Broccoli for Breakfast

In case any of you missed it, there has been an interesting debate on the subject of feminism doing the rounds last week. Now, while the discussion has hardly rocked the blogosphere, it has raised some very interesting questions regarding the status of modern feminism.

Sinead at Sigla may well be held responsible for kicking off the debate with her response to Damien Mulley's piece on the 'most powerful women in the bloggersphere'. Sinead's interesting article (which mentioned the f-word only once and in relation to this blog) resulted in an incomparable display of ill-informed anti-feminist doggerel over at reality check (dot) ie. Sadly for Auds at Reality Check, she tried to make sense of feminism without applying any cogent or comprehensive analysis to the subject. In fact Auds came back from her first outing on the matter, Women, Sex and Blogging with an incredible blast of fanciful reasoning offering up Eve, the lead character in Hollywood B movie Legally Blonde, as a role model for women today.

The most disturbing aspect of Aud's piece, entitled Feminists. And why I am not one, lies in the fact that her understanding of feminist ideology is severely biased towards radical and separatist feminism. The radical feminist movement was born in the sixties and is the daughter of second-wave feminism; by contrast the majority of western feminists today are much closer in ideology to first wave feminists and a lot of radical feminist principles are now completely outmoded by modern thinking on the subject.

But radical feminism is sensational, it is a particular brand of feminism that encourages the media to irresponsibly link all feminist thinking with a depraved culture of man-bashing, bra-burning, female victimisation; it is headline grabbing stuff that demands women replace patriarchy with matriarchy which in itself is no solution to inequality within the sexes.

Blaming feminism for almost all societal ills, as Auds does, from a collective misunderstanding of rape, to ladette culture, is an unfortunate, one-dimensional position to take up. Men are not the 'official enemies' of feminism, we do not view them as rapists and wife beaters, moreover they are credible partners in the struggle to afford their wives, their sisters, their mothers, their daughters and ultimately themselves with the benefit of a level playing field – one where men do not carry the burden of responsibility on the wage-earning front and one where they can secure equal rights within the family. Feminism is not necessarily all about women by the way, nor are all feminists female.

Feminism is not a single ideology and since its inception has never been. If, as Auds suggests, claiming to be a feminist depends on the definition, then I suggest that she and women of her ilk educate themselves in the many definitions of feminism out there – Marxist feminism, eco-feminism, liberal feminism, post-colonial feminism and black feminism – take your pick, just don't assume that all feminism is radical or separatist, please. A little education can go a long, long way.