misogyny?

(Did I just commit heresy?! )

And yeah. How to escape it? There's no pathway out. Feminism is like, oh whoops, you chose wrong, okay bye.

she made it realily clear that one of her aims was not to become a loser "just a mother

Haha! God yes. And I really wonder how many feminists didn't become mothers because they essentially thought/think mothers were just losers.

I mean under patriarchy the weak, the vulnerable , are losers. So they're not wrong in that sense.

But it's a bit different to becoming child free for feminist reasons, isn't it. Or for the sake of the children. Or to save the planet.

women are childfree by choice for positive reasons of course; but if you go about acting like mothers are losers as part of your politics, then I might hazard a guess that a choice you made when you were young runs no deeper than you simply thought mothers were shit, the way people often think women are shit.

And yeah. How to escape it? There's no pathway out. Feminism is like, oh whoops, you chose wrong, okay bye.

I know

And because I had no idea how powerless mothers actually were, I thought I had a better chance of protecting my children from the ravages or patriarchy. Naive

Not everything that is difficult in life is down to 'the patriarchy'.....

as I believe outside of a patriarchy women would be able to run things more ecologically anyway

What do you mean by this, and how? Do you really believe that women are essentially better human beings than men?

So being a mother isn't really a free and informed choice imo. Maybe for some people idk, but none of that rhetoric makes sense to me

Hardly anyone would have children if they thought about it rationally.

Not everything that is difficult in life is down to 'the patriarchy'.....

You'd be surprised.
Protecting pedos by giving them lenient jail sentences, when outside of a patriarchy they'd be strung up by the women to serve as a warning to others

As far as the question whether there are divergencies of opinion within different types of feminism - yes, absolutely. I am not really aware of any type of political or ideological movement where this doesn't happen. Not all Marxists agree, not all deconstructionists agree, not all Muslims agree, not all Hegelians agree. Often the disagreements are substantive, and even bitter.
It's really only the groups of one where there is ideological purity. You can almost always come to several sets (at least) of ideas from the same set of first principles.

You'd be surprised. Protecting pedos by giving them lenient jail sentences, when outside of a patriarchy they'd be strung up by the women to serve as a warning to others

Err, that's just one thing.....

Err, that's just one thing.....*

Yes. Should I list more?

Given that she said "not everything hard is the fault of the patriarchy", if you want to disagree, you have to list everything.

Everything hard.

And it all has to be the fault of the patriarchy.

Instead, can I list things that aren't the fault of the patriarchy?

So umm... a healthy woman dying of a homebirth... probably not the patriarchy's fault

Certain health issues. Many health issues are in fact the fault of the patriarchy, but not all.

Earthquakes.. although it has been said that the death toll in the 2011 tsunami in Japan could've been avoided if people had heeded the warnings written by ancestors not to build on that land, but the land was cheap so.... so partly the fault of the patriarchy, that one

So she is right, not everything. I stand corrected Goosefoot

God you've just reminded me of Fukushima. They're saying it's on par with Chernobyl.

Building a nuclear power plant on an earthquake zone is probably the epitome of what patriarchy stands for

And the homebirth death only applies if the woman wasn't raped. If she was raped and that's why she's pregnant and dead from the homebirth.. then it's the fault of the patriarchy

Jeez louise.

a healthy woman dying of a homebirth... probably not the patriarchy's fault

If home birth techniques had been prioritized in research and training, who knows how much more we might know? People might have developed cheap, portable equipment that midwives could take along and help them avoid the rush to hospital in emergencies.

Yes, supporting mothers have safe and pain free (ha ha) birth is massively underfunded and under researched compared to - say - how to get old men to maintain erections.

That's definitely the fault of the patriarchy.

I’m a feminist and a mother (several times over). I use radfem spaces because they seem to be the only spaces that recognize biology, but I live in the sort of place that such beliefs are culturally... tricky. So radfem spaces provide somewhere to discuss and centre women. That said, Dittany was convinced I was some sort of sex positive liberal (nah). I haven’t ever drawn fire for being a heterosexual married woman - there are a few in the spaces I use - but I’m comfortable with discussing the issues caused by being female and child-bearing, and the pressure young women are under to be fuckable, so in some senses it really is much easier to be a lesbian radfem... less necessity for personal reflection.
I’m just a feminist. But if you are looking for matricentric stuff, the old Association for Research on Mothering, now, erm, MIRCI, has a ton of interesting stuff. Some of it quite liberal, but interesting for a very wide perspective on feminism and mothering. Andrea O’Reilly sometimes pitches up in the UK as a keynote speaker.