Lisa Millbank is a blogger I really respect, because she’s really smart about gender and even when I disagree with her ideas I always have to question my beliefs. Recently, she finished a series called The Prudes’ Progress, which is about developing a radical feminist concept of sexuality and has induced Many of the Thinky Thoughts on my part. So I’ve decided to write a bunch of blog posts responding to it, or talking about the ideas that are more-or-less related to her thoughts. This is the introduction to the series!
First: Millbank is a radical feminist. Most people I know tend to use “radical feminist” as either a synonym for “extreme feminist” or a synonym for “transphobic whorephobic kinkphobic feminist,” neither of which are actually correct. Radical feminism is a distinct theoretical perspective on feminism (which, yes, often happens to be extreme and transphobic/whorephobic/kinkphobic).
Radical feminists believe that gender is a social construct, not a biological reality, formed out of patriarchy. Patriarchy, they believe, is a social structure in which men dominate and oppress women; it seeps into every aspect of our lives, including such apparently apolitical things as appearance and one’s sex life. Radical feminists believe that gender, structures of domination, and patriarchy are bad for women and should be eliminated. (For the curious, I disagree with #1 (gender is both a social construct and a biological reality), agree with #2, and agree with #3 except for the gender bit with caveats.)
In particular, since I’m going to be talking about radical feminist views of sexuality a lot, I should talk about what they are. If patriarchy seeps into every aspect of life, it also seeps into sex; since patriarchy is bad, this leads to sex that hurts one or more of the people involved. How so? Well, obviously sexual violence. But beyond that an ideology of beliefs that wind up promoting sexual violence (the famous “rape culture”)– the treatment of one person as active, powerful, the subject, the one who wants, and another as passive, subordinate, the object, the one who is wanted and does what the subject wants. Through sexuality, patriarchy eroticizes and actively maintains this difference. Lisa Millbank calls patriarchal sex “instrumental sexuality,” which is a phrase I’m going to use.
Radical feminism was originally opposed to liberal feminism, which was the feminism that mostly dealt with legal inequality and job discrimination and reproductive rights. Very few people identify as a liberal feminist anymore because the abortion thing is basically the only part of liberal feminism that’s remotely controversial and if you like abortion rights you can just call yourself pro-choice.
Around about the time liberal feminism became incredibly uncontroversial, feminism decided to have something called the Feminist Sex Wars (not kidding). Radical feminists tended to believe that porn, BDSM, and sex work perpetuate social structures of domination and were violence against women. Sex-positive feminists, on the other hand, were like “wait, no, I get to do what I want with my own vagina, stop telling me what to do.”
(Also in this period huge swathes of radical feminism inexplicably decided that trans people were Public Enemy #1. Which, okay, if you think gender is a product of the patriarchy then trans people probably won’t exist in the post-patriarchy, but I fail to understand how that turns harassing trans women into a feminist practice.)
(Yes I do. The answer is transmisogyny.)
A huge amount of theory that even sex-positive and trans feminists use was developed by radical feminists. The concept of “patriarchy”? Radical feminists. “Rape culture”? Radical feminists. “The personal is political”? Radical feminists. Consciousness-raising groups and their descendant the feminist blog? Radical feminists. I am really sad that radical feminism has all too often devolved into woman-hate, because there are so many radical feminist authors I respect and who have deeply affected my feminism and challenged my thought on gender. Part of the reason I like Millbank’s work a lot is that she’s a modern radical feminist who gives my brain the same workout as, say, Dworkin.
Another reason I particularly like The Prudes’ Progress is that a lot of people, having proved to their satisfaction that such-and-such sexual practice is inherently oppressive, consider their work done. To pick on a non-radical-feminist example… let’s say it’s oppressive to consider trans, disabled, and fat people inherently unattractive, both because it’s a product of a culture that considers trans, disabled, and fat people unattractive, and because it’s shitty to be considered ugly because you’re part of whatever marginalized group. Okay, great. What do you do with that? If you’re someone who’s only attracted to cis, abled, thin people, do you… have sex with trans, disabled, and fat people anyway for anti-oppression points? Self-flagellate about your oppressive boner? What? Identifying a problem is not the same thing as offering a solution.
Millbank has written an entire really long series of articles about how, if you accept radical feminist beliefs about sexuality, to make your sexuality less patriarchal. I approve of this and wish more people who want to critique sexuality would do similar things.
