IN DEFENCE OF RADICAL FEMINIST PRINCIPLES
FEMINIST PULSE
Every year, on March 8th, the world indulges in a day-long, curated mass hallucination. A giant boulder of manufactured “empowerment” hits us in the form of high-gloss portraits of achievers and leaders; airbrushed corporate and sports icons; skeletal “models” who completely miss the point of “my body, my choice”; and a nauseating pink explosion of pseudo-celebratory bag of retail discounts.
We are offered “20% off” on cookware to “celebrate” our thankless labour, and targeted adverts to remind us that “age is just a number” while selling anti-ageing cream to mask our exhaustion. Once the travesty of skin brightening, vagina tightening promos passes, the cameras pivot back to men and their eternal love affair with themselves.
What we need instead, is a radical feminist overhaul of our rights movement that puts an end to a celebration of imaginary “choices”.
What’s Not to Like About the End of Female Suffering?
Radical feminism, through its incisive analysis of patriarchal society, offers such a perspective that empowers women to look past these selective fanfare. It identifies the root of the malady, and organises for it to become obsolete. It categorically seeks to abolish patriarchy by eliminating male supremacy in social, private, economic and political contexts. While many other “feminismS” – liberal one in particular – seek to negotiate a space in existing structures often complying with the ever-growing demands of patriarchy, radical feminism understands that the structures – state, family, society – are all built on the subservience of the female sex, regardless of whether this sex belongs to a black woman, a poor woman, a lesbian, a girl, a mother, a woman with a disability or migrant…
To reach this goal, radical feminist principles deploys Consciousness Raising as a methodology. Though the male violence epidemic has been crippling for women worldwide, it isn’t possible to bring those experiences together without identifying the collective political patterns of our oppression. Consciousness raising enables women to defy the societal expectations of hiding the cruelty “behind closed doors”, and see it as a manifestation of the global sex-class system. As radical feminist Sheila Jeffreys points out, it is through consciousness raising that we bring to fore concepts of “love” and “wifely duty” as yet another form of social control designed to keep the female sex in a state of service. Speaking of the radical women’s movement, she said: “…it was the first political movement to challenge the most intimate aspects of the relations between the sexes. Women were to find that the private world of the family and of sexual relations was as much a site of oppression and struggle as the world of the marketplace.”
Central also to the understanding of our oppression is to see sexuality as a mechanism of power. Radical feminism accurately posits that male supremacy is enabled and maintained through the sexual colonisation of female bodies. It identifies the female body as the first colony that patriarchy seizes for reproductive and sexual labour. Dworkin expands the colonisation aspect further. The constant threat and the horrors of male sexual access to our bodies – enforced further through pornography and sex trade – consumed the woman’s private life until she thought of her submitting to the coloniser’s demands as her own “desire”. In her book Intercourse, she said: “In the colonial world of the bedroom, women are the land and men are the conquistadors. Pornography is the map of the territory, showing exactly where to strike and how to occupy. When we are told to ‘enjoy’ our own degradation, we are being told to celebrate the fact that our occupiers have successfully invaded our very capacity to feel.”
The Myth of Personal Freedom in a Patriarchal System
Given the state of the world, regardless of the day’s supposed “celebration” of women, the reality of our lives is a far cry from this glitzy pink affair. Marketing departments – especially working overtime to drill deep on the imagined choices – speak of a generic, nameless “identity”, while the actual female sex is being systematically, and tactically dismantled.
Whether through the literal sex-based apartheid of the Taliban, the commodification of our bodies for “sex work”, or the modern-day misogyny desperate to delete the very words ‘woman’, ‘girl’, ‘mother’ from the lexicon – their end goal is the same. From the perspective of ordinary women, life is a crime scene, bearing no resemblance to the grinning, fair-skinned women in ads who “defy the patriarchy” by getting jobs, boyfriends, all while wearing white tight pants during their periods. That’s why women who ascribe to radical feminist tenets don’t get swayed by such pink-washing; instead, they use it as an analytical scalpel that cuts through superficial “choice” to reveal the decaying sex-class-oppressive system beneath.
The foundational issue with current society is that it is entirely rebranding the private sphere of a home, and the sexual sphere – through systems of pornography or prostitution – as zones of personal freedom and liberation. But they are the primary sites of female labour, and violence and male sexual control respectively. To break the chain, rather than being satisfied with the scraps of “representation” or the “choices” men trick us into thinking we make of our own free will, we must seek to abolish the system that treats us as secondary.
Choice Feminism Gaslighting – A Potent Weapon
It is easy to sloganeer aspirational, but ultimately hollow chants “the future is female”, but in the face of merciless attempts at erasing women, what future are we discussing? The grim reality of crimes committed against women speak for themselves. The numbers from the past year alone are a direct indictment of a global attitude that considers female concerns non-existent.
As of early 2026, over 840 million women and girls (one in every three) have been physically or sexually abused, a figure that stayed shamefully stagnant for over two decades. Closer to home, the situation is no safer: only according to very moderate numbers from the UN, an average of 137 women and girls get killed every single day by an intimate partner, or a family member – one female life obliterated every ten minutes. In conflict zones, the rate has reached a fever pitch; verified cases of sexual violence in war surged by 87% over the past two years, where women and girls make up 92% of the victims.
