Talk:Radical feminism

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Overly assumptive and specific statements about prositution

"They see prostitution as a form of male dominance over women, as the client has sex with a woman who does not enjoy it and who may be making a tremendous psychological effort to mentally dissociate herself from the client "

'as the client has sex with a woman who does not enjoy it' should be stated as a theory and not as a fact, which the use of 'as' implies.

As an ex-sex worker (and radical feminist) and I can verify that not all sex workers are 'a woman who does not enjoy it'.

I understand that the majority are in this situation, but it generalizes sex workers as unhappy clones of one another, who's circumstances and feelings are the same (obviously the anti-thesis of feminism in all forms).

I will be changing 'a woman who does not enjoy it' to 'a woman who may not enjoy it' please do not revert the edit — Preceding unsigned comment added by Msgoody2shoes (talk • contribs) 20:29, 15 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, but I've reverted the edit. That statement of ideological stance is sourced to prominent radical feminist activist and theorist Catherine MacKinnon. Just putting your own opinion in falls foul of our policies on original research, so we're going to need a source before we can change that. Dolescum (talk) 21:05, 15 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Overreliance on Ellen Willis's work in a poorly sourced manner

This article appears to have been written by someone who relies predominantly on the writing of Ellen Willis, an obscure anti-radical feminist writer. It appears that the entire introduction is cited only to five pages out of some unnamed work by Willis (which given that the title and edition isn't provided, we have no way of checking) apart from a single citation to another non-radical feminist author. The rest of the article is predominantly in dialoge with or grounded on the writing of Ellen Willis.

It is inappropriate to structure the entire article around a single work by a single author who isn't even a radical feminist, let alone a prominant or movement defining one.

Just to get a sense of the scale, Willis's name appears 42 times on the page and is cited dozens of times. Catherine A. Mackinnon, likely the principle figure of the radical feminist movement, only appears 15 times and she's cited directly only three or four times. To compare their relative statures, google scholar reports that MacKinnon's Feminism Unmodified was cited 3582 times, and MacKinnon's Towards a Feminist Theory of the State cited 2698 times, and she has at least three or four other books with more than 1000 citations each. Ellen Willis's most cited book recieved 78 citations and her most cited article recieved 134 citations. Andrea Dworkin's name appears 8 times but only in passing or along with MacKinnon except for one quote and her principle work is never discussed.

Edited to add: A whole section of the article is devoted to Willis's "Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism", the apparent source of the whole article. Why is there a whole section fo the artile devoted to a rarely cited publication?

This article seems to be closer to a summation of a single unnamed work of an activist who opposes radical feminism than a neutral account of radical feminism.

I don't know how to best address this though since writing a balanced article from scratch takes a lot of time (a lot more time than, apparently just repeating a summary of a single book) and I don't right now have a lot of time to do that, but it should get fixed eventually. N0thingbetter (talk) 20:22, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

"This article seems to be closer to a summation of a single unnamed work of an activist who opposes radical feminism than a neutral account of radical feminism."

This article in general is closer to a summation of opinions of activists who oppose radical feminism than a neutral account of radical feminism. I deleted parts of that section which were mostly about cultural feminism, but the entire page needs lots of work and one of the editors who I planned to fix it with is no longer an editor. I doubt it will be solved soon, but you can try if you have time, I have material that needs to be in the article but no time to put it in. Bridenh (talk) 17:17, 23 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]