Obvious Disclaimer: all of this is personal piety, not basic morality. Your moral obligation sexually is discharged by not being an asshole. (You know: don’t rape people, don’t call people ugly because they don’t give you a boner, don’t lie to your sexual partners about how many people you’re fucking or whether you have an STI, use contraception unless you’re prepared to have offspring, that sort of thing.) If you don’t accept radical feminist beliefs about sexuality (which I do with some caveats), you might be able to get something out of The Prudes’ Progress, but it’s primarily targeted at a different audience. If you’re in a place where working on your sexuality is not healthy or fulfilling or the optimal choice for you right now, great! Go build houses for Habitat for Humanity or something. If your feminism involves hating on women who aren’t hurting anyone for being insufficiently feminist, you are bad at feminism.
Further Obvious Disclaimer: The Prudes’ Progress is mostly written for women in erotic relationships with other women. I am a nonbinary but female-presenting person primarily in erotic relationships with men (although I have been in erotic relationships with women in the past). I expect this is going to affect my reactions to shit she talks about.
Probably Non-Obvious Disclaimer: Most of my planned blog posts range from “inspired by The Prudes’ Progress” to “completely unrelated to it but thrown in as an appendix because why not,” so you do not have to read The Prudes’ Progress in order to understand the series.
This sounds interesting. I’ll read her series later; I expect to agree with some and disagree with some. But that’s ok.
If you accept the radfem central tenet (that the system and society we live in are soaked in patriarchy) the of course it follows that sex is. Especially het sex, but even gay sex; we’re still interacting with gender and fucked-up ideas about it.
It’s the “what then?” that falls down. The answer seems to be that one should therefore abstain from sex if one can, have same-sex relations if not, and generally treat the oppression commonly found in sex as in curable, poisonous and best avoided.
I have a few critiques right of the bat.
1. It sounds (from your description) that Rad Trans Fem as well as radical feminism in general makes a similar error to that made by many post-colonialists: thinking that whatever paradigm is being fought is so specifically focused on their own oppression, and that care strongly about maintaining the hold of the oppressive elements. I think that this is inaccurate, and that when ‘Stop sexism’ becomes ‘smash the patriarchy’, it all to often actually means ‘smash all of our current love and sex related culture, even when it is not even the slight bit connected to oppression and even when what replaces it will be just as oppressive, in a different way’. This leads people to hate you..
2. As part of this, I think that way more stuff gets connected to heterosexuality vs homosexuality. Shelia Jefferies actually used ‘heterosexual desire’ to refer to desire somehow involved with sexist, patriarchal inequality rather than actual heterosexuals.
3. Also as part of this, she seems to delight in finding the absolutely most value-laden (positive or negative) words to attach to important, influential, but fuzzy good or bad concepts. I thought ‘rape culture’ referring to things seeming only tangentially related to rape or the resistance to prosecuting rape was weird, but then she coins the word ‘rapeminded’.
4. I suspect that a lot of radical feminism is only potentially attractive to women within a limited (though potentially very, very large) cultural sphere. Find me somebody who is horrified by the widespread failure to acknowledged titular nobility (Ozy, you might want to ask Yvain to hook you up) (How do I hyperlink) and I will find you somebody horrified by the prospect of the end of dominance hierarchies, both sexual and otherwise.
More to the point, it’s a false dichotomy (us vs. them) that also leaves a power vacuum: if you smash every social construct related to love and sex, you leave a void, which will quickly be filled by Something Else — and that Something Else is not necessarily good. Instead of smashing the patriarchy, we need to interrogate it and build something new and respectful from the old (though doing so may involve a certain amount of smashing things).
On the subject of the original post, I like Ozy’s summary of radical feminism. I’m so used to thinking of radical feminism in terms of folks like Andrea Dworkin that I’ve forgotten all the useful contributions made by radical feminism. Thank you, Ozy!
To me, as a nutbag heretical Christian-type, the kyriarchy IS Satan, in a very literal way. Or if you’re into more modern folklore, think the First Evil from Buffy
Actually maybe don’t think of that, it might come with season 7 flashbacks….
