Actually having been hit on a a variety of second wave lesbians I think she has got it dead on.

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Blog...http://itsjustahobby.wordpress.com/

Soon, if we are not prudent, millions of people will be watching each other starve to death through expensive television sets. Nye Bevan

I'm still waiting to hear about the second wave.

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That subtle admixture of the absurd and the surreally plausible...

Me too. I wouldn't recognise a second wave lesbian if she whacked me in the goolies with a wet halibut.

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I'm a nasty, violent lefty. You cunt.

Oh are they the fishwhackers? I met some of those once. I didn't realise they were lesbians though. No wonder they were so cross.

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That subtle admixture of the absurd and the surreally plausible...

A second wave feminst would see that as a waste of fish.

I am waiting for the forth wave, you know women who tjink the maternal death rate in the third world and female genital mutilation matters more than white middle class women arguening about whether they can wear heels or not.

In case they were genuine questions, and this is my view, Enzira is the well read one

First wave.kind of started with Mary Wollestoncroft, goes up to the suffragettes, women were not born intellectually or morally inferior to men. A basic understanding that society is biased towards men, and that is a bad thing, however no idea of class, race or gender issues. This matters because many of the women who fought for the vote agreed with the idea that it shouldn't be given to the poor or unmarried, they were clearly inferior.

Second wave, in many ways a reaction against this, we are all sister under the skin. However sisterhood meant heterosexual sex was sleeping with the enemy and the only logical choice for a feminist was lesbianism. It was not a way people are born but a lifestyle choice. Any woman who enjoys/participates in porn and or sex does so either as a traitor or due to brain washing by a misogynistic culture. They did however identify memes such as rape culture and the basic misogyny of many university courses. The Dead white males idea of history for example. Many ideas we would no longer accept are thanks to the second wave, some of the majoe ones being equal pay, maternity rights and challenging the she was asking for it idea.

But...and it is a massive but, there attitudes to sex workers, heterosexual women who liked sex and worst of all trans people were appalling. There are cases such as feminist conferences refusing to allow women who have had gender reassignment surgery to attend, as they were still, in the words of the organizers, men. They see femaleness as such a sacred thing that brings superiority that it must be confined to those born with a vagina. The worst trans bashing on the web belongs to second wave feminists. Dont believe me...

http://hour13.wordpress.com/2012/03/21/trans/

Third wave, well it recognises a working class man might have more in common with a working class woman than a journalist in islington, that poverty matters more than arguring about the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin and that race, age, sexuality, are things that matter, and matter alot.

If you weren't really asking...well I will go wash the kitchen floor, I know my place

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Blog...http://itsjustahobby.wordpress.com/

Soon, if we are not prudent, millions of people will be watching each other starve to death through expensive television sets. Nye Bevan

Thank you for that Story.
I was genuinely interested really (I was just mucking about whilst I was waiting for teacher to enter the room).
I've never really seen it set out like that, feminists always make me nervous because I'm never sure what to expect.
I've met some who it was just a waste of my time talking to because nothing I said could be of value - I have a cock y'know.
Thanks to you, I now know these are 2nd wave - I wish they wore badges, it'd be so much easier to hide from them.

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That subtle admixture of the absurd and the surreally plausible...

I'm reeling from all the second-wave hate.

I'm not, alas, the well-read one but by my understanding the 2nd wave begins with Simone de Beauvoir in the late 1940s: the differentiation between sex and gender, and the beginnings of a theory of patriarchy (why men, as a group, dominate and oppress women, as a group). Then a gradual rumble until Betty Friedan's The feminine mystique (1963) which debunked the myth that Betty Draper-type women got fulfilment from housework and wifeliness. Grassroots organisation picked up with the civil rights movements and included:
— successful campaigns for the rights to abortion, divorce and inheritance, and the final scrapping of the idea that a married woman was legally the property of her husband;
— "the personal is political": raising awareness of domestic violence, rape and sexual abuse, opening shelters for survivors, and 'no means no';
— employment legislation governing equal pay, harassment, and sexual discrimination;
— legal recognition of female homosexuality (which had been sort of invisible in the UK until 1967) and challenges to obscenity laws which made it an offence for same-sex couples to, eg, kiss in public;
— the creation of women's liberation movements, the first diversity and equal opportunity groups in corporations and public institutions (sorry Mr Littledick), and in the US the National Organisation for Women.

In universities, women's studies emerged, the canon of 'dead white males' was challenged as storygirl says, institutional inequalities and discrimination were contested, and feminism spread from being polite, straight-laced and ivory towerish into communes, direct action, organised protest, revolutionary manifestos (notably SCUM and Valerie Solanos — her what shot Andy Warhol), separatist wimmins' republics and 'political lesbianism', a temporary rejection of heterosexuality among (a very small number of) straight women.

The dominant theories of second wave feminism — and they were multiple, and fast-changing — were essentialist and often took as their starting point, when analysing inequality, the body. An example of this is The female eunuch by Germaine Greer, which locates the source of women's oppression in the biological difference which reduces women to their reproductive function. This now seems misguided, but back in the 1960s the main obstacles faced by middle-class women such as Greer and Gloria Steinem did appear to be based on biology: no access to abortion, motherhood as destiny, abnegation of female sexual desire. Unfortunately, pursuing this biologically essentialist argument led some thinkers, including Greer, to deny that transwomen were women. It should be noted that many second-wave feminists have reconsidered their position on transpeople in the context of queer theory, and a few, eg Twisty Faster, were never trans-phobic to begin with. I know a couple of radical feminists who identify as lesbian transmen: it's more complex than 'radfems = trans-phobes', I think. (I hope.)

