Maya’s response to Radical Notion’s GC divisions

[HiccupHorrendousHaddock]

I thought this was a very interesting answer to the recent issue of RN.

Shout out to the vipers and their Mumsnet Feminism within!

mforstater.medium.com/on-gender-critical-disputes-db2e456ad9cd

I made mention of Steinem because earlier it was mentioned that maybe some rad feminists from RN didn't have children and didn't understand issues for mothers. I wanted to highlight a prominent radical feminist who broke that stereotype.

I would be interested to read the insights on the other thread but it’s massively long and inevitably long threads get derailed.

Thank you Biturongs and Warrior for your anthropological insights. I’m a bit confused by the polygamous societies – does this refer to both men and women having multiple partners? If so doesn’t the community need to be limited in number somehow? What is the economic structure? Do you know when these societies died out?

This leads to the question of how to reconcile feminist theory and activism with reality to create a powerful and effective feminist movement.

This deserves its own thread @thedankness

Ultimately radical feminism is not that popular, and it hasn't been effective. Is it too far removed from individuals' realities, too heavy on analysis even if it is entirely correct?

Radical feminism is not popular and will never be popular because most women are mothers and most women are heterosexual and it's extremely difficult and painful to live happily with men who you love and/or are dependent on, while looking at things through the lens of radical feminism.

Nevertheless, radical feminism has achieved a lot. In practical terms the whole DA sector was built on their work. They have given us extremely clear analysis on MVAWG.

Women who are able to centre women and girls wholeheartedly, without any distracting concerns about men, bring a different perspective because they can see the problem more from the outside.

Rad fem literature is usually very straightforward to read. It's not an academic tradition.

A lot of second wave stuff was old school classical liberal feminism (not to be confused with the more recent 'libfems').

It was all perfectly readable until the 1980s when the pomo gibberish started to be popular.

Just looked and Retire was the OP.

Hear, hear!

I was a feminist long before there was any possibility of being a mother, and have remained the former despite never being (or wanting to be) the latter. I'm perfectly capable of understanding and caring about many things I have not personally experienced.

But I really don’t see why disagreement about any of this stops us uniting to demand single-sex jails.

Exactly.

I see what you are saying, but my sense was that MF was reading the thread where everyone was saying words to the effect of “these RN writers are all a bit up themselves, thinking we have time and energy to read their long and tedious screeds replicating their twitter feeds”, and she thought “ah, I have some culpability there, I need to admit it was my suggestion they do it in long form”, so she wrote a blog post rather than saying it in the middle of the thread where it could get missed. That’s how it seemed to me.

I feel a bit weird saying too much in response to MF here, because I don’t think she is really adding that much to what mumsnetters were already saying in this instance, but I appreciate how this thread has taken a slightly different turn.

Out of interest @HiccupHorrendousHaddock what was it that made you start a new thread, rather than posting MFs blog on the existing thread?

does this refer to both men and women having multiple partners?

Yes.

If so doesn’t the community need to be limited in number somehow?

Being on an island in the middle of the Pacific sorts out that side of it.

What is the economic structure?

Can't remember, apart from the matrilineal inheritance part. But we're talking about non-industrial communities with a largely subsistence farming/fishing basis. So probably not a large economic gradient.

Do you know when these societies died out?

Haven't the foggiest, sorry - I'm working off memories of lectures last century.

Ah! Sorry about your thread, Retire!

Not an expert so happy to be corrected. My understanding is that radical feminism (“radical” meaning “root”) aims to dismantle patriarchy – the social power structure of men as the dominant class over women – and essentially reorder society without a ruling sex class. However the word “radical” is also understood by many to mean “extreme” so people naturally recoil at that. Radical feminism knows that we are oppressed on the basis of sex but concerns itself with nurture rather than nature and says that the reason for our oppression is a socially constructed hierarchy; this is how our biology is used against us.

Maya is talking about biological essentialism, which is often talked about in a very negative way, because it can be twisted to justify the worst elements of human nature. But that’s not the point she’s making in the article – what she’s saying is that there is an element of nature and not just nurture that plays a part in our oppression. I.e. we don’t condone a “boys will be boys” attitude but we believe that some men will always want to rape women.

Thank you for this; I think it's roughly what I thought except that I thought radical feminism also included more basic biological essentialism. In that the nurture part is in the very early years mostly the woman due to biology.

I struggle to see much of a difference between radical feminism and Maya's basic root pov because I see it as nature and then nurture.

'Dismantling patriarchy' is idealistic on a large scale across modern society and some would argue that it's already starting to be achieved with more women climbing to ceo positions and prime ministers in some countries. But more via capitalism in reality.

