Are feminists liberals or extreme conservatives?

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I know that modern feminism is associated with progressivism and the left. It is held as a very progressive social and political movement. On the other hand, I've seen lots of conservative and radical Christian groups aligning with feminists for their criticism of pornography for objectifying women. Conservative Christians as I observed it seem to be aligned more with feminism because they both happen to agree that male sexuality is inherently "dirty" or sinful. So, are feminists really that progressive?

This was just an observation, what do you think though?

Two things:
1) I like the term 'regressive leftists' for the incoherent left and they, third-wave feminists, true bible-beaters, and sharia proponents seem to have quite a bit of incoherence and emotional obsession as well as overmagnification in their opinions.
2) I notice a certain kind of centrist, almost libertarian but with compassion (ie. maybe neoliberalish thinking but not quite in the same way) among city conservatives, new atheists, and also the kinds of feminists who are more inclined to be in favor of what they consider feminist or ethical porn - ie. stuff that's helping to distigmatize the realities of sexuality rather than continually benight people's world views.

The second offer could be somewhat problematic in that the people I just described my not vote in the way I described their mindset but I think the point I'd get across - they share a certain kind of altruistic empiricist attitude with their sociology and really try to avoid having any sacred cows.

As for a Tedx on feminist porn:

I think that this is a subjective question, although I would say that feminists are liberal. Seeing as this is the internet, I will no doubt catch some heat for posting my opinion. With the way I see it, the sole focus of feminism isn't sexualization. While the sexualization and objectification of females is a problem addressed by feminism, there are many other "old-time" problems that feminism seeks to eradicate, such as political injustice, the glass ceiling, and the pay gap.

First of all, liberal is a contested concept. That is, people don't agree on the definition.

Feeding into this, it seems the older definitions don't always apply or are woefully inadequate as they don't allow for nuances. In recent years, the conservative far right has been largely taken over by those who overtly want a theocracy. Many conservatives are looking a the GOP presidential candidate field and wondering (as one put it in a recent interview) "who let the crazies in & how did they take over?".

Meanwhile, feminist are having to deal with our own splinter contingent that on occasion allies itself with the conservative Christian activists, specifically when the goal is to deny the existence and equality of trans people. They also tend to be overtly misandrist which is ironic considering the stance of the conservative Christians they team up with.

Excluding the TERFs (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists) and misogynists*, I'd say feminists tend to be liberal & often progressive. We tend to accept and embrace concepts such as intersectionality & equality and especially using taxpayer money for the good of all & passing laws that increase equality (the latter may possibly be more progressive than liberal, strictly speaking).

*Not playing into "No True Scottsman"; they're still feminists, I'm just saying the answer is not simple because the groupings are likewise complex. We can average, or divide & analyze the segments.

My first impulse is to say liberal but I have know feminists who had mostly conservative values.
The term feminist could be broadly interpreted.

Feminists can be found all over the political spectrum.

Depends on which feminists you are talking about. The people commonly associated with feminism these days are closest to fascism with thier belief in inferiority of men and there virulent muscular anti free speech views. I think they are far from the majority of feminists but the only feminists the media want to publicize.

They seem to be conservatives disguised as liberals to me, I mean they both shame male sexuality and see having a high libido is wrong and such!

I've tried and failed numerous times to come up with a good term for the feminists the OP is describing, as I'm reluctant to brand myself as anti-feminist across the board, I just continually find myself at odds with the anti free speech brand of inter-sectional feminism that currently holds sway online. They're very much progressive in that they believe that they know whats best for other to the extent it should be mandated, though their very illiberal beliefs do demonstrate that you'll meet in the middle if you go far enough left or right.

Huh, now that's odd. I'd say I know a fair number of feminist - both men and women - and none seem the least bit conservative nor do they dislike men, nor have low libidos! In fact, they seem quite sex positive and since many are heterosexual, the women do tend to like men both as partners and people.

Really, keeping half an eye on the media the past few years and doing a bit of Googling I'd say someone started painting a distorted picture of feminist and any other women who stand up for equality right around the time of the Sandra Fluke controversy. Not too long after that a movement sprang up from nowhere. If I were a conspiracy lovin' woman I'd even say it fit nicely into the scheming of certain politicians that very much do not want Hillary Clinton in office. It just has that sort of Karl Rovey-esque GOP/TP slimy underhanded feel to it, you know? And it fits so well with the women-should-be-subservient values of conservative Christians, too. Serious astroturfing is my guess, because it really truly doesn't fit *any* of the feminist I know, I've met or read. I've asked around too, and it seems there are a few splinter groups but again, they are such a tiny minority and so extreme...it truly feels like someone is trying to rebrand feminists without our permission. Then again it may simply be a very small group that is very, very busy online and damn near obsessed (ie like the TERFs).

No-one has quite defined what feminism actually is (some have tried, but as with many terms in politics and identity, it then becomes 'reclaimed' by others), except that it has something to do with the interests of women qua women. What those interests are quite depends on what one thinks 'women' are, and what their interests might be.

It's all about context.