Beyond the conventional crimes women have faced for centuries, further wars are waged on our bodies through archaic traditions and technological catastrophe. According to some hollow concept of “purity”, the practice of Chhaupadi continues to claim women’s lives. Young girls are women exiled in a windowless menstrual hut die due to cold weather, snake bites, and are frequently raped. Over 4 million girls are subjected to female genital mutilation annually. Over 140,000 cases of dowry based crulety, violence and marital rape -which remains legal in many countries- were reported in 2025 alone. Furthermore, 712 women die every single day from preventable pregnancy and childbirth complications. Approximately one million girls are lost annually to female feticide worldwide, and not just in the developing world. Over 140 million women are currently “missing” due to son preference, sex-selective abortion, and postnatal neglect.
This violence is exacerbated in the digital prison where spy-cams and “nudify” apps have grown exponentially. In the early 2026, over 950,000 pieces of AI porn were removed from a single platform. Staggering as it may be, 102 nudification apps are available commercially and have been downloaded 705 million times globally, generating $117 million in revenue in early 2026 alone. The European Parliamentary Research Service’s briefing on children and deepfakes noted that 8 million deepfakes were shared in 2025, up from 500,000 in 2023. The briefing reported: “Europol estimated that 90% of online content may be generated synthetically by 2026 as deepfakes spread rapidly through social media platforms, messaging apps and video-sharing platforms, blurring the line between reality and fiction”
Despite this rapid explosion of cyber crimes, only 15% of the world’s economies have laws specifically protecting women and girls, leaving 1.8 billion women with no recourse.
To ignore this carnage for meaningless optics is the moral equivalent of slaughtering someone with a “kinder” weapon – a pink silk laden weapon asking the woman to smile for aesthetic while killing her just the same.
Andrea Dworkin’s famous dismantling of the illusion of choice is worth mentioning: “The commoner’s freedom is always defined by the ruler’s needs… In a world where men own the wealth, the law, and the physical force, ‘choice’ is a luxury the oppressed are taught to simulate so they don’t have to face their own powerlessness. Most of what women ‘choose’ is simply the least of several evils.”
Who is a Female Anyway?
But let us assume there is a future to protect, do we get to decide who/what a woman is? Special interest groups promoting gender identity frameworks at the expense of sex based protection of women and girls would say otherwise. This neo-misogyny functions by eliminating the female sex class and depriving us of the linguistic and legal tools needed for us to name our oppression. This ultimate form of patriarchal colonisation promotes pornified versions of female bodies and reduces us to a series of fetishes directly made available for male domination.
From sports to carceral systems, the damage is becoming unmanageable. Several landmark cases across the world highlight this mourning danger: male sex offenders housed in female prisons, and their demands for fake silicon breasts being entertained by the state. Female athletes are pushed out of the podiums by mediocre men claiming a female “identity”. Worse still, the words central to defining us and our experiences have been replaced by tautological phrases like “uterus haver”, “cervix owner” and “birthing parent”. Thus making it impossible to mandate single-sex wards, or track the ever-increasing, yet severely under-reported femicide statistics.
The pattern is the same: ensuring the female sex class remains seen as objects but never heard; used as bodies but never named. Be it the forced hijab under the Taliban, or the linguistic hijab of “inclusion” in the West, all roads lead to a female apocalypse. And the only plausible way to resist this doom is through radical feminism.
Mary Daly, who provided the radical feminist philosophical critique of this female erasure, duly warned us with these prophetic words: “The ‘manning’ of the female identity is a supreme act of theft. They take our names, our experiences of childbirth and menstruation, and they re-label them as ‘inclusive’ or ‘neutral.’ This is not inclusion; it is the total evacuation of the female from the human record. It is a linguistic vanishing act.”
The Future Must Be Radical Feminist For A Future To Be Female
The radical feminist approach rightly identifies the global sex trade, the surrogacy industry, and the pornography empire as unified hardware for female exploitation. To concede that these industries under the banner of “choice” is to ignore the tangible realities of a machine that is oiled by skewed, sexualised bodies tailored for male consumption.
It offers a way out of the sophisticated manipulations of all kinds of profiteers of sexual acts: from the street-level trafficker, or tech billionaires hosting “nudify” apps, to the likes of Epstein and his lackeys. They may try their best to make us believe that by choosing to indulge in their many shades of oppression, we hold the power. They would prefer that we mistake the length of the tether around our necks for the expanse of our freedom. But there is no power in subordination; we handed it to them the moment we agreed to negotiate for it within a system that works towards our erasure. Radical feminism points out that we can’t negotiate for a seat at the table built on the broken backs of millions of missing girls; instead, we organise our efforts to topple it.
True liberation would mean a reclamation of the word ‘woman’ as a biological, political reality – not objects to be purchased, sold or identified as. And such liberation wouldn’t be possible until the collapse of the last menstrual hut, the smashing of the last spy-cam, and the last girl born into a world where she is unwanted.
While some women may “choose” to beautify our cages, radical feminism urges us to see the difference between “inclusion” and colonisation. The longer we take to understand this, the harder it is to break free from a cage we delude ourselves into thinking is “empowering”.
So, on this day, it would serve the women of the world well to stop polishing our chains with their pink handouts and employ them to dismantle the system that forged them by standing on top of the guiding foundations of radical feminism. And then, we can celebrate.