Liberal versus radical feminism: the fundamental contradiction

I have been following the unfolding feminist scene in Egypt since 2010, particularly its emergence on social media as a means of protest, in the form of engagement with individual cases of sexual violence, as frequent as they were, and as a forum for feminist articulation and theorization. I have learned a lot from it and have found it to be as rich with grief and pain as it was with excitement, will to understand, and more importantly, a will to power. It was dense with intergenerational conflict with older feminists, and a site of engagement with the patriarchal status quo, whether eloquently articulated by the male-dominated left or its version in the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated, socially conservative circles. It took its protest to both and to the state and its laws. 

Gradually, I witnessed the emergence of a young generation of feminists who were astute in their analysis, defiant in their posture, courageous in their self-revelation, and determined to change the status quo. They eked love and solidarity. And a whole lot of laughter and joy.   

The feminism that I witnessed seemed to me to be engaged in reversing the cultural revolution of the Sahwa al-Islamiyah (Islamic Revival Movement) that had for decades acculturated women to take full responsibility for what happens to their bodies. According to this hegemonic religious vision, women were expected to manage, through their dress and public behavior, both their own desire and that of men. The rising feminist reaction wanted to flip this equation on its head: women should be free to do whatever they wanted with their bodies and dress however they liked; it was men who were responsible for managing their reactions and sexual desire. This demand seemed to be premised on the strategy of gaining back the spaces that were hijacked by Sahwa, especially as the social cost became very high, street harassment being its most conspicuous expression, often taking monstrous and unrelenting forms making women’s lives in public spaces sheer hell. The focus of this new feminism was sexual violence, whether in the form of sexual harassment, on the street or at the workplace, or rape, including mass and gang rapes. In its pursuit of safety for women, this new feminism combined a strict notion of “consent,” which it married to liberal attitudes toward dress and pleasure. 

The strategy on its face is tricky. It combines two familiar strands that have historically plagued Western feminism: the sexual libertarian one and the radical feminist one. Those two respective strands emerged from the bosom of second wave feminism in the US where one, known as liberal feminism, put the accent on women’s agency and desire and saw that liberating both from the grip of the socially conservative society of the 1950s was its goal. The other, radical feminism, developed a skeptical attitude towards ideas like women’s “agency and desire,” utilizing radical critiques of these concepts from the Marxist leftist traditions. Just as the radical economic left insisted that agency and choice was constrained by the “system,” (here understood as “capitalism”) so did radical feminism. It insisted that agency and pleasure were constrained by the patriarchal system that on the one hand, constrained women’s set of choices, and on the other, interpreted desire and pleasure on male terms. For the latter strand, nothing short of overturning patriarchy as a regime would make women’s agency meaningful and introduce women to pleasure on their own terms. 

When these two sets of feminisms developed stands on singular issues they tended to calculate cost for women differently. Liberal feminism insisted on the importance of “consent” when it came to sexual matters and adopted a rather formalist approach to it. If there was consent to sex then there was no rape. Period. This formalist approach to sex worried that anything more exacting in the definition of consent would end up second-guessing women’s choices and thereby replacing the state and its laws with the social conservatism of society. They treated women’s pleasure as a cost to such exacting attitudes that they didn’t think wise for women to pay. While the liberal feminism of the second wave saw pornography and sex work as symptoms of a patriarchal culture they did not seek to outlaw them for the reasons stated above. 

Radical feminism on the other hand adopted a skeptical and anti formalist attitude towards the idea of female consent to sex. The anti-formalist approach saw coercion behind female expressions of consent, coercion to “please men” being a definition of what a female is. In this instance women may consent to sex (for fear for their lives, for fear of being judged, etc) but they may very well still be considered rape. Here radical feminism’s skeptical attitude is willing to sacrifice pleasure for safety, its goal being to stop violence against women. Radical feminism saw “sex work “ as “prostitution” (in alignment with the socially conservative society) and treated it and the associative industry, pornography, as defining of patriarchy. Given the foundational roles these practices play in promoting patriarchy, radical feminism saw women’s liberation contingent on banning these practices.

Those two strands inevitably collide with each other as the former pushes for risk taking on the part of women and the latter pushes for risk aversion; where the former charges the other with patronizing women and the latter accuses the former of throwing women in the mouth of the “beast;” where the former inflates women’s agency and the latter that of men’s. Each theory treats “cost” differently — for the former, certain cases of sexual violence have to be tolerated so women can act as free sexual agents, feeling that regulation will substitute social conservatism for the state; alternatively, for the latter, certain forms of sexual interaction between the sexes have to be sacrificed so sexual violence by men is deterred — men have to think hard before they initiate sexual interaction with women. 

Western feminism has not been able to reconcile those two strands, but perhaps putting them together as the young Egyptian feminists are trying to do and allowing the internal tension to work itself out over time is a good idea, nevertheless. But the sooner those feminists understand this underlying tension and try to manage it, the better. 

The one risk though that I see with this strategy is that middle class women end up securing relatively safe spaces with the men of their class by upping the ante with these men (they pull the radical feminist posture to gain ground), while drinking the Kool-Aid on what plagues poor women: sex work. The term “sex work” is a term of privilege within the sexual libertarian arm of feminism-liberal feminism, in which prostitution is treated as “contractual” and in which the “work” conditions of the prostitute are ignored: pimps, drug and alcohol addiction, and an exceptionally high rate of sexual assault. The combination strategy can break down on class grounds: radical feminism for me, where “yes means yes”; sexual libertarianism for her, where standing on the street corner means “yes”.  

Another risk that I see is the general backlash to feminist demands, especially within the ranks of the college graduate intelligentsia, where men experience the demand of women to be sexually seduced without acting on it as an impossible demand. I worry that rather than curbing sexual assault, this strategy will nevertheless cause an increase in sexual assault, along with increased misogyny and male resentment. Within the leftist circles of this male intelligentsia, the paranoid reaction of the men, that the feminist pursuit of visibility in the way women within left circles are treated will deliver them to the authoritarian state, adds to the problem of backlash. This clearly poses difficult questions to those feminists who want to associate with left circles, about how to manage the fallout of feminist critique without compromising the survival of the left as a site of dissent. 

There is also the risk that the state will adopt only one strand in this combination where radical feminism seems to fit more generally with its social conservative posture. Here, it seems to me feminists have to evaluate the cost of going along with this strategy. The state will welcome heightened attention to sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape but will look unkindly on women who challenge the idea of those who deserve such protection. In other words, the state will discriminate on who it offers protection to: women who are “proper” deserve it, and those who act in a more sexually subversive way do not. The state is happy to drop the sexual libertarian side and, in fact, make state protection conditional on the absence of the libertarian side. There is a lot to be gained by pushing the social conservative route, but is the cost worth it?

Again, the more the younger feminists are aware of the risk, the better for everyone. There are no golden rules on how to proceed. It all depends on the local context as activists treat reaction to their strategy as a call to reconsideration as they see fit under the circumstances. 

Let me register a final worry: I worry that Facebook activism, which is an important site for young feminist activism — maybe even the most important — might end up creating an echo chamber where each articulated grievance is inflated through collective sympathy, where emotions roll like a snow ball unchecked by the burden of reality, where the anthropological world is replaced by the virtual moral one and where each feeling and each grievance is condoned, shared, heightened, and in the end isolated by collective validation. What started as respite might end up an alternative world, that, put simply, makes little sense.