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Zoe's avatar

Thanks for this analysis Edie. I’m with you; please start the new WSPU! I’m also not a radical feminist and (I just had this discussion with my Mum) I find it difficult to call myself any sort of feminist, because liberal feminism’s so bloody awful. Come to think of it, I’m not a believer in any ideology as people tend to get trampled in the name of ideas. I enjoy your writing and as I have never done Cultural Studies, I learn a lot too. Thanks.

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Steersman's avatar

Edie: "

• ... cracks in the growing gender critical movement

• Radical feminism has a way of understanding the culture of sex (gender) as a system where one class oppresses the other. How much male oppression of women is innate ad how much is culture is a question for the ages ...

• If ... male pattern violence is innate .... If male pattern violence is cultural ....

• I think that humans are a mix of biology and culture that I don’t have the expertise to fully understand. ...

• I don’t know where the line is between culture and biology, but the slate is definitely not blank ..."

A fairly solid bit of analysis in general, but while I can’t say much towards any of your comments about and related to Marxism, I think the five listed points above speak to the crux of the matter.

As I’ve argued recently in another comment here, it seems the biggest problem with much of feminism in general and radical feminism in particular is its tendency to rather dogmatically insist that gender is just a matter of culture, that it was hatched in the inner sanctums of “The Patriarchy” with the sole intent of “oppressing” women, that the slate is indeed blank. I think you’re entirely justified to wonder where “the line is between culture and biology”, but the evidence seems clear that both contribute, in varying degrees depending on the traits in question, to the various personalities and personality types that are subsumed under the rubric of “gender”. Failing to acknowledge those facts tends to preclude optimal solutions to their worst consequences.

ICYMI, UK lawyer and Substacker Helen Dale had a fairly illuminating, if not damning essay on “Feminising Feminism”, the pretext for which was a review of Louise Perry’s “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century”. A couple of particularly damning comments related to the above:

"

• ... a counterblast to the braindead feminism I encountered at university. Pseudoscientific feminism never took me in ...

• ... [Perry’s book] represents a sincere attempt to anchor feminism in reality.

• ... led [Perry] to do what no feminist theorist has done before: take biology seriously."

https://lawliberty.org/book-review/feminising-feminism/

That seems to be the biggest problem with far too much of feminism – a rather pigheaded and dogmatic reluctance to “take the biology seriously”. Offhand, it seems there’s more than a bit of value in the concept of gender – at least, as many argue, as a synonym for those personalities and personality types. Where much of feminism seems to have gone off the rails is in “thinking” that those personality types – AKA gender – don’t have their roots in significant personality differences by sex that are, in turn, based on fundamental bedrock biological differences.

As I’ve argued here, much of gender is incoherent and quite antiscientific claptrap, but there are some worthwhile elements and perspectives that might reasonably be put on a more scientific footing:

https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/i/64264079/rationalized-gender

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