Radical Feminism - Criticisms

Criticisms

Within the New Left, radical feminists were accused of being "bourgeois", "antileft", or even "apolitical", whereas they saw themselves as further "radicalizing the left by expanding the definition of radical". Radical feminists have tended to be white and middle class. Ellen Willis hypothesized in 1984 that this was, at least in part, because "most black and working-class women could not accept the abstraction of feminist issues from race and class issues"; the resulting narrow demographic base, in turn, limited the validity of generalizations based on radical feminists' personal experiences of gender relations. Comedian George Carlin, in a routine from his 1990 HBO special Doin' It Again, remarked: "I've noticed that most of these feminists are white, middle class women. They don't give a shit about black women's problems, they don't care about Latino women, all they're interested in is their own reproductive freedom and their pocketbooks." Many early radical feminists broke political ties with "male-dominated left groups", or would work with them only in ad hoc coalitions.

Betty Friedan and other liberal feminists often see precisely the radicalism of radical feminism as potentially undermining the gains of the women's movement with polarizing rhetoric that invites backlash and hold that they overemphasize sexual politics at the expense of political reform. Other critics of radical feminism from the political left, including socialist feminists, strongly disagree with the radical feminist position that the oppression of women is fundamental to all other forms of oppression; these critics hold that issues of race and of class are as important or more important than issues about gender. Queer and postmodernist theorists often argue that the radical feminist ideas on gender are essentialist and that many forms of gender identity complicate any absolute opposition between "men" and "women". Radical feminism has been accused of being transphobic, for example in 1979 Janice Raymond's book The Transsexual Empire described transsexuality as a "patriarchal myth". Many radical feminists today still believe that transsexuality is oppressive to women, and genital reassignment surgery is a violation of human rights. Sheila Jeffreys for instance, describes 'transgender' surgeries as 'mutilation.'

Some feminists, most notably Alice Echols and Ellen Willis, held that after about 1975 most of what continued to be called "radical feminism" represents a narrow subset of what was originally a more ideologically diverse movement. Willis saw this as an example of a "conservative retrenchment" that occurred when the "expansive prosperity and utopian optimism of the '60s succumbed to an era of economic limits and political backlash." They label this dominant tendency "cultural feminism" and view it as a "neo-Victorian" ideology coming out of radical feminism but ultimately antithetical to it. Willis drew the contrast that early radical feminism saw itself as part of a broad left politics, whereas much of what succeeded it in the 1970s and early 1980s (both cultural feminism and liberal feminism) took the attitude that "left politics were 'male' and could be safely ignored." She further wrote that whereas the original radical feminism "challenge the polarization of the sexes", cultural feminism simply embraces the "traditional feminine virtues". Critics of cultural feminism hold that cultural feminist ideas on sexuality, exemplified by the feminist anti-pornography movement, severely polarized feminism, leading to the "Feminist Sex Wars" of the 1980s. Critics of Echols and Willis hold that they conflate several tendencies within radical feminism, not all of which are properly called "cultural feminism", and emphasize a greater continuity between early and contemporary radical feminism.

Also, Willis, although very much a part of early radical feminism and continuing to hold that it played a necessary role in placing feminism on the political agenda, later criticised its inability "to integrate a feminist perspective with an overall radical politics," while viewing this limitation as inevitable in the historical context of the times. In part this limitation arose from the fact that consciousness raising, as "the primary method of understanding women's condition" in the movement at this time and its "most successful organizing tool", led to an emphasis on personal experience that concealed "prior political and philosophical assumptions".

Willis, writing in 1984, was critical of the notion that all hierarchies are "more specialized forms of male supremacy" as preventing adequate consideration of the possibility that "the impulse to dominate… could be a universal human characteristic that women share, even if they have mostly lacked the opportunity to exercise it." Further, the view of oppression of women as a "transhistorical phenomenon" allowed middle-class white women to minimize the benefits of their own race and class privilege and tended to exclude women from history. Further, Willis wrote that the movement never developed "a coherent analysis of either male or female psychology" and that it ultimately raised hopes that its narrow "commitment to the sex-class paradigm" could not fulfill; when those hopes were dashed, according to Willis the resulting despair was the foundation of withdrawal into counterculturalism and cultural feminism.

Echols and Willis have both written that radical feminism was, ultimately, dismissive of lesbian sexuality. On the one hand, if the central struggle was to take place within personal heterosexual relationships, as envisioned by the Redstockings, lesbians were marginalized. On the other, political lesbianism granted lesbians a vanguard role, but only if they would play down erotic desire. Those lesbians whose sexuality focused on genital pleasure were liable to be dismissed by the advocates of political lesbianism as "male identified". The result, through the 1970s, was the adoption by many of a "sanitize lesbianism", stripped of eroticism.