The following is from 'One Dimensional Woman' by Nina Power. It's a short but pretty thorough overview of late oughts feminist thought (it came out in 2009). It's still as clear-headed a view of the matter as I've read, always looking for another perspective, to, as Wittgenstein had it, 'show the fly the way out of the bottle'. I'd heartily recommend it. The pdf is but a Google away.

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Pornography has historically split feminism along political lines. Andrea Dworkin famously made allegiances with right-wing groups who shared her hatred of pornography, if not any of her other positions. More recent feminism has tended to regard it more benignly, particularly if it is deemed to be of an 'emancipatory' variety, if it falls along the line that runs from vibrators to pole-dancing to 'feeling sexy'. Both positions frame the issue in moral terms - pornography is either degrading therefore bad or it is enjoyable and thus morally good. But pornography is, we must first of all acknowledge, a massive industry with major economic and social import.

Both those who defend pornography on the grounds of free speech, and those, such as Dworkin and MacKinnon, who come down strongly against porn, take as their model a debased, one-sided representation of desire and thus treat porn as if it were a historical invariant, one which always has the same kind of content. The ahistoricism of the anti-pornography movement takes as its presupposition the idea that men will always nurture a violent desire towards women and that porn is merely a reflection of this. As Dworkin puts it:

"The insult pornography offers, invariably, to sex is accomplished in the active subordination of women: the creation of a sexual dynamic in which the putting down of women, and ultimately the brutalization of women, is what sex is taken to be."

Making pornography a free speech issue similarly obscures the historical specificity of porn at any given moment. The ahistorical approach to pornography neglects to consider the social and economic conditions surrounding both the form and content of pornography as it exists at any given time.

There is no doubt that the porn uppermost in Dworkin's mind was the often extremely nasty, violent porn of the 1970s, and that the exploitation of women in a porn industry was as brutal and any other in the increasingly neo-liberal and unjust society of American capitalism. But this is precisely the point. Violence, and the violence specific to certain kinds of pornography cannot be completely removed from a complete analysis of the society that produces it.

If we take instead a historical approach, one might even say a dialectical approach, towards pornography, then we might want to look to a different kind of archive, that of vintage porn, as a way out of the 'porn good' /'porn bad' opposition. In that sense, then, the argument about pornography is ultimately a positive one, taking up Angela Carter's point that:

"Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers, as if sexual relations were not necessarily an expression of social relations, as if sex itself were an external fact, one as immutable as the weather, creating human practice but never a part of it."

It is useful and revealing to compare contemporary porn to older forms to see if there are any resources for Carter's suggestion that pornography could potentially participate fully in human practice.


Contemporary pornography is realistic only in the sense that it sells back to us the very worst of our aspirations: domination, competition, greed and brutality.

The pornography industry is itself is a veritable juggernaut, generating an estimated $57 billion in annual revenue worldwide. It makes more money than Hollywood and all major league sports put together. 300,000 internet sites are currently devoted to its propagation, and 200 new films are estimated to be made every week. Almost any genre and type of sexual taste is catered for, just so long as you aren't looking for anything as recherche as sweetness or wit.

On one level, we might say, so what? Pornography serves a certain practical purpose, why expect anything more from it? If you want romance, go and read Mills and Boon! Alternatively, we might side with anti-pornography feminists and argue that the genre is so irredeemably associated with violence and misogyny that we should steer well clear of it, and perhaps even campaign for its abolition.

But what if there was another history of porn, one that was filled less with pneumatic shaven bodies pummeling each other into submission than with sweetness, silliness and bodies that didn't always function and purr like a well-oiled machine? The early origins of cinematic pornography tell a very different story about the representation of sex, one that suggests a way both out of the rubberized inhumanity of today's hardcore obsession, but also out of the claim that pornography is inherently exploitative. But pornography alone tells us nothing unless we accept Angela Carter's argument that there is an intimate link between sexual relations and social relations.

You are talking about 2ND WAVE FEMINISM. And the only thing that these 2 groups agree upon is their opposition to pornography. What they disagree upon is homosexuality.

Modern feminists on the other hand strongly support sexual freedom which means they oppose censorship of pornography and believe female exhibitionism is perfectly acceptable(so long as its not done out of financial desperation).

Why, I've read that some modern feminists even (gasp! Where are my pearls to clutch?) *like* pornography IF it was made by a non-exploitive production company and actually understands non-male sexuality. Rumor has it some of them even make the stuff, targeting the same audience.

Second Wave is wholly responsible for the amazing consideration for intersectionality that now exists in Feminism. By the late 1970's they'd become so exclusionary it seemed more like a suburban PTA meeting.

The number one mistake I see around here is the assumption that feminism is a single entity or a single philosophy, rather than a category of philosophies. You can have feminists who are liberals, conservatives, moderate or none of the above (e.g. me). You can even have those in the same group. There are an abundance of disagreements between certain schools of thought within feminism, some of them very deep; it's not in any way monolithic.

So the answer to the question is "Kind of."

Sorta like asking if atheists are liberal or conservative when all the term means is, "do you believe in a god or gods", eh?