Towards the end of the second wave, as feminism became more ambitious and the theories behind it more revolutionary, and in the face of a backlash from men, from the media and from all sorts of women who did not feel represented or included by the movement, an extremist tendency developed. It was never very large, but it did attract attention. It was quite varied, but generally critical of heterosexuality, which was felt to be the reason why ordinary women had not joined the revolution. A lot of radical theory is interesting: Catherine MacKinnon's criticism of pornography, Andrea Dworkin's attacks on prostitution, and Sheila Jeffreys' dismissal of the very notion of heterosexuality are all compelling and, I think, deserve to be read — critically. I'm not sure their ideas are all wrong, but some of them clearly don't stand up to scrutiny (I mean, heterosexuality does exist, surely), and ultimately the main problem is that they're a dead end. Perhaps all sex between men and women is infused with unequal power relations and misogyny. Logically, that means feminists should abstain from sex with men. Well, why should they? And, frankly, who's going to?

In summary, I think 2nd wave feminists did a lot of good and a bit of harm. If I had to identify with a wave myself, it would be 3rd, but when Naomi Wolf and company start burbling about eyeliner, I admit I have a wee yearning for the 2nd.

I am waiting for the first wave of people who do not violate the rights of others for reasons of utter bullshit.

I guess I will keep waiting.

Humans suck.

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You may say I'm a dreamer.... but I'm not the only one....

But it's movements like the second-wave that absolutely destroyed the credibility of feminism in at least the eyes of the right-wing. Thanks to them, feminists are all bra-burning, men-hating, butch lesbians and they want the world to be ruled by women and for men to be slaves and what have you.

That's ridiculously far from the truth (bra-burning never really happened, as far as I'm aware), but it's how they're seen due to a number of... loud people.

Heck, after encountering Julie Bindel I was reluctant to even begin to think of myself as a feminist.

Oh, and men can be feminists too.

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Changin' avatars like there's no tomorrow

According to a QI book, 'bra burning' started off as an offhand quote taken out of context by an American reporter. The combination of a strident act combined with mild titillation ('cos, you know, bras are sexy) caught the public imagination. Pity it never happened.

In the UK, as far as I'm aware the only act of bra burning was by June Whitfield in Carry on Girls. That's where it probably lodged itself in the consciousness over here.

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Ten seconds... the pain begins.

Fifteen seconds... you can't breathe.

Twenty seconds... you give up and turn off the Jeremy Vine show.

Althea: The right wing was never interested in the credibility of feminism in the first place. It wanted to portray feminism as terrifying and a threat (to their own privileges); along came a handful of radicals and revolutionaries with ideas that were designed to be threatening (to inequality and to received ideas about gender and sexuality), and bingo. I wouldn't defend all the radicals' ideas, but I do admire their refusal to be nice and defer to other people's rules about how a woman should look and act.

Above all, I'm comfortable with the notion of feminism as a threat. Sexism and inequality are deeply-rooted and pervasive; they're weapons of the powerful and privileged. If we want them to disappear, they have to be exposed and attacked. And you're right, men can be feminists too — but they're often understandably blind to their own privileges and blissfully unaware of the many tentacles of sexism and inequality, and their effects on women. (A great blogpost on this subject by a transperson.) A lot of what seems self-evident to women has to be understood somewhat in the abstract by men (although having daughters seems to bring the issues closer to home). It's similar to me as a white anti-racist: I can make the effort to empathise and understand, but I'll never overcome all my blind spots, and never viscerally feel the effects of racism on myself or on the people I love. I will loudly give my backing to anti-racist movements, and go on their marches, but always in a supporting, backstage role.

My conception of feminism is as a movement that's as inclusive as it can be without diluting its goals — namely, the pursuit of equality and an end to discrimination, rape culture, and all forms of oppression based on gender and sexuality. If there isn't room in that movement for bra-burning, 'men-hating' butch lesbians who want to rule the world, then I can't be part of it. (Incidentally, I've never met a butch lesbian who hates men, but there are plenty of male and female heterosexuals who hate women — see DM comments). I think Julie Bindel is wrong about transpeople, and I see why her comments cause offence, but I believe she's worth listening to … critically, of course. Her 'transphobia' is ideological, not kneejerk; it's based on a longing to abolish gender altogether, which I think is shared by many transpeople. She goes the wrong way about it, not because she's a lesbian or a feminist, but because she's a self-proclaimed revolutionary: she puts ideology before human lives. That position needs to be debated and contested, not silenced. You've now met at least one lesbian feminist who doesn't support it.

An unlikely revolutionary!

I'm just going on what Storygirl posted. She identified the second-wave as the man-haters.
Was she wrong? You don't seem to have rebutted what she said.

I don't like division and conflict, my instinct is to look for common-ground.
I have no time for bigotry.
Just as a racist is a racist whether they are black or white, a sexist is a sexist whether they are male or female.

It seems self-evident to me that if one wants to bring about social change it's probably best not to start out by alienating half the population by dismissing them.

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That subtle admixture of the absurd and the surreally plausible...

I'm pretty much in agreement with you, but I find people like Germaine Greer and Julie Bindel to do more damage to feminism now than anything else.

I would much rather we had prominent feminists who actually made clear what the movement currently stands for, and how to fight it - but also how to bring men into it.

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Changin' avatars like there's no tomorrow

There is only one -ism that counts, and that is the one which embraces all others, and that is socialism.
A genuine socialist cannot be sexist or racist because she or he accepts the equal worth of all people as an axiom.