I posted a couple of paragraphs last summer from a piece I did in 2002 about difference feminism. Now I’ll just post the whole thing, because I want to.

I want to because some people are confusing the kind of feminism that was discussed and assumed at Women in Secularism 2 with difference feminism, and with postmodernist feminism more broadly. That is completely wrong. Nothing that was said in talks or on panels had anything to do with difference feminism, much less postmodernism. Nothing.

The word “privilege” is not code for epistemic relativism. It’s not.

I will admit that I don’t use the word in this context myself. It puts people’s backs up, and it’s never been part of … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Reposted from the first Butterflies and Wheels.

Second wave feminism has always had a radical strand. It has always been about   more than equal pay. It was also, for instance, about exposing and then discarding   banal conventional unreflective ideas that led to banal conventional unreflective behaviour. Ideas about cooking and cleaning being somehow naturally women’s work, for example, which led to men cheerfully lounging about while women put in what Arlie Hochschild calls a second shift. And even more than that, unexamined ideas about what women are like, what they want, what they should be and do.   David Lodge once remarked that women became much more interesting after feminism,   and his own novels bear this out, as do those of … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)