“Sexual difference is probably the issue in our time
which could be our ‘salvation’ if we thought it through.”
— Luce Irigaray
Several years ago for Father’s Day, my step-daughter gave me a tee-shirt. Printed in bold letters on the front were the words: Radical Feminist. I held it up for my wife to see my gift from her daughter. “Perfect,” she said. “She really knows her step-dad.”
I was pleased with the double recognition. Radical Feminist is a label I bear with pride. It grieves me to think of the loss of our full humanity under the patriarchal principle, as half of the human race has been controlled by the other half. There are many factors that made this convenient acquiescence possible and much has been written to come to terms with causes and outcomes. Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex (1949) and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) are only two of hundreds of books and articles on women’s liberation.
It appeared to me that most feminist work was done on the sociological level using politics as the lever to make things move. And for good reason. Social inequality was the most apparent way in which women as a group were made lesser to men. From a woman losing her identity of origin in marriage to the disparity of the pay scale, there are a multitude of ways the balance of power is tipped in favor of the masculine. Politics has been an effective tool to bring about egalitarian change. In Freudian terminology, cultures have created a phallocentric mythology which posits that the beneficial domination of men over women is the way it should be. In this system, the well-being of women’s lives was determined by men. Good men made a good life possible for women. The opposite was also true. Sexual difference was seen as an unnecessary distinction. We are all, after all, just human beings. Equal implied identical. Women were expected, and expected themselves, to behave like men. As Henry Higgins sings in My Fair Lady, “why can’t a woman be more like a man?”
The tee-shirt given to me displayed two words: feminist was one, the other was radical. Ever since my Montana boyhood, when my buddies and I raided neighbors’ vegetable gardens on warm summer nights, pulling up, rinsing, and eating red and white radishes, the word radical has been significant to me. The humble radish gets its name from the Latin ‘radix’ meaning ‘rooted’, ‘grounded.’ The question was beginning to be asked, as a woman, is not my feminine gender an essential to who I am? Even though femininity is authentically expressed in a variety of ways, there is a deep root difference between women and men. As the French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray puts it:
The phenomenon of gender difference does not imply disparate value between women and men although it is often misused that way. Rather offers access to rich deep veins of human experience as we make our way together in this world. On this Father’s Day, may the fathers of daughters and sons do our part in thinking it through.