No, actualy this isn’t my feminism

I spent most of yesterday reading Sister Outsider by Audre Lourde and Blood Bread and Poetry by Adrienne Rich and they blew me away, I was moved by ther honesty, their compassion their love for other women, the fluidity of their thoughts and their willingness to dialogue with other women that’s didn’t always agree with , and they wilingness to unpack there own attitudes, and the fact that they realised that calling oneself a feminist was a starting point not an end point ,

And they wrote about a whole stack of different issues, race, sexuality, motherhood poetry ,anger, history, honesty, safety, silence. Rich, thick, deep writing about stuff that really matters then and still really matters now and I was just drinking it in, infusing myself with it and as Iiswas doing the I was also thinking “What the fuck happened , where did this all go, how did we loose this ?”

I was talking later to some feminist friends and ranting about the current State of rad Feminism and how this wasn’t what I signed up for inasmuch as ‘signed up” for anything. I didn’t want a Feminism that was exlusitory, elitist, refused to examine its own privilege and atitudes, and had a very narrow agenda, I wanted a feminism that was about love and listening.

One of my friends Suggested that actually maybe there were two main branches of radical feminism. One branch Came from women such as Rich and Lourde and Hanich and Millet, women who did have other women’s interests at heart, who didn’t think you could use represive state laws to make things better for women, who listened to other women, who were far from perfect but who were mostly honest and oudward looking and understood that women were fluid.

Then later came another group of feminists such as Dworkin, MacKinnon and Jefferies who seemed to have a very narrow agenda, who decided there were certain ways that “real” feminists (and in the case of Jefferies “real” lesbians) behaved, I have read lots of both Jefferies and Dworkin and I like some of the things they say but I really dislike the idea that their ideas are right, are set in stone, I really dislike the solid unmoving rigidity of their positions, I really dislike the feeling that they think disagreement and discussion is anti feminist, and the way that there doesn’t seem to be much self reflection. I also think with this sort of feminism it totally isn’t taken into account that women are complicated, that we don’t all come from the same place, that we create ourselves and survive in different ways. This kind of feminism and its adherents also seems to be allergic to even listening to women with different views and there doesn’t seem to be the emphasis of working through stuff together, at looking how we are situated can make us blind to other women.

My feminism comes much more from feminists such as Rich, from who I drink deep, and learn from and challenge myself with, although I am influenced by Jefferies, Dworkin et all I do not consider them my inheritance in the same way I consider other radical feminists.

I was searching for stuff about the differences between Rich and Dworkin and I found this,

Others more deserving of the badge of radical feminism, such as Adrienne Rich, have developed thoughtful and constructive critiques of heterosexuality as a compulsory institution. Such contributions have an important place in our evolving socialist/feminist theory and practice; they enrich our understanding and provoke critical questioning.
In contrast, MacDworkinism offers us nothing liberating; its emotion-laden screed comes down to nothing more sophisticated than “pornography is bad, sex is dangerous, and men are violent.” Positing that words and pictures cause violence and oppression, it scrupulously avoids any meaningful discussion of the root causes of these social problems.
In the real world, this version of “feminism” has disaffected countless women who do not experience male violence as the defining characteristic of their lives, and has distracted countless others from the economic and political battles we should have been fighting while we have been squabbling about “pornography.”

To be honest male violence has been one of the defining charcteristics of my life but it is far from my only issue and i’m also really aware that other women have other diferent issues also

This explains why I have been so frustrated with radical feminism/radfems lately because there is an assumption that we are coming from the same place and belive the same things when actually we are on very different tracks that often don’t meet in the middle. Its like we’re speaking the same langauge but the words meant differnt things.