It can’t be “killed” or defeated outright by human agency – it can only be fought into retreat by patient, tireless, careful, and thoughtful efforts, whether on the scale of our individual lives, human civilisation as we know it, or anything in between. We need to replace our kryiarchically-infected notions of sexuality along with everything else, yes. But as Krause/Gaius say, we can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. And we need to remember that whatever replacements we come up with are likely to contain the seeds of wholly new and wonderful forms of oppression – just as for instance tradical feminism, that as Ozy describes is so necessary to the fight against misogyny, has nonetheless in some cases mutated into a vehicle of transphobia……
As someone whose existence would theoretically draw some very strong ire from radfems (asexual, but still enjoys and participates in kink-fueled sex acts with a cishetero man that are not particularly concerned with my sexual pleasure, happily engages in pain play, craves humiliation and fear play, wants my hubs to take the reigns even more, etc, all without the desire to assert myself sexually and sensually; by all accounts I should have them screaming “why are you even having sex???” at the tops of their lungs), I’m interested in what this may or may not say about my situation.
Oh man the section on fetishes. Ohhh man.
I’ve recently started something of a “working relationship” with a postgraduate psychology student who wants to focus his research on paraphilias-as-healthy-parasexuality because there is so, so little in the academic and medical literature out there that accomplishes anything but a casual and generalized pathologization. I’m really interested in where his work will take him, and I imagine that it’ll be far, far from the theories outlined at the linked blog.
And once again, I’m going to assert that we need to develop the fuck out of the vocabulary that describes the reality of the paraphile because having all of 3 fucking words to describe an entire mode of sexual understanding is just mind-boggling to me.
@gaius: [blockquote]: if you smash every social construct related to love and sex, you leave a void, which will quickly be filled by Something Else — and that Something Else is not necessarily good. Instead of smashing the patriarchy, we need to interrogate it and build something new and respectful from the old (though doing so may involve a certain amount of smashing things). [blockquote]
I agree with this. (Although not everything leaves a vacuum.) On a much-more-general-than-just-gender level, this is pretty much my theory of reconstruction.
-Additional aspects of my theory of reconstruction:
— People who defend oppressive structures or elements of culture often might be satisfied, even if not aware of that fact, with a completely neutered substitute.
— The ‘Nuke All Restrictive Social Norms’ crowd speaks mainly for themselves. That’s great, and they should be able to escape most restrictive social norms, but they do (should) not speak for everybody. This is my most common disagreement with Ozy.
I’d add that there really is a TON of smashing needed and that it’s possible that a majority of the smashing is already done. Rad Trans Fem seems aware of this, but only to a degree; her suggestions for new stuff are focused on reacting against the old stuff and she hasn’t examined the invisible norms that don’t need smashing very much.
I think that the closer society gets to being non-patriarchal (or, even, just respectful of women) the less smashing and the more reconstruction is needed. Furthermore, the people whose stuff you just finished smashing actually kind of need to be included (or their *actual* desires to some degree considered) in the discussion of what the new norms are going to be, because those are going to be their new norms as well. For example, I think that people who oppose gay marriage on the grounds that it hurts their own straight marriage might lay down if a conditional surrender could be negotiated. I’m not sure that is going to be good, since they will have gay kids at the same 5-10% rate as everyone else, and may still affect gays outside their own culture, but its a possiblity. I think that this is probably most relevant in some matters of sexuality, and in some matters of race.
The Continuing Saga Of Feminist Hypocrisy | YouViewed/Editorial
Interesting analysis, thank you. I agree with what you said about smashing vs. reconstruction. If you’re going to smash someone’s worldview, you have to give them a reasonable alternative. Otherwise, all that happens is that they go back to what they knew before, but this time they feel guilty about it. I have more to say about the instersection of radical feminist theory and liberal feminism, but I have to go now.
Diana Rajchel » My feminism, my paganism
I was talking about more substantiative society-wide change than just breaking up ideas. One thing that frustrates me is that a lot of the time activists will say things to the effect of ‘stop complaining about us, you have the privilege to ignore us.’. This is 1. sometimes not true and 2. does nothing for those who want them to succeed, but have their own stuff that they want to survive.
Okay, I’m back.
Ozy, you wrote that radical feminism arose in opposition to liberal feminism. It seems to me that the two are/were more interdependent than opposite. In order to get lasting political change you need a deeper understanding of the issues; of how these things came about and why we should do something about them. One of the consequences of living in a toxic, kyriarchal society is that there are always more assumptions to unpack. Do you see radical feminism as continuing to change and grow and unpack people’s assumptions, or is it a dinosaur stuck in the 70′s and still flailing against a liberal feminism that no longer exists?
