It’s safe to say that at some point, everyone—all men and women—are exposed to the reality that patriarchy exists. Although some do not understand the depth and scope of the dark heart of the patriarchy, they have a general understanding that this world operates under the control of men. If, unlike most men and women, individuals decide that they are going to summarily reject patriarchy in all of its forms due to recognition of how awfully horrible it truly is, reading radical feminist work is important. This is the case for several reasons.
One of the reasons is that being attentive to radical feminist thought enables individuals to identify and summarily reject the lies of the patriarchy. This process transpires through the work of conscious, critical thought. In many if not most cases, women and girls subconsciously absorb male supremacist values and subsequently replicate patriarchal patterns in their personal and professional lives. Although patriarchal values are often spelled out with unapologetic, ugly lucidity (such as when a parent or authority figure tells a woman to stop studying politics because she will never be a president or politician), many sexist values which prevent female people from understanding the destructive agenda of men are actively present in the material world without being openly articulated. Therefore, these relatively subtle patriarchal processes and practices must be thought through so that they become glaringly conspicuous sources of evidence that men are actively working against women and, if many if not most cases, hate us. This is what radical feminism does. It thinks through patriarchy so that the hateful, discriminatory, dehumanizing value system which it upholds can be summarily rejected.
An example of how the radical feminist process of thinking through and rejecting patriarchy might happen would be recognition of the way Joanna Russ interrupts the mainstream/malestream view of gender relations by questioning the idea that men and women are engaged in a process we could consider in terms of a “battle of the sexes.” Within this fallacious framework, men and women are thought to equally contribute to psychic and physical abuse of one another. Although this view is empirically false, the fallacious language of there being a “battle of the sexes” is frequently utilized, thereby contributing to women misinterpreting reality such that they don’t recognize that male violence, not female violence, is the primary problem within the system of gender relations. When the myth that women and men are caught up in a war which involves each sex being equally culpable with respect to harms done to one another, female people are logically discouraged from becoming 1. feminist and 2. radical feminist because there is no rational framework through which to understand that women are being subjected to a war at the hands of men. Again, radical feminist reading and writing contributes to the creation of clarity regarding who the oppressor is and why we can construe him this way (such as empirical data indicating that roughly 86% of violent crimes are committed by men).
