Hey everyone, 

A harried BrazenShe checking in real quick, because I think I’ve solved a little mystery. 

There’s this idea floating around that radical feminists are conservative. More than that, I have seen us called white supremacists with all the authority a Tumblrite can muster. 

Dafuq you say?

At first blush, this confused me immensely. I’m from Cleveland Heights. Racism does not compute for me. 

Ok, some of us have made appearances next to conservatives recently. Scratch the surface and you’ll find a frustrated liberal abandoned by her friends. 

The only other people in the room not falling in line with gender ideology are the people who want us back in the kitchen.

Then there’s the idea that Male and Female are projections of colonialism, as if indigenous peoples don’t understand how babies are made.

But radical feminist philosophy is not conservative in the slightest. Reading just a few sentences of any resource will inform the reader of this, so claiming otherwise is suspicious. The obvious reason anyone would ignore our clearly stated views in favor of painting us as enemies of progress is to discredit us. 

Lacking any way to discredit our arguments, they try to discredit us ourselves. But if this accusation has such flimsy evidence, why does it have such legs?

Because it calls back to the very roots of knowledge itself. 

There are two main schools of thought about knowledge: Rationalism and Empiricism. Plato and Aristotle argued about it, modern Enlightenment thinkers tinkered with it, and we are still having this argument. Even if we have forgotten what we are fighting about.

Rationalism is a founding principle of liberalism, of education. Rationalism teaches that the world works according to knowable rules. That an educated person can make wise choices and improve her own life. That ideas are the real Truth of existence.

Empiricism teaches us that the Truth is what we can see, hear, and touch. Ideas are only as good as their practical application.

These building blocks have obvious influence on the current culture wars. Rationalism and Empiricism need each other like mind needs body, and the distinction is probably just as artificial.

How does anyone keep track of all this??

The Rationalist liberals insist their ideas – Their identities – are the most real thing.

The Empiricist conservatives use simplistic understandings of the world to justify selfish short-sightedness.

Radical feminists cross this line. We are progressives – A liberal creed wanting to rewrite the relationship between women and men – whose practical streak falls back on Empiricism in the Scientific Method tradition. 

Neither Rationalism nor Empiricism is inherently liberal or conservative. They are mental tools that can be applied in either direction, depending on the biases of the user.

But our current polarization of thought has attempted to wedge them into one or the other. Conservatives are against education in their gut because they understand the liberals have claimed ideas. Liberals feel betrayed when an educated person disagrees with the accepted orthodoxy, usually because of observations made in material reality.

Radical feminism appears to exist in a dimension that most of modern thought does not. It doesn’t know what to make of us, we’re not following the rules. I can only hope that, as we continue gathering, discussing, and getting the word out, eventually we will reach critical mass.

With persistence, maybe we can at least bring dimension to the debate.

Happy holidays,

    – Sarah

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