She outraged bookish theory-type “radicals” in the early 1970s — she was very much an activist and had no time for theory types who came out with theory that didn’t match their actions, or who basically did nothing but sit around and talk theory, period. She outraged them by calling certain radical men — again, radical being the classic, internationally understood definition of radical — her “Sisters” but not so-called “radical feminists” who didn’t get it. She wound up “divorcing” the movement she founded in the early 1970s. And you don’t read her stuff anywhere in any women’s studies classes and you’re hard-pressed to find it yourself because her book containing her collection of essays and speeches is out of print (I do have a copy). But that’s a little history for you in regard to the activist side of the movement and its personalities (as opposed to theory alone, which as I said, is easy to find and has a much higher premium on it within the movement than activism or even history of the activism within the movement ever did).

In the end, although your critique makes sense if radical feminists are politically defined as radical, they are not. So your criticism does not really seem to apply.

There are different degrees of conservatism. Like feminists, a lot of conservatives disagree on issues that appeal to them. So a conservative could be a feminist. He would just be a different degree of a conservative than an anti-feminist conservative.

But that might contradict the idea that what you call yourself doesn’t matter. That might automatically make the person who calls him/herself a feminist conservative to actually be a liberal.

Anyway. FurryCatHerder, you haven’t seen a little fat cat that accidentally got loose from its owner by any chance, have you?

What did it look like? And don’t tell me it was small, furry, had four legs and a tail, because that could describe a dog …

Anyway. FurryCatHerder, you haven’t seen a little fat cat that accidentally got loose from its owner by any chance, have you?

Sure, why not.

Conservativism isn’t a specific ideology — “Women deserve to be treated like doormats” — it’s a belief that change should be measured and that what we have today is probably the way it is because it worked.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative

What this nets out to mean is that many things which we take for granted today as rights — women having the vote, for example — aren’t something a proper Conservative would be opposed to. Additionally, some of the arguments in Roe v. Wade were very classically conservative — using women’s historical right to terminate pregnancy prior to “quickening” — in their formulation.

What has happened is that amongst social-justice-minded individuals, words like “Conservative” are considered to be swear-words. Fiscally, I am a conservative. I also believe in universal health care because, from a conservative standpoint, it makes sense. Go figure. The other thing that’s happened is that a lot of former liberals moved to the right and established “Neoconservativism”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservative

which is not particularly new and entirely not at all Conservative.

The problem arises because there are really two different axises which make up “Liberal” and “Conservative”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_chart
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pournelle_Chart

If you think about “personal freedom” — “Lesbians should get to marry!” — and “economic freedom” — “Businesses should get to pay as little as they can get away with, and I should get to keep all my money to myself, forever!” — these are really orthogonal concepts. Many Progressives are all for “personal freedom” but tend to be against “economic freedom” because “economic freedom” is contrary to the kinds of wealth redistribution schemes needed to bring about “social equality”.

What needs to be discussed, rather than labels like “Liberal” and “Conservative” are those two axises — can someone who is opposed to “personal freedom”, wherever they fall on those two charts — be a feminist? And the answer is “No”.

http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz.html

Back to feminism specifically, in recent years a number of folks have talked and written about the “identity politics” phenomenon and how dangerous it is and how ultimately it works against the people taking a politics as their identity. I don’t much follow all this new research but yes at some point some time ago feminists like Catharine MacKinnon required, if they were to have followers who didn’t question some of their reasoning and actions, who didn’t see the “radical” in “radical feminism” as a descriptive term describing what one’s activism looks like or where it takes place but as a vague overall description for the theory (she calls herself radical because if the changes to the legal system she advocates were enacted then the system and people’s attitudes would be radically different, she argues). When your politics is not a strategic or tatical means to an end but YOUR IDENTITY then when anyone, even someone who also is feminist, questions any aspect of what you are doing or what theory you are espousing, you are against that individual, that very INDIVIDUAL, not their ideas or their actions and there is no other way, you are either with them or you are the enemy. I know this sounds disconnected but really we’re on the same wavelength here I think. We’re talking about loyalties that go much farther beyond classic political alliances and strategies toward one goal or another but not every last darn thing regardless of all else — and we are talking about enforcement of that identity, proof that you put that political identity before any other politics or consideration even when it is contrary to your politics, and we’re talking about penalties against you/your group and yes alsis harassment of you for the party’s failings, the whipping boy/girl, the easy scapegoat and explanation for why they don’t succeed when otherwise if you’d obeyed they would have, etc.

