The types of radical feminism you are mentioning in your first three bullet points are not types that I or the people or organisations I am mentioning would associate with. These groups are often labelled as Trans- or Sex worker- exclusionary radical feminists. It is a shame that they use this label too. They are generally funded by far right groups and instrumentalised to make it seem that they represent the feminist movement as a whole, or women's interests more broadly.

I think you're whitewashing the history of radical feminism a bit here. I think the radical feminist movement has to own these mistakes in order to move on from them. To say something like "that's not real radical feminism" or "that's a false flag operation" is not to acknowledge the reality of what happened and the harm that was done. For example, the pornography ban I mentioned was supported by key figures in radical feminism.

The fourth bullet point I hadn't heard about, and that Contrapoints video has been on my watch list for a long time now- I should really watch it!

If you're a fan of ContraPoints too, then that's one thing we can agree on! Her videos are wise, perspicacious, funny, and visually beautiful. I think they should win awards. I'm a huge fan. 

Could you give a little more context on what you don't understand? I'm not sure I can see the same issues, at least at the moment

I tried to read Pleasure Activism in part because the idea of "pleasure activism" sounded interesting to me. I wondered, is the idea to make activism more fun? More guided toward things that are emotionally rewarding, rather than all about pain and discomfort and altruistic self-sacrifice? Or, alternatively, is it about fighting for things that bring us pleasure and joy?

The book does not really explain this. It does not really explain what pleasure activism is, at least not in a way I could make any sense of. I'm not alone in this, since I asked my friend who recommended the book to me if he understood what adrienne maree brown was trying to say, and he basically said no. 

When I tried to read Pleasure Activism, I wanted to see if anyone could make more sense of it than me. One of the reviews I found, from a sympathetic reviewer,^[1] was generally positive, but also called out how confusing the book is. (It also mentions adrienne maree brown's claim that she was bitten by a vampire.)

To me, if you write a book about a new idea and you don't explain what that idea is in a way that's easy to understand, your book has failed as a piece of scholarship. If I can't understand what you're trying to say, and especially if you don't even try particularly hard to explain it, then there's nothing I can do with your work. It can't affect me. It can't cause me to think or act differently. I can't engage with it. I can't even disagree with it, because I don't know what I would be disagreeing with. 

One thing I'll say for now is that there are certainly parts of the feminist movements that you will strongly disagree with, and that disagreement is welcome.

I am a feminist and I have a good grasp on feminist theory, partly because I took courses on feminist theory when I was in university. I already articulated four key points I disagree with many radical feminists about — trying to harm trans people, banning pornography, opposing decriminalization or legalization of sex work, and narrow views on what kinds of sex are ethical. Especially nowadays, I would guess there are some people who call themselves radical feminists who have different views on these topics (and this seems to be what you're saying). But I also probably disagree with those people as well, for example on economic issues.

Some parts of the radical feminists' critiques were correct. They were correct to focus on many of the social and cultural phenomena that contribute to women's oppression (although they made some serious mistakes here, too, as I mentioned), going beyond a focus just on formal, legal equality (which is important, of course, but too limited). For example, the radical feminist critique of rape culture was hugely important. 

It seems to me a lot of radical feminists' critiques have been absorbed into the mainstream in a way that didn't feel true (or nearly as true) 15 years ago. 

This is a good thing for the mainstream, since the critiques that were absorbed are correct, but it also makes self-identified "radical feminists" today less relevant, since their good ideas are now a part of mainstream feminism — and feminism, in general, is more a part of mainstream culture — and what radical feminists have to offer is now less differentiated from mainstream feminism. 

I agree that authoritarian communism is bad, but I have a lot more belief in degrowth. Could you give some more specifics on what your issues are with it?

Economic degrowth is the idea that we should make the world significantly poorer (i.e. significantly decrease the world's total income) for environmental reasons. I think this would be a humanitarian catastrophe on a scale that's hard to fathom and I don't think it would even be particularly helpful for achieving environmental goals, and might even do harm, ultimately.

For example, if we could snap our fingers and cut the world's consumption of fossil fuels in half, probably millions of people would starve or die other kinds of preventable deaths. And our progress on climate change might end up getting set back since the world's economy would be so crippled, it would be hard to do things like fund R&D into wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, energy storage, and other sustainable energy technologies or to make long-term capital investments into deploying these technologies. 

If you want to read a more in-depth critique of the idea of economic degrowth, Kelsey Piper at Vox wrote one that clear's and accessible. 

