WHAT IS RADICAL FEMINISM?
I'm not an expert on radical feminism—quite the opposite. I'm currently in the process of learning about it. I also think there is likely to be disagreement on many issues. However, I have collected the following impressions so far:
Radical feminists attempt to explain inequality by analysing sex as a class or caste system. They look at power, exploitation and the division of (productive and reproductive) labour between men and women. They understand gender as the socially constructed roles and expectations that are imposed on us based on our sex. They analyse how gender norms help make sex based injustices appear natural, inevitable, or even invisible. For radical feminists, feminism or women's liberation is the political movement for women to fight sex based injustice, and to refute the cultural mythology of gender that disguises or dignifies these injustices.
Radical feminists do not think that choice alone can tell us whether a cultural practice is good for women or not. They analyse customs and practices that affect women (whether these are “foreign” or familiar). Radical feminists therefore stand in opposition to certain mainstream “feminist” messaging that treats any and every choice a woman makes as feminist and empowering. This kind of “choice feminism” disappears the background conditions that radical feminists are committed to analysing, while treating choice as stemming, apparently uncaused, from the individual will.
Radical feminists collect empirical evidence of the abuse and harm that occurs in prostitution. They consider it to be inherently exploitative for men to buy access to women’s and girls’ bodies, since they argue that money cannot substitute for consent. They consider the global sex industry a form of modern slavery, and modern radical feminists tend to promote the Nordic Model as the best legislative approach to address it. They point out that pornography is part of this industry and is produced using real women and girls, who are frequently subject to real and devastating abuse.
Any theory or politics that disguises sex differences and the socially caused nature of gender roles is likely to undermine the radical feminist project of analysing and fighting sex based injustice. For this reason, radical feminists have clashed with some trans rights activists and queer theorists, who vehemently reject common sense definitions of women as female people in favour of ameliorative redefinitions that ensure no one shall be categorised in a way they do not prefer. The categories of “man” and “woman” are made inclusive and optional by divorcing them from physical sex and social sex caste. Robbed of substance, the new redefinitions tend to be either circular, unfalsifiable, or reliant on stereotypes. The ameliorative project also poaches from women the linguistic resources they need to talk about their experiences and interests as female people in a male-dominated world, to explain sex-based inequality, and to describe solutions.