Of course, the outrage of Democrats towards those on their left is simply a frustrated sense of ownership. Or entitlement. Or, to paraphrase that ultimate feminist role model, Midge McCracken. “If you ever voted for them, even once, it’s like they own you. Like dogs pissing on a tree.”

Early on in the Second Wave, U.S. feminist leaders explicitly decided the movement would not have revolutionaries — a la the Black Panthers or the Weather Underground, which used violence toward their ends. Instead, the activism in the U.S. feminist movement would be either liberal (meaning working within the system for change through the system, be it legal changes, for example, or whatnot) or radical (meaning working outside the established system for change — that is, building new paradigms instead of seeking a law to change what’s already in place, or whatnot). Liberal feminist Betty Friedan seriously ticked off radical feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson when she said early on that what NOW’s (and U.S. feminists’) No. 1 goal was getting women into positions of power. (So I mean I’m not harping on Amp alone here — there is definitely a strain of feminism that *to this day* thinks putting women (any politics) in a top government or CEO position is a “first,” a “Breakthrough,” and maybe in one sense it is but if that’s your stance and all feminism is to you then you would have cheered Condi Rice whether you knew her partisan politics or not, as is the case with *many* women who break through to become the first this or that. My point being, partisan politics clearly is for many feminists their first alliance, feminism only under that, and Condi Rice is a clear example of this, seeing how in any corporate position where these same feminists knew nothing of her partisan politics they would have claimed her as one of their own firsts, breakthroughs, heroines, whatever).

There is nothing radical about Catharine A. MacKinnon’s activism: She works exclusively within the legal system to change the legal system — she puts all emphasis and all respect toward the law, above everything else, even though the top men the laws she has worked to get on the book flip her laws off with great disrespect. She has more faith in the law and the legal system than in frontline radical feminists — she doesn’t trust them, she doesn’t like them, she considers them a threat, she actively works to destroy and demonize them, all in the name of something as insubstantial (within the radical context of the thing) as changing the law.

Mary Daly’s recent activism is not radical either, because she is not working to build new paradigms of human behavior toward the oppressed that make the world or more equitable place. Instead, she is inflaming hatreds and bigotries and fears with her preaching that, for example, transsexuals are “monsters” — she means it quite literally — and a threat to women and women’s space, when transsexuals are one of the tiniest and most hated minorities killed right now in the streets of, for example, our nation’s capital, for no other reason than that they exist.

As for whackos as in right-wing conservative extremist whackos — can *they* be feminist? Ah hell. I mean for crying out loud. The radical feminist movement currently *is* basically a bunch of right-wing conservative extremist whacko absolutist bigoted intolerant nutcases masquerading as “radical feminists.” I mean same ends — sometimes more extreme hatred and flamboyant bigotry, even. The same ends but through different reasoning. It doesn’t matter what the intentions when the actions are exactly the same and result not in breaking down the status quo to make the world a better place but inflaming existing or even out-of-date bigotry and hatred and thriving on destruction and not empowerment as your mobilizing force and your raison d’etre.

The radical feminist movement — “who weren’t partisan enough, crossed the political lines to gen in bed with nasty prudish right-wing Christians who all oppose porn” — I don’t even understand what you’re saying, bean, it doesn’t make any sense. As you know I am a former collective member of *off our backs* and am now as sharply critical if not more so of what has become of the U.S. radical feminist movement as I am of the U.S. liberal feminist movement. It’s been hijacked by nutcases, basically, who call themselves “radical feminist” but have nothing at all radical about their activism — take MacKinnon and her absolute insistence on working through the legal system alone for change (extremely liberal) — or even feminist about their actions (take Daly, please, and her literal witch-hunts and preaching of outright hatred and bigotry for transsexuals, for example). These “leaders” are preaching/teaching utter intolerance not only for anyone who is not born female but who is born female but doesn’t agree with their every last action and word. In fact MacKinnon in particular and her psychophants will hunt down and demonize and destroy not just individual feminists or groups of feminists or frontline radical feminists in international war but yes entire WINGS of feminist movements if that’s what it takes for their word to rule — at least within the movement itself. And come on. That’s not feminist. It’s not pro-woman. They actively put a huge amount of energy in DESTROYING RECOGNIZED FEMINISTS, GROUPS, AND EVEN WINGS of the movement — they don’t even like feminists, they don’t like women thinking for themselves, they can’t tolerate another woman thinking for herself and partly agreeing but not agreeing entirely with them. None of this is feminist. All of it has made radical U.S. feminism irrelevant. And it’s so anti-everything classic radical and feminist!