One of the most succinct and eloquent critiques of degrowth I have read comes from a review of Naomi Klein's book This Changes Everything:

The second, incredibly risky response to the climate crisis that she [Naomi Klein] recommends is a policy of “degrowth” (88). This is sort of a euphemism for reducing the size of GDP, which in practice means creating a policy-induced, long-term recession, followed (presumably) by measures designed to restrict the economy to a zero-growth equilibrium. Now because she plans to shift millions of workers into low-productivity sectors of the economy (126-7), and perhaps reduce work hours (93), she imagines that this degrowth can happen without creating any unemployment. So the picture presumably is one in which individuals experience a slow, steady decline in real income, of perhaps 2% per year over a period of 10 years (none of the people recommending this seem to give specific numbers, so I’m just guessing what they have in mind), followed by permanent income stagnation. (There would, presumably, still be technological change, so a degrowth policy would have to be accompanied by some mechanism to ensure that work hours were cut back in response to any increase in productive efficiency, in order to ensure that production as a whole did not increase.)

At the same time that incomes are either shrinking or remaining stagnant, Klein also proposes an enormous shift from private-sector to public-sector consumption, presumably financed by significant increases in personal income tax. Again, she doesn’t give any specific numbers, but from the way she talks it sounds like she wants to shift around a quarter of the remaining GDP. Plus she wants to see a huge amount of redistribution to the poor. So again, just ballparking, but it sounds as though she wants the average person to accept a pay cut of around 20%, followed by the promise of no pay increase ever again, combined with an increase in average income tax rates of around 25% (so in Canada, from around 30% to 55%). And don’t forget, this is all supposed to be achieved democratically. As in, people are going to vote for this, not just once, but repeatedly.

What I find astonishing about proponents of “degrowth” – not just Klein, but Peter Victor as well – is that they don’t see the tension between this desire to reduce average income and the desire to reduce economic inequality. They expect people to support increased redistribution at the same time that their own incomes are declining. This leaves me at something of a loss – I struggle to find words to express the depth of my incredulity at this proposition. In what world has this, or could this, ever occur?

In the real world, economic recessions are rather strongly associated with a significant increase in the nastiness of politics. Economic growth, on the other hand, makes redistribution much easier, simply because the transfers do not show up as absolute losses to individuals who are financing them, but rather as foregone gains, which are much more abstract. It’s not an accident that the welfare state was created in the context of a growing economy. (See Benjamin Friedman, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, for a general discussion of the effect of growth on politics.) It seems to me obvious that a degrowth strategy – by making the economy negative-sum – would massively increase resistance to both taxation and redistribution. At the limit, it could generate dangerous blow-back, in the form of increased support for radical right-wing parties.

As a result, I just don’t see any moral difference between what Klein is doing in this book and what the geoengineering enthusiasts are doing. The latter are techno-utopians, while Klein is a socialist-utopian. But both are trying to pin our hopes for resolving the climate crisis on a risky, untested, and potentially dangerous policy. Furthermore, the idea that Klein’s agenda could be achieved democratically strikes me as being otherworldly, in a country where the left can’t even figure out how to get the Conservative party out of power.

The "shadow" of degrowth is environmental authoritarianism, in which "the hardest choices require the strongest wills" (to quote a villain), and so, the ability of people to resist unpopular policies that make them poorer needs to be quashed with force. 

Some people go in the opposite direction and, rather than "biting the bullet" and endorsing an ugly conclusion, lean into cognitive dissonance and try to say that degrowth is not really about negative GDP growth, after all, but about... something they either have a hard time making clear, or that just doesn't make sense, or ends up amounting to green growth (the opposite of degrowth), or ends up undermining their claim that degrowth is not about negative GDP growth.

Your concluding comments seem like rage-bait and might be an unnecessary addition to your otherwise very thoughtful reply.

It's not rage bait, it's just rage. I have deep exposure to radical leftist ideas, spanning about 15 years, and I'm just fed up with so much of it. I think so much of radical leftist discourse is incoherent (like Pleasure Activism), insane (like degrowth), or evil (like the level of praise or apologetics for authoritarian communism you see in radical leftist communities). And the way that radical leftists try to advance their ideas is often cruel and sadistic, for example, by harassing or bullying people who express disagreement (and sometimes by endorsing physical violence).^[2] I am angry at the radical left for being this way. 

I have been as much of an insider to radical leftism as it's possible to be. I know the ins and outs. My perspective does not come from a shallow gloss of radical leftism, but from a deep familiarity. 

I think probably one of the most effective ways to limit the harm caused by the radical left as it currently exists is to try to fill the vacuum of liberal, progressive, centre-left, or leftist ideas for structural reform. 

One of the most encouraging examples I've seen is the economist Thomas Piketty's short political manifesto at the end of his book Capital and Ideology. The manifesto is the final chapter of the book, titled "Elements for a Participatory Socialism for the Twenty-First Century". This is the most coherent, most sane, and most constructive version of radical leftist economic thought (if it is accurate to call it radical leftist) I have ever seen. More of this, please!

