Question Were you a libfem before you were a radfem?

This poll really needed the option of I was a Second wave feminist, because for those of us who grew up in the 60,70,80s, you were simply a mainstream feminist.

I got into feminism before the capture, in the 2000s, and the circles I found, the blogs were not particularly radical, but also not this libfem shitshow. Topics like prostitution was up for debate, with many against and many pro legalisation, and myself being on the fence about it. When I started seeing the shift I may have gone a bit to the lib side, but was not too comfortable with the direction. I was confused as to why suddenly we couldn't be critical of make up, housewifery, and why suddenly it became ok to celebrate objectification of a woman just because she was fat.

I considered myself a feminist since I learned the word, which was when I was a kid, but very unaware of how things were. Just "women's liberation? I'm in!” and only in my early 20s I actually learned more about it. When the shift started I was caught up with other stuff and took a break from social media, stopped using Tumblr, and didn't pay attention to what was happening anymore. Some of my views tended to the radical side, but others were more liberal. Never bought into corporate feminism, but sort of believed, with some skepticism, that legalising prostitution would be beneficial. Believed that women could dress however they wanted, but was uncomfortable with self objectifying women. I bought into the myth of "feminist porn".

There's a lot of naivety in liberal feminism. Sometimes you don't want to see it, you don't want to admit that your choices are shaped by oppression, you don't want to admit that men don't respect you.

But then I started seeing the state of things, specially with the trans activism. I started feeling I didn't have a voice anymore, and I realising I was ignoring my own instincts. So I started going more and more towards the rad side, and quickly became radical. I've been a radfem for maybe a year and half or two years.

I guess technically I’ve always been a “cultural feminist,” but since everyone hates radical feminists that’s how I refer to myself. It vibes with my personality. As a young girl, I didn’t get the hype about men. That’s not hate. Being a woman is cool and hip to the jive, men are square, have nothing going on. They say we are mad because of hormones, I think being mad is transcendent. Men have to destroy shit to feel even half the depth I have. The moon shifts phases and our organs grind and we pass blood without dying. Females are the portal through which life passes in an often violent battle. When a woman wins the battle of pregnancy and birth, a new life enters the world. A new consciousness, a new soul. I didn’t get what’s so “inferior” about that. I didn’t always know there was a name for it, but I was just born a girl who likes being female and I grew into a woman who still likes being female. No one can take my love of being female from me. If that’s radical feminism then I’m a radical feminist. It doesn’t really matter what name of it is. It’s a visceral love that runs from brain to clit

Conservative evangelical complementarian anti-feminist NLOG cool girl to radfem pipeline. Happened super fast too.

I don't think it's such a strict binary of radfem/libfem. And i think you can be more than one type of feminist. It reminds me of an old Magdalen Berns video saying she had never heard of radical feminism before being called a terf, and it made me really sad. I'm really happy i had the privilege of taking feminism courses before most of this nonsense. Anyway, i really enjoy some of the material, postcolonial, grounded theory, and standpoint theory views in feminism.

No. I was more of an anti feminist for a long time but I realised when I found radical feminism why I disagreed with liberal feminism.

I also grew up with my dad as my primary care giver and I don’t think liberal feminism does a good job of really addressing internalised misogyny because it’s too busy pandering to men. Radical feminism helped me to really see what had happened along the way and that it wasn’t that I’m not a feminist I just didn’t understand there was more than one type of feminist

Yep, and then Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie refused to say "cis" and got bashed for it. Her comments on the situation opened my eyes:

What’s interesting to me is this is in many ways about language and I think it also illustrates the less pleasant aspects of the American left, that there sometimes is a kind of language orthodoxy that you’re supposed to participate in, and when you don’t there’s a kind of backlash that gets very personal and very hostile and very closed to debate.

Had I said, ‘a cis woman is a cis woman, and a trans woman is a trans woman’, I don’t think I would get all the crap that I’m getting, but that’s actually really what I was saying.

But because ‘cis’ is not a part of my vocabulary – it just isn’t – it really becomes about language and the reason I find that troubling is to insist that you have to speak in a certain way and use certain expressions, otherwise we cannot have a conversation, can close up debate. And if we can’t have conversations, we can’t have progress.

And:

A campaigner for LGBTQ rights in Nigeria, Adichie is a star of the progressive left and not accustomed to finding herself on the receiving end of its ire. She said: “It was unpleasant, and I think it was unpleasant not because of the sort of criticism and vitriol and hostility – which I’m used to, because I think if you make the choice to label yourself feminist publicly it just comes with the baggage – but in this case it came from my tribe, my tribe being women who believe in equality.

They were "my tribe" too and they were bashing her. I loved Adichie's ted talk on feminism, among other things, and to me she could generally do no wrong. But people were bashing her just because she wouldn't use the terminology they wanted. It felt beyond stupid to me. I'd say I peaked thanks to that but I didn't learn about radfems until a few years later. Let's just say it showed me how intolerant the Left (a.k.a "my people") could be and gave me the first hints of some ideas that I didn't really flesh out completely until I stumbled upon the Gender Critical reddit sub one day.

Kind of. The whole prostitution and porn are empowering thing never sat right with me. When I read about radical feminism after starting to learn about gender identity ideology, it all made sense to me and fit my values like a glove. The quote I love is "If your feminism makes pimps happy, you're doing it wrong".

I kind of bought into the "choice feminism" because it was framed as giving women more options or liberating women. Trying to support the "Sex work is work!" scam, all while my instincts told me that prostituting women is not "empowering".

The one thing I regret was writing and submitting a 20-page research paper on a female artist who basically painted cartoon porn and naked women. My professor told me that she didnt initially support that sex posi stuff, I did make a strong enough argument to change her mind a few things. If I could go back, I'd tell her that all that art was just porn and I dont believe in whatever I argued in my paper.

I don't think my views changed all that much but when I learned about the distinction between liberal and radical feminism (from radfems, after realizing I was a "terf") I agreed much more with the radfems. I think radfems gave me more confidence to disagree with mainstream feminist takes and also made me more aware of some issues like surrogacy and just made me think deeper about feminism