Radical Feminism — a good idea in theory

Welcome to the academic mean girls club.

Radical feminism often gets a bad press, but it’s one of the branches of feminism that has been central in forming the movement that we have today. Many concepts, such as patriarchy and the notion of women and men as social classes, originated in radical feminism and they are pivotal in the discourse of other schools of thought — some of them opposed to other aspects of radical feminist philosophy. It seems to have gone astray recently, with many attacking radical feminism as a concept. It’s a shame, because applied appropriately, it has a lot of uses in the 21st century.

The core idea of radical feminism is that our society is designed to favour men giving them unfair advantages and more power than women, and in order to achieve gender equality, society needs to be reordered to redistribute power and access to resources. That in itself isn’t too controversial (although there’s always those that play the “reverse sexism” card), but some of the other ideas stemming from radical feminism are more problematic.

Radical feminism began in the 1960s, arising from the civil rights movement. It aimed to centre gender as the most fundamental form of oppression (the term “radical” in this sense refers to identifying the root cause of sex discrimination — it doesn’t mean “extreme” or “crazy”)…