Something else struck me when you wrote about liberal feminism. You seem to say that we no longer have any more battles to fight politically except for abortion rights. I have to disagree with you there. It’s true that nobody uses the label “liberal feminist” anymore, but there are still plenty of women’s issues that need to be addressed politically. Most of these have to do with motherhood: Maternity leave policy, access to affordable child care. Specifically, one reproductive rights issue that is routinely underreported is our right to give birth the way that we choose. If anyone wants to learn more about this, I recommend the book “Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care” by Jennifer Block.
To tie this into what I was saying before, reproductive rights technically falls outside of radical feminism, but it helps to look at it through a radical feminist lens. Radical feminism deplores the idea of men as subjects and women as objects. In popular culture, the most common image of childbirth is of a couple rushing to the hospital, then a cut to the woman lying on a bed screaming. This is an emergency! Only the doctor can save her now!
Around about the time liberal feminism became incredibly uncontroversial
Okay, if that ever happened at all (because I sure don’t remember it), it was for like five minutes before the backlash started.
I don’t think this is accurate, or at least not universally so. I’d say that radical feminism arose in opposition to patriarchy, and I don’t just mean that as a glib statement. Anyway, I doubt most radical feminists in the 60s,70s, 80s thought of themselves as “opposed to liberal feminism”. Andrea Dworkin even praises what she calls “reformist” feminists as an important part of the women’s movement. There’s a tendency to describe feminists in terms of which feminists we dislike, one I think should be dialled back.
Irene, is the word backlash there supposed to be a link? I’m clicking it but not getting anything, but when I hover over it the color changes.
Apparently I fail at HTML (big surprise). The link is http://www.susanfaludi.com/backlash.html .
It does seem that opposition to such stuff has shifted from denying that they are right to denying that the problem still exists. To a point.
Gaius: folks like Andrea Dworkin
Is she just considered self-evidently bad, or what?
I don’t claim to know very much about her but she doesn’t seem worse than the average semi-extreme femininist.
I think that the ‘all men are rapists’ sorta-misquote (It was spoken by a fictional character she wrote, and that fictional character was supposed to be an extremeist, not really an author avatar) has permanently destroyed her image.
Some pretty good insights into Dworkin’s work here: http://www.realadultsex.com/archives/2005/04/dworkin-and-meaning-consent
Ozy, we’ve chatted privately about your idea of doing this series in response, so you know that I’m cautious about it and have reservations. I’m still wary of being misrepresented or, even more problematically, misframed, so that the original work is recontextualised in a way which subtly transforms its meaning. So I’ll be following this series and possibly commenting occasionally if I think that’s what’s happening!
I probably won’t be engaging in comment thread conversations in this space, whether in response to my comments or in any “putting the record straight” sense with regard to misrepresentations in the comments, not the posts. However I’m happy to have respectful, on-topic conversations in the comments area of my blog, on Twitter (@radtransfem, only for conversations without too much risk of miscommunication, since 140 characters) or in some cases via email (ask me on twitter for email address).
If you’re going to be mentioning me a lot, by the way, my name is Lisa Millbank and my blog name is A Radical Transfeminist; the username “radtransfem” is (obviously) short for the blog name, rather than my name. I’m generally cited (when cited, which isn’t often) as “Millbank, Lisa”, and find it slightly bemusing to see my name written as “Rad Trans Fem” (especially with “fem” as a separate word).
So it’s “Lisa Millbank” or “Millbank” if you’re talking about me (“Lisa” if we’ve had a conversation and if you’re a woman and/or don’t hold gender power over me), “A Radical Transfeminist” if referring to the blog, “radtransfem” for casual blog references. (I’m sure you can imagine why, as a transsexual person, I might be particular about how people name me.) Thanks!
Lisa Millbank: Ack, sorry! I’m so embarrassed. *blushes*
Krause: That’s not Dworkin, that’s Marilyn Frye, a completely different feminist thinker.
Vicky: My point is a bit more nuanced than that– what I mean is that a lot of the things liberal feminism fought for are not just law right now, they’re completely uncontroversial law that no one argues about, so in a sense nearly everyone agrees with the fundamentals of liberal feminism. There are, of course, exceptions such as reproductive rights and (as you pointed out) maternity/paternity leave.
Irene: Even the backlash people don’t think we should ban women from jobs where they have to carry more than 30 pounds or reinstitute sex-segregated want ads or ban birth control (although many of them think it shouldn’t be covered by insurance). (The ones that do are definitely not in the mainstream.) Some of them have a tendency to present themselves as “equity feminists” who totally believe in real feminism (i.e. no sex-segregated want ads) but just oppose all this victim feminism that’s dealing with issues like, you know, every other kind of sexism in the world.