I am also reading (almost finished) Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's book Abundance, which just came out this year. It's awesome. I am sold on the idea of "abundance liberalism", which started out being called "supply-side progressivism", but now has a much better name and has probably also expanded a bit in terms of the ideas it encompasses.

As much as I'm fed up with so much about the radical left as it exists today, just complaining about the radical left probably isn't a good strategy for changing things for the better. We should come up with good, constructive ideas to draw people away from bad, destructive ideas and to take the energy away from bad, destructive political discourse.

The importance of any of my criticisms (of radical feminism, of radical leftism, of degrowth) pales in comparison to the importance of coming up with and advocating for good ideas that can offer an alternative. This is hard work and it's where I want to put more of my focus going forward.

I don't know how much energy I have to continue this thread of conversation, so if you decide to reply, please do so with the warning that I may not read your reply or respond to it. I can get really into writing stuff on the EA Forum, but it takes up a lot of my time and energy, and I have to prioritize. 

1. ^{^}

   I'm not clear on this, but I think the person who wrote the review even works at the radical leftist publishing company, AK Press, that published the book.

2. ^{^}

   The phrase "the cruelty is the point" has been used as a criticism of Donald Trump and the Republican Party under his leadership, but it would also apply aptly to a lot of radical leftists' behaviour.

I'd be interested to hear you disagreements with the Marxist-leaning influences. Could you give a few examples?

This is a very long + complex topic. 

To me, much of it is a deeper issue. I see EA as coming from academic movements such as the Enlightenment, Empiricism, Analytic Philosophy, Humanism. While I see Marxist-leaning clusters as having influences more like Romanticism, Continental Philosophy, Postmodernism, etc. These are two clusters that have had a few-hundred-year argument/disagreement with each other. I'm sure you can find more with more searches and LLM prompts. 

I don't see a ton of overlap here. There are lots of social movements, and meaningful engagement with other social movements does take time, energy, and focus for both movements. Unless there is high overlap or unusual synergies, sometimes it is better for both movements to basically ignore each other. (I would emphasize that the points below apply to whether it is in radical feminism's interests to expend resources on engaging with EA as much as the converse.)

For instance, although Open Phil has funded work on reducing incarceration rates in the US, that isn't a current focus of any appreciable segment of the EA community to my knowledge. And to the extent that radical feminists are also working in or near core EA cause areas, it's plausible that most radical feminists and most EAs have different values and goals that cannot be harmonized with better understanding of different approaches. The idea that their values in these areas are fundamentally compatible is plausible, but would need evidentiary support.

Is there evidence of meaningful competition between the two groups for the same donors and funding sources? Based on your description so far, the movements seem different enough to me that I would expect very few donors to be realistically open to funding EAs (but listening to radical feminist advisors), or vice versa.

In my view, EA generally shouldn't say much at all about "issues [it is] poorly suited to solving" (and I suspect the same is true of radical feminism). If EA methodologies are not well-suited to solving a problem, then they probably aren't well suited to figuring out which of the numerous other altruistic social movements are best situated to solve the problem either. Moreover, trying to recommend charities or charitable approaches in a bunch of non-EA cause areas, and doing a good job of it, would be a costly endeavor at best.

I'd like to hear why you chose to label radical feminism as an 'extremist group'. This has a lot of negative connotations carried, vs using a term like 'radical'. 

Yes, that is important, because when considering 'uniting' with another group, you will acquire their negative connotations.

I suggest being curious about and open to learning from radical feminism. This allows you to discard ideas that you would like to discard, and take in ideas that you would not.

This seems like a motte and bailey argument to me. After the The Meiji Restoration, Japan was curious about and open to learning from the west, but Japan did not 'unite' with any Western nation. The word 'unite', sharing a latin root with 'unity', implies a merging and coming together as one, not mere communication. 

To make it painfully clear: I suspect you would agree that we should be open to learning from all sources if they have good and relevant ideas. We should be open to learning from industrial agriculture, because they have a lot of relevant information about animals. But this does not imply we should 'unite' with factory farms, and I think few people would propose this. Likewise, we should be open to learning from the Republican and Democrat parties. But we shouldn't 'unite' with either of them, let alone both. Because 'uniting' is not about curiosity, it is about forming a close alliance, setting aside differences and focusing on common foes.

Your final comment indicates that perhaps you are not that familiar with radical feminism, and perhaps such a strongly weighted opinion would be best kept until after a little more research?

While I periodically read feminist pieces online and have discussions with feminists, you're right that it has been over ten years now since I formally studied feminist political philosophy. Fortunately I still have my old notes, which I reviewed. The notes are a summarized version of the original source material I read, but they confirm my recollection: almost every line was about women, or sexism, or maternity, or patriarchy, or sex in some way. This article is I think the first 'feminist' article I have ever read that didn't mention a single one of these concepts.