Comments Elsewhere

Aeon:

This is an issue that we touched on in earlier drafts but which got short shrift in later versions. So let me try to spell it out a bit more here. There’s nothing essentially wrong with trying to piece out which members of a group you find reasonable and which you do not, and making this a part of what you say. The worry with Radical Menace rhetoric here isn’t that it’s sectarian—sectarian debate is, if anything, how movements define themselves and their programme, and I, for one, happen to think that there’s a strong empirical case to be made that the most productive years of the feminist movement (as well as the abolitionist movement, incidentally) were those in which sectarian wrangling was the most pronounced.

Our worries about Radical Menace rhetoric come from different considerations. For example…

1. There is the degree to which it usually depends on problematic notions like “mainstream” and “extremist.” The problem here is that “mainstream” and “extremist” aren’t terms with any legitimate normative content, but they are typically treated as if they are. As folks like William Lloyd Garrison and Ayn Rand were fond of pointing out, if something is extremely wrong with the organization of society then an extreme response is morally in order, whether or not the “mainstream” of thought likes it. The worry here is that the frequent tendency of Radical Menace rhetoric to depend on charges of, e.g., “extremism” serves to subvert a feminist program whenever it happens to run up against “mainstream” opinion. (You might object: but look, mainstream opinion is closer to the truth than a radical feminist program on a number of issues. Okay, but that’s a disagreement with the empirical arguments that male supremacy exists more than it is to the analytical category of Radical Menace rhetorc. And I think that Ayn Rand was right to point out that the use of “extremism” as a term of criticism is philosophically objectionable even if the people so described do happen to be wrong.)

2. There is also the way in which such rhetoric typically attempts to polarize the feminist movement on terms imposed from the outside, rather than in terms of any particular tendency within feminism itself. Feminists have always recognized the distinction between liberal feminists and radical feminists, for example, but the terms on which this distinction is made are very different from the way that Radical Menace rhetoric typically construes it—not surprisingly, since the rhetoric is more or less invariably concerned with the baiting tactics of antifeminists. Because the terms being used to draw the line are so often alien to the distinctions drawn and traditions of thought developed within the feminist movement, they usually distort the positions of the group of feminists being critiqued and lump together feminists whose thought is really distinctly at odds. The issue here isn’t sectarian disagreement, but rather sectarianism in which the “sects” are divided up by alien criteria in ways that blur essential differences. (This is also why this tendency tends to invite the use of antifeminist caricatures, even by well-meaning feminists. It’s also even more clear when the categories—such as Christina Hoff Sommers’ “equity feminism” and “gender feminism”—are completely alien to the feminist tradition.)

3. There’s a general worry about rhetorical strategies that define a feminist political position mostly by opposition to other forms of feminism. Feminists may have conflicts with other feminists, but feminism is primarily defined by opposition to patriarchy. Minarchist libertarians think that individualist anarchists are mistaken, and may think that anarchists hold a position which will ultimately alienate people from libertarianism. Fine; it’s worth arguing about these things. But if a minarchist were investing substantial time and organizing effort to distance him/herself and his/her project from individualist anarchism—rather than from, say, statism—people might very well wonder whether pitching that much effort into the fight with people who are closer to your position than your critics, but have in some way or another gone further than you think they ought, is going to end up limiting your politics.

I’m sure there is still plenty to disagree about here, but I hope that I may have at least helped a bit in articulating where the disagreements may lie.