Emily: That’s very fair– in addition, a lot of sex-positive feminists had respect for radical feminists (particularly pre-Sex-War radical feminists).
Ooops.
Ahem. Marilyn French, not Marilyn Frye. “The US writer and academic Marilyn French, who has died aged 79, is best known for her debut novel, The Women’s Room. …The novel’s best-known line – “All men are rapists, and that’s all they are” – has not been an easy legacy for the next three decades of feminism. Spoken in anger by one of the book’s most radical characters, a woman whose daughter has been gang-raped, it entered the popular lexicon and is often cited, wrongly, as one of the tenets of modern feminism.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/05/obituary-marilyn-french
Agh! In my defense I’ve been reading Marilyn Frye a lot for Feminist Philosophy class.
Ozy,
to be honest, I think the fundamental concepts exposed by every feminist these days, are based on radical feminist “epistemology”. I put it in scare quotes because I don’t consider it as much epistemological as ideological, and, in many ways, wrong and even oxymoronic in nature, but that doesn’t change the influence it had and has.
Thing is, while I don’t agree with most of what radical feminists have to say, and I believe their argument is either self-contradictory or insufficiently explained. They for one, never explained why they, as opposed to all other women had the epistemic ability to see through the oppressive patriarchy matrix, why being a radical feminist activist is any more an expression of free will than posing for playboy within the context of their own axiomatic structure. And I guess that’s what led to the sex wars, because you cannot limit the declaration of free will to expressions you like. This epistemic eclecticism is the only reason I see for the fact that so many women seem to agree with the axiomatic structure of radical feminism (oppression/patriarchy/etc) while at the same time still demanding their decisions be taken seriuosly and as valid individual expressions.
Still, it’s the same kind of selective thinking that makes feminist epistemology such an easy target for everyone who doesn’t *want to believe*. I think it’s an impressive political achievement. But that said, I think it’s also, at it’s core, badly formulated pseudo-marxism that is damaging for a real discourse about gender justice. Too bad modern online feminism seems, in my perception, to be going back to this structure instead of a more post-modern axiomatic structure.
Prudes’ Progress: Why Not Instrumental Sexuality? – Ozy Frantz's Blog
Sam: Erm, there’s been a lot of work on feminist epistemology, including radical feminist epistemology. I can’t make heads or tails of most of it myself (I’m too dumb for philosophy), but it definitely exists.
Also, I believe the standard explanation is that radical feminists have had their consciousnesses raised– that while every woman understands sexism to a degree determined by their standpoint, it’s only in conversation with other women and feminists that women can come to understand their personal discomfort as being one part of a larger social system that oppresses women.
Ozy,
oh, sure, there’s a lot of feminist epistemology, and I’m not even disagreeing with a gender aspect in knowledge generation, but that’s about where the sane part ends and the axiomatic ideology begins. Standpoint epistemology and the claim of an epistemic privilege for women with respect to gender is just bizarre. I think it’s mainly a twisted version of marxist class consciousness, and the whole theory is mainly a distorted version of marxism with gender as main contradiction, because that was a theory en vogue when feminism became relevant as a social force in the 60s and 70s (mostly due to economic and technological, but also due to social changes, of course), and most of the people on the political left who could give initiatl support were people who were already familiar with thinking along “contradiction”-lines. It’s a bizarre notion and people like Judith Butler helped move gender thery off this silliness to a degree by explaining and reframing Hegel in more feminist friendly terminology, but standpoint epistemology is still at the heart of most contemporary feminist thought structure. A thought figure like “you’re blind to your privilege” is not logically permissable unles you claim an epistemic privilege in the first place. And this is essentially what you refer to with “consciousness raised” – which is basically saying “I have seen the light”, my will is free, you’re still blinded by your immersion in the matrix. Yet if the matrix is as pervasive as claimed, limiting any expressions of female free will, why should their consciounsness raising efforts be considered any different than any other female expression of free will? Because they themselves have created a category according to which their will is free but not other women’s? Thing is, this largely worked for them and still does as we can see by the pervasiveness of their concepts in gender discourse. But it’s not because their concepts were logical, inevitable or correct, it’s because they were easy to intuitively agree with for people only looking at the surface and not thinking the question to the end. Hence people like Judith Butler, who brought back individualism to the discourse.
Btw, you’re certainly not too dumb for philosophy. You’re one of the sharpest minds writing about this stuff
Prudes’ Progress: Objectification! – Ozy Frantz's Blog