I saw an evolutionary psychologist on triggermonetry (Google now informs me there's been a few, so not sure who) who'd led the way in the area and been smeared as a eugenicist in the early days. Now though it's recognised via all sorts of research, twin studies etc. (the book Love Matters looks at a lot of this through attachment theories.)

He said psychology/ behaviour/ who we are is roughly a varying mix of nature, nurture and accidental happenings.

As a side note, from observation and experience MLD send schools are usually around 8:1 boys to girls. A send register in mainstream usually includes more boys. There are clearly some biological differences between the sexes in how the xx and xy expresses some genes.

A study I've always found fascinating is that boys who coslept with mothers/ parents were identified by teachers at age 5 as being more socially amenable and able compared to those who didn't whereas it made no difference to girls. Who can tell what natural or nurturing forces are at play there, but it would indicate that rad fem nurturing ideals are important. Boys do need antidotes to toxic masculinity / gender stereotypes. (Seems to have been easier for girls to be non conforming from the 80s until the last decade.)

Ultimately though, women are left and right leaning and you are going to have both sides saying men can't be women. No one can ™ it though, we are half of the population.

Radical feminism is not popular and will never be popular because most women are mothers and most women are heterosexual and it's extremely difficult and painful to live happily with men who you love and/or are dependent on, while looking at things through the lens of radical feminism.

This is so true. I actually feel depressed sometimes thinking about this but I can't unsee this view. In fact it's my interaction with men that makes radical feminism all make sense. I fear the kind of relationship I desire with a man is not possible, and I fear the vulnerability of having children. I've seen video clips of Andrea Dworkin and want to read her books, but also I know they will depress me.

You're right, a lot has been achieved; maybe I should have quantified that statement with "recently". VAWG is the one issue I was actually thinking about as being well within the public and political conscience, despite it needing a lot more work.

Do you have any recommendations of second wave liberal feminism and straightforward radfem authors? I'm no expert on feminism and I associated liberal feminism with "choice" feminism.

Maybe it's just semantics because I, like many mumsnet feminists, support radical feminists' work on pro-abortion, anti-surrogacy, anti-prostitution and porn (admittedly gets murkier considering motherhood, domestic work and employment etc) and so if the work is getting done then does it matter if the goal is utopian or not? But actually I think Maya is right in that we need to acknowledge human nature both in relationship to the establishment of the patriarchy and our feminist activism. That the start and end point of radical feminism doesn't acknowledge this is in part responsible for its relatively weak position in society.

I'm very grateful to this thread because it's evolved into a really interesting discussion, whereas the previous thread was complicated and bitter in a way unpleasantly reminiscent of the RN special issue itself.

Possibly this is because Maya (whether you agree with her 100% or not) is a really clear and thoughtful writer, whereas the RN writers disappear up their own overly intellectual arses.

At the point I posted this new one, the other one was a running to almost 800 posts, about 250 of which were about the spurious criticism.

I wasn’t sure Maya’s post would get seen to the degree I felt it should be with all those derailments.

Ta.

I read an article some years ago about the way economics, technology, evolution and so on all act with each other to affect the extent of inequality between the sexes:

It's unlikely that the nomadic hunter-gatherers had strong hierarchies as they couldn't accumulate wealth separately from their bodily skills (and so to use it to pay others to be their hench men or provide them with sexual services), but the beginning of agriculture made that separate accumulation possible and so some link it with the onset of not only what is called patriarchy here, but also hierarchical societies in general. This change, in a way, was about technology, or at least about the way people got their nutrition.

That, and from another angle, economics, also affected things. The article argued that the societies in which women's status has been the worst are nomadic herder societies where the constant moving makes it almost impossible for the women (because of pregnancy, lactation, and the care of small children) to participate in contributing to the family's income/nutrition*.

Women's status was the highest in the kinds of societies which were not nomadic and where garden-type intensive agriculture was feasible, as women could work that and combine it with child-care more easily. The yield from their work could be traded or consumed, and staying in one place allowed local trading connections to be created.

My belief is in rather complicated explanations like these, rather than in overly simple essentialist ones. Even male violence levels vary greatly between countries, so they are at least somewhat amenable to being changed by education, social support structures and culture.

*Though even here some women had portable looms and might have been able to sell the cloth/rugs they made. Still, it would have been harder.

I keep nodding, when reading the main sources of radical feminism, until suddenly I shake my head. This happens with me when I read any school of feminism (unless I dismiss it right away), in that I may agree some basic argument but do not find it applies as widely as the author argued or in quite as simple a format or that some other argument working in the opposite direction is ignored in the discussion.

