Why "fun feminism" should be consigned to the rubbish bin

[fishwax]

92. basically I just think that

both second and third wave feminism (granted: the terms themselves are perhaps problematic and subject to contest) are important and still have interesting and productive things to offer the world. Likewise, each has had problematic aspects that it must address; and, as the status quo marshalls forces against them, each has aspects that can be exploited through caricature. I'm not a fan of "fun feminism" as this article would paint it, but then I don't think that it gives a very accurate picture of where feminism is today. Her paraphrase of Natasha Walter, for instance--that she "claims that being able to wear trousers and drink beer on her own means sexism is dead"--ignores Walter's more recent work, which acknowledges that she was wrong about how easily the world might be rid of sexism. (I haven't read her latest book, Living Dolls: the Return of Sexism, but I've read some reviews and summaries of it.)

radical and fun: I'll take one binary from the article as an example--one can take from the article that "radical" feminism is about transforming societal/cultural whereas "fun" feminism is about personal empowerment/rights of the individual. Certainly it's possible that "fun" can destroy "radical" (in the sense that an insufficient attention to power dynamics, particularly as they present themselves socially and culturally, can take the edge off, sapping the movement's power and perhaps even making it counter-productive). At the same time, "radical" can also destroy "fun" (in the sense that insufficient attention to personal empowerment or "the rights of the individual" can have the appearance [or even the effect] of enabling an authoritarian impulse and/or inequalities). Those are dangers that both "sides" are certainly right to be cautious of, I think. But while they can destroy each other, but they don't have to. At least, I think/hope not. But that's not to say I have a clear vision for how the various oppositional threads within the big world of feminism may be reconciled or synthesized