I’ll be traveling again this coming week, busy with matters spiritual and temporal. I will be back to blogging Monday, September 13; until then, I will be checking in and moderating comment threads as best I can. Feel free to follow me on Facebook (where I happily accept friend requests) and Twitter.
Re: recent debates ’round here. Check out an interesting post from Glendenb at One Utah.
I think glendenb’s post suffers from some of the reductiveness of which he and others often accuse radical feminists. It’s true that to a lot of liberals, radical feminism and social conservatism have some overlapping elements. I’d suggest that that is because radical feminists and social conservatives are fighting on opposite ends of the same battlefield.
Liberals in general tend to view liberty and well-being in somewhat subjective terms. The primary way to decide that someone is liberated is the self report: are all the elements of your existence being fulfilled?
Social conservatives insofar as they promote the benefits of their views beyond compliance to Scripture tend to view well-being in external terms, with a particular focus on stability of life for children.
Radical feminists (along with, I’d argue, other radicals on the left side of the spectrum) consider the liberal view to be inadequate because they’re skeptical of the authenticity of individual subjective views of well-being. How in the liberal paradigm do you account for systematic inequalities in well-being? To take a largely subjective view of well-being is to give away a large portion of the battleground to conservative criteria.
Of course, if you’re not willing to take a subjective view of well-being, then the things people do for themselves must be subject to moral scrutiny, because what the majority does is crucial in understanding class-wide disadvantage.
As to why you would want a class-wide understanding of well-being (and the concomitant individual moral scrutiny), consider glendenb’s quotes of radfems’ self-reported anger. They consider themselves to represent those classes of women on the periphery, left behind by the majority’s overall acceptance of a potentially smaller slice of the pie. After all, the whole class of women may be getting a smaller slice of the pie, but that may be enough for some women: to radfems, that leads to unacceptable losses (including often themselves).
Indeed, the discussion of “acceptable losses” is very common in radfem writing particularly about porn. If no losses are acceptable, than everyone’s behaviour and self-report of well-being need to be in principle subject to objective moral scrutiny.
In that sense, radical feminism and social conservatism exist on a similar footing. It’s the same battle ground. Radical feminists accuse “funfems” of abandoning the field, and therefore many women.
Mandos,
“similar footing”
Yeah, a tendency for a teleological worldview and a desire to implement the assumed correct aesthetics or behaviour or genetical strucutre with totalitarian means. Graveyards the world over are filled with the remains of human beings who didn’t make the cut.
If the 20th century has taught us anything, it’s to be particularly careful when someone presents a simple answer to complex problems.
“How in the liberal paradigm do you account for systematic inequalities in well-being?”
First of all, you need to understand that any systemic inequalities are usually constructed within the axiomatic structure of the ideology in question. There is no unified standard for human well being. Cardinal utility theory and aggregate utility functions are simply impossible to construct. What do you want to look at? The world development index? Life-experience? Most people’s experiences are simply incommensurable, you cannot logically create a hierarchy of individual experiences.
Hey,
Mandos I appreciate you taking the time to head over and read my post. I’m working on a follow up so I hope you’ll check in at oneutah in a day or two.
I think you restated my point in different language – the liberal analysis is actually working at a very different perspective and, to borrow your language, looking at a very different battlefield.
Sorry, I’ve been very busy lately. I’ve meant to respond to Sam and glendenb but I might not get to this until next week, or I might get to it tomorrow depending on things.
If I can briefly (for me, heh) leave you with something:
It’s clearly the case that it’s difficult to come up with a detailed account of class-wide well-being, questions of subjectivity are pretty hairy, etc, etc. But there are some obvious metrics we can agree on, like rates of rape, DV, and overall susceptibility to victimization in general. Most liberal and radical feminists agree that women are more susceptible to those things at greater rates than men, even in the white Western middle class. If so, the question becomes: is this merely the condition of women in relation to men, or is it because women are getting/accepting a smaller share of the well-being “pie”? If the latter, precisely where does this acceptance/force come from?
Radical feminism has several answers to this, and accuses liberal feminism of largely ignoring the question. It’s one thing to be worried about women being forbidden to drive in Saudi Arabia—everyone agrees about that—but another to wonder why inequality exists in places that have been otherwise liberated.