And I DON’T think it’s antifeminist to say the U.S. liberal and radical feminist “movements” — to the extent you can even say they continue to exist as movements anymore — are SERIOUSLY FUCKED UP right now, irrelevant, so far off the deep end as to no longer even be talking sense, hypocritical, acting directly against women. Oh it’s a creep show. It really is. And I don’t think you can change it — it’s so bizarre and so disgusting and so unattractive and inept that most women can’t stand being involved in it for very long. But trust me we’re still out here — GenX activists that got a real shocker to see what the movements and the leaders are really like and how much a waste of a woman’s life and energy and money it is to put any time at all into that insanity. We’re still out here and the only way for this grotesqueness that is the current U.S. liberal and radical feminist movements to change is to just sit on the sidelines while the “leaders” kick the bucket one by one. I mean the movements are on lifesupport. The lifeblood is gone. These movements ain’t getting up and moving no more. Not in the form they exist now. And good riddance.

Amp, I think *you* are the one who wrote:

“Feminism is and has always been about activism; feminists are trying to change society. In particular, feminism is about changing society so that women, who are unfairly kept down in our society, can at last experience full equality.”

and

“A feminist:

1) Believes that there is current, significant, society-wide inequality and sexism which on balance disadvantages women.

2) Advocates for the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.”

Yup, I wrote those, and I stand by them. But here’s what you wrote, Laylalola:

You want political equality? That’s what counts to you?

I think it’s obvious that “social, political and economic” equality, as well as “full” equality, are both calling for more than just political equality. Political equality is one of the many things I want, and it matters, but it’s not the end-all and be-all.

Next, the *headline* for crying out loud to this blog is: “Can conservatives be feminists?” … and you are trying to tell me that your blog does NOT have as its underlying assumption that of course feminists are … partisan at the least and obviously *not* conservatives (that is, they are Democrats or liberals or progressives) if you have to ponder whether conservatives can be feminist.

First of all, I think of a “blog” as meaning the entire blog, not just this one post (which you call a blog). So when you said “this blog has as its assumption that of course partisan politics define you first,” I thought you were referring to the entire blog - all the thousands of posts - not just this one single post. So that’s part of why I took umbrage. Sorry for misunderstanding you.

As you yourself implicitly admit, if I question whether or not conservatives can be feminist, it doesn’t follow that feminists are a subset of the Democratic party. I can believe that conservatives can’t be feminists, and nonetheless think that feminism spans from Greens, to leftists, to progressives, to anarchists, to socialists, to communists, to Dems, etc.. It’s only if we have such a narrow view that we assume the Democrats are the whole of the left, that we can assume that “conservatives aren’t feminists” must mean that feminists are Democrats.

Furthermore, not all conservatives are Republicans! So the assumption that “conservative” has to be a partisan term is dubious, as well. (The word “Republican” was used by Faludi in the bit I quoted, but it was nowhere used in the stuff I wrote for this post).

In short, you’re projecting a narrow Democratic/Republican vision of the world onto a post that made no such assumptions. If one of us is refusing to step away from partisan thinking, it’s not me.

Finally, you might have noted this line from my post: “Yes, in my opinion, conservatives can be feminists.”

I can totally understand being so bruised by a past problem that you tend to see things in its light. I have a lot of sympathy for that. Really.

Nonetheless, the fact is, I don’t think that feminists must be democrats. Period. If you’re not willing to take my word for that when I tell you explicitly, then I don’t know if there’s any point in continuing the discussion.

“Feminism is and has always been about activism; feminists are trying to change society. In particular, feminism is about changing society so that women, who are unfairly kept down in our society, can at last experience full equality.”

and

“A feminist:

1) Believes that there is current, significant, society-wide inequality and sexism which on balance disadvantages women.

2) Advocates for the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.”

Next, the *headline* for crying out loud to this blog is: “Can conservatives be feminists?” — and you are trying to tell me that your blog does NOT have as its underlying assumption that of course feminists are … partisan at the least and obviously *not* conservatives (that is, they are Democrats or liberals or progressives) if you have to ponder whether conservatives can be feminist.

We have different takes on this one. I feel strongly that the liberal feminist movement sold out feminism as an ideal to partisan politics — subordinated feminist ideals to partisan politics — to such an extreme degree in the mid-1990s that I can’t see straight when the subject comes up. It’s like they tossed any ability to make change through the liberal activist venue — the legal system, legislative system, etc. — to the wind, and the damage won’t be undone until we’re at least one generation removed. (But you also have to keep in mind I’m more classic radical anyway and don’t particularly hold liberal and partisan activism up to any real degree — but I mean *some* ability to make change through the venue is better than none!)