Yet I am a feminist and have been one for most of my life!

I thought this was the most interesting element of the essay as well.

It's not just a disagreement about purity, with radical feminism being the most "pure" and other versions being a compromise - her argument is that radical feminism has some fundamentally wrong, untrue beliefs behind it, which can make it ineffective when it tries to act, and also limits it's appeal. And also perhaps have opened us all up to some of the very bad thinking we see now in terms of gender ideology.

Whenever you really mistake human nature, the social and political remedies you suggest are likely to be failures.

In that the nurture part is in the very early years mostly the woman due to biology.
I struggle to see much of a difference between radical feminism and Maya's basic root pov because I see it as nature and then nurture.

Can you explain this a bit more because I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying you understand radfem to acknowledge nature in the sense that women are biologically programmed to be caregivers in the early years, at least to the extent that they breastfeed?

'Dismantling patriarchy' is idealistic on a large scale across modern society and some would argue that it's already starting to be achieved with more women climbing to ceo positions and prime ministers in some countries. But more via capitalism in reality.

This is an interesting concept, and a hopeful one. I agree that the patriarchal society is going nowhere in a hurry. Getting women in positions of power is instrumental in changing the lives of other women. However we also have women in power acting against the interests of women (see Nicola Sturgeon and Amrapali Gans, CEO of OnlyFans). 🙄Under patriarchy, women compete for individual power or "pseudo-power".

Epigenetics - how the environment influences gene expression - is a really interesting area of study and I think fairly recent?

A study I've always found fascinating is that boys who coslept with mothers/ parents were identified by teachers at age 5 as being more socially amenable and able compared to those who didn't whereas it made no difference to girls.

This point is fascinating and reminds me of an article I read recently about how the idea of a virtuous masculinity is much more important to a civilised society than any notions around femininity, which are largely biologically determined. This is why toxic masculinity is such a problem because it is degrading to society as a whole. I'll see if I can find the article to link.

Really interesting post nepta and thanks also Lang, great points.

Do you have any recommendations of second wave liberal feminism and straightforward radfem authors? I'm no expert on feminism and I associated liberal feminism with "choice" feminism

Would also appreciate this. .

I think ‘mumsnet feminism’ is really radical feminist in essence, rather than liberal feminist. There’s a broad agreement about ending the sexual exploitation of women girls, ending VAWG, sexual objectification, the commodification of women, etc.

A lot of radical feminists see it as about rolling your sleeves up and getting shit done. It’s also about recognising that you aren’t socialised in a vacuum, so you will have internalised misogyny, yet feel like it is natural and freely chosen. You have to question and examine everything to recognise where you’ve been trained in inferiority and submission, in order to be truly liberated.

With mumsnet feminism, I think there isn’t as much examination of internalised misogyny, or recognition of where we’ve compromised ourselves for an easier life, as there used to be. I wonder if all this trans stuff has become such a life-or-death struggle, it now seems really insignificant to discuss what wearing painful high heels says about women’s position in society, for example.

Yes Demi you've put it so concisely.

I'm really appreciating the interesting discussion.

This is the article I mentioned:
unherd.com/2022/10/andrew-tate-and-the-wests-lost-boys/

When I saw the title and that it was written by a man I thought it was going to be way over sympathetic to men but I actually found it very reasonable. And then the comments section was full of snivelling men lol.

Re: technology and tools that can close the sex gap…

There are some memey type things floating around the internet that claiming that the right to bear arms/gun ownership makes women safer, but does it?

Guns remove the requirements for physical strength when murdering, obvs

But does owning a gun make us less likely to be killed by men because we have an efficient tool to use in our defence?

Or do those same tools just give men another, more efficient way to kill us?

Or do guns narrow the sex gap amongst murderers…. whilst making both sexes more likely to be murdered?

I can’t face trying to dig through US statistics but I have a feeling it’s the last one, and that guns enable more women to kill men, but that male murderers will still far always far outnumber female murderers, no matter how much killing tech we invent.

(The AI robots are gonna kill us all anyway!)

Maya is spot on.
Most of us don’t have the time, energy or inclination to wade through “ intellectual “ arguments about women’s rights & safeguarding children. We just want to get on with it.
The women here on Mumsnet have been incredible in joining the dots, informing each other, supporting each other and handing the likes of RMW his arse on a plate, so I thank everyone of them.
Maya has a sense of humour, which I know , having had a giggle with her at a demo at Holyrood last year, which many in this war lack.

Speaking of RMW, I came across this the other day.

Robin misgendering Sam Smith on Twitter 🤣