Sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on one's sex or gender.
Sexism can affect anyone, but it primarily affects women and girls. It has been linked to stereotypes and
gender roles, and may include the belief that one sex or gender is intrinsically superior to another. Extreme
sexism may foster sexual harassment, rape, and other forms of sexual violence. Gender discrimination may encompass
sexism, and is discrimination toward people based on their gender identity or their gender or sex differences. Gender discrimination is especially defined in terms of workplace inequality. It may arise from social or cultural customs and norms.
Radical feminism is a perspective within
feminism that calls for a
radical reordering of
society in which male supremacy is eliminated in all social and economic contexts, while recognizing that women's experiences are also affected by other social divisions such as in race, class, and sexual orientation. The
ideology and movement emerged in the 1960s.
Radical feminists view
society as fundamentally a
patriarchy in which men dominate and oppress women.
Radical feminists seek to abolish the
patriarchy as one front in a struggle to liberate everyone from an unjust
society by challenging existing social norms and institutions. This struggle includes opposing the sexual objectification
… Read more of women, raising public awareness about such issues as rape and violence against women, challenging the concept of
gender roles, and challenging what
radical feminists see as a racialized and gendered capitalism that characterizes the
United States and many other countries.
Radical feminists locate the root cause of women's
oppression in patriarchal gender relations, as opposed to legal systems (as in liberal
feminism) or class
conflict (as in anarchist
feminism, socialist
feminism, and Marxist
feminism).
Patriarchy is a social system in which men hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, and social
privilege. A patriarchal
society consists of a male-dominated power structure throughout organized
society and in individual relationships. Most contemporary societies are, in practice, patriarchal.
Patriarchy is associated with a set of ideas, a patriarchal
ideology that acts to explain and justify this dominance and attributes it to inherent natural differences between men and women.
Feminist theorists have expanded the
definition of patriarchal
society to describe a systemic bias against women, and most feminists saw that
oppression of women
… Read more came from the underlying bias of a patriarchal
society.