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- NON-HIERARCHICAL RELATIONS
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INTERCONNECTEDNESSWhereas patriarchy emphasizes our divisions, radical feminism emphasizes our connectedness: with each other, with the earth, and with our history. The main manifestation of this for feminism is, of course, women's connections to one another. Foss, Foss and Griffin write: To be a Radical Feminist is to become a member of a minority, to place one's trust in other women, and to reclaim women's relationships with other women …to embrace the cognitive and affective shift that takes place in the soul as a result, and to embark on the spiraling journey of female becoming that takes women into the background. (Foss, Foss and Griffin, FEMINIST RHETORICAL THEORIES, 139) Realizing that interconnectivity allows women to stop patriarchy from pitting them against one another. In the current system, white women are pitted against Black women; rich women are told to subordinate poor women. Radical feminism offers a vision wherein each woman has more in common with every other woman than with any man. So, at least within the confines of gender, radical feminism wants women to be interconnected. NON-HIERARCHICAL RELATIONSWhereas patriarchy believes hierarchy to be inevitable, radical feminism rejects that inevitability. Radical feminists see human beings as fundamentally able to be equal, and deserving to build social relationships which maximize that equality; not in some abstract legal sense, but in real and concrete ways. Two strains of Sonia Johnson's thinking help clarify why radical feminist values necessitate the rejection of hierarchy. First, for Johnson, all oppression is based fundamentally upon the oppression of women. Since family and domestic relations are, and always have been, the most primary and original relations (before we enter the "outer world" we first have relations with our family), dominance in the intimate sphere is a prerequisite for other types of dominance. Johnson's metaphor is familiar: at one time, long ago, men from one tribe decided to attack the tribe across the river. Thus war was born. But Johnson says there is a story even before that story: The men in that tribe first had to dominate and "colonize" the women and children in their tribe. Once they were able to do that, they were subsequently confident and powerful enough to decide to conquer other people too. Extended to everyday relations today, the metaphor becomes clearer. Women must be subordinated today for men to fight wars. They must keep having babies to turn into faithful workers, soldiers, and other mothers. They must "keep the home fires burning" while the men are away killing each other. If patriarchy values aggression and dominance, it feeds upon the dominance over, and aggression towards, the essentially peaceful women who help sustain the patriarchy through their reproductive and nurturing capacities. Second, Johnson argues for the empowerment of "ordinary" women, not self- or other-designated spokespersons for some elite group of feminist adjudicators. Johnson is fond of saying that she is Sonia Johnson, and no one else, and she can only absolutely influence herself. She believes that true feminism is not the product of a few elite women theorizing in classrooms or boardrooms, but is in fact a movement of millions of women who have realized their self-responsibility, and even more millions upon whose everyday experience feminism must be based. Ultimately, non-hierarchical relations require (1) self-responsibility from each person, and (2) the willingness to sacrifice for others. This is a radical vision of democracy that says "leadership" is a sham, because it implies that different people are differently equipped to take responsibility for their endeavors. True, we ALL need help from one another, no one more or less than another. But the ultimate end to that help ought to be empowerment, not dependency. Patriarchy thrives on dependency, on relationships of dominance and submission wherein the dominated party feels she NEEDS to be dominated. Johnson's radical feminist values reject such a framework in favor of mutual trust and self-empowerment. IMPLICATIONS FOR DEBATEMost value debates center around questions we have long assumed to be basic philosophical dilemmas. Some of these include freedom versus order, justice versus mercy, and sovereignty versus law. In each of these cases, a "zero-sum" is assumed. That is, it is assumed that some people will use their liberty to harm others. It is assumed that some leaders will take advantage of an ordered society to coerce others. It is assumed that justice requires harm, or that mercy requires allowing harm to go unpunished. It is assumed that sovereign nations will inevitably harm people within their borders, or that law is always coercive. Radical feminists claim that these assumptions only hold true under a patriarchal system where people are pitted against one another. Thus, feminism attempts to dismantle that belief by providing an alternative where people are encouraged to cooperate and freely associate with one another, and where individuals, communities, and nations see violence as primarily unacceptable and certainly avoidable. A radical feminist president would have waited longer to go to war with Iraq in 1991; or would have avoided war altogether, by offering solutions which were nurturing, understanding, and constructive to all parties. The fact that this seems "utopian" or unrealistic is further proof that we are led to believe the current state of affairs is the only possible reality. Feminism provides the framework for searching for the systemic causes of problems rather than accepting their existence and establishing ad hoc solvency procedures for them. In the evidence section to follow, Sonia Johnson writes: Feminism...far from being a "single issue," is a perspective, a way of looking at all the issues. It provides a framework for evaluating them. It is a world view, a complete and complex value system, the only alternative to patriarchy. Feminism is, in short, the most inclusive and descriptive analysis of the human situation on earth--at this time or any other, as far as we know. (Sonia Johnson, GOING OUT OF OUR MINDS: THE METAPHYSICS OF LIBERATION, 1987, p. 237.) In addition to offering a comprehensive philosophy with which to weigh other competing value claims, radical feminism promotes a radical version of democracy, which challenges traditional interpretations of the concept of government. Feminism promotes a concept of democracy, which is participatory, inclusive, and constructive. Debaters arguing from a radical feminist standpoint must convince critics that human beings are not naturally self-serving, aggressive, or acquisitive. The point of feminism is that we were made to be those things, and can hence be unmade from those things. 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