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Lesbian FeminismLesbian feminism is a feminist ideology, most popular in the 1970s and early 1980s, that advocates the view that lesbianism is the logical result of feminism. Although many of feminism's detractors had made this same assertion as a way of discrediting feminism, lesbian feminists instead asserted it as a way of promoting lesbianism. It is important not to confuse all lesbians who are feminists with lesbian feminists. To be a lesbian feminist is to be an adherent of a very specific ideology that not all lesbians who are feminists agree with. The most important tenet of lesbian feminism is that all women can and should become lesbians in order to invest the majority of their energy in giving love and support to women. Lesbian feminists argue that to continue having sexual relationships with men is to remain caught in the oppressive heterosexual pattern in which the fact that discriminatory employment laws prevent women from earning as much as their male partners or even enough to pay the cost of a good-quality, full-time babysitter is used to pressure married women into giving up their careers and becoming housewives financially dependent on men. Even bisexual women in sexual relationships with male partners are encouraged by lesbian feminism to leave their male partners have sexual relationships exclusively with women. Lesbian feminists do not regard all lesbians as having consciously chosen to become lesbians for feminist reasons. However, lesbian feminists have traditionally argued that all lesbians have at least unconsciously felt drawn toward women rather than men due to their desire for equality in their sexual relationships. If the founding of the lesbian feminist movement could be pinpointed at a specific moment, that moment would probably be the moment in May 1970 that Radicalesbians, an activist group of 20 lesbians led by lesbian novelist Rita Mae Brown, took over (uninvited) a conference in New York City known as the Congress to Unite Women, lined up on stage wearing matching T-shirds inscribed with the words "Lavender Menace," demanded the microphone, and read aloud to 400 feminists their essay The Woman-Identified Woman, which laid out the main precepts of the lesbian feminist movement. Because of its focus on the need for equality in sexual relationships, lesbian feminism has traditionally been associated with opposition to all forms of BDSM. It is also associated with opposition to sex reassignment surgery, for the same reasons that feminism in general has traditionally opposed cosmetic surgeries such as breast implants designed to enhance women's attractiveness: feminism (with the exception of some more recent specific branches of feminism such as transfeminism) traditionally discourages treating unhappiness with one's body as a problem with one's body, and encourages treating it as a problem with societal forces that have conspired to make one feel unhappy with one's body. Lesbian separatism is a logical continuation of lesbian feminist ideas, and is centered around creating separate societies exclusively for lesbian women. Famous lesbian feminists External links
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