Questions From Readers Vol.1

So today I got an ask from a friendly youngster who wanted to remain anonymous, but I wrote her quite a lengthy reply which might be of interest to others so I’m reproducing it here:

"Okay i went to your blog really angry at first, thinking you were against gender equality but as i read your posts i started realizing, you know? But even still, i am confused. I can understand that feminists are actually completely disregarding men’s rights, but at the same time i do think that the people who do that are misandrists. im not even sure what my question is right now, i mean one side of me is saying that feminism is an equal movement, but the other side is saying that feminism is unjust, so right now im a little at war with myself. im not sure and i hope you dont mind me asking, but what was the original idea of feminism? Did feminism become warped? What were the reasons you decided to not be a feminism? what is feminism in general? Thank You!"

Hey, it sounds to me you’re asking some very healthy questions and I don’t want to try and interfere with that to ‘convert’ you to my way of thinking or anything, but since you’re asking here’s what now seems obvious to me:

'Feminism' as a term began being used a hundred years or so ago, but really just to denote a personal belief that women should have the same opportunities as men, should be able to work and vote etc. There was no enshrined ideology beyond that, nothing was codified into any law or teaching and you didn't have to support any thing beyond that simple basic stance. What political actions there were had clear objectives that - like the female suffrage movement - ceased to exist just as soon as those specific goals were met.

Modern feminism (the so-called ‘second wave’ onwards) is a political ideology that for the most part emerged out of western university campus Marxism in the late 1960s. ‘Revolutionary’ women who couldn’t get on with the men they were supposed to be working alongside to bring down the state kept much of the same theory but just replaced the word ‘class’ with ‘gender’ and ‘patriarchy theory’ was born. In this narrative of history, all men (regardless of circumstance) are more privileged than all women (regardless of circumstance) and all societies are set up to benefit men through the oppression and exploitation of women.

Instead of seeing the universal division of labor (man goes out hunting, does the harder, more dangerous work while the woman most often stays closer to home and cares for her children) as something we evolved over hundred of thousands if not millions of year to best survive, this became framed as a relatively recent conspiracy to keep women down. To make this sound even remotely plausible, further theories had to be dreamt up of ‘matriarchal’ societies that existed before written history, maybe 8 thousand years ago. There is not today, and there never has been, even one scrap of evidence for any ‘matriarchies’ existing anywhere on planet earth. You can see already, I’m sure, how much of a leap this kind of thinking is from simply ‘the belief in equality’ the institution of feminism still publicly claims to be about, in order to retain the widest base of support it can.

To truly identify as an active feminist now, you really have to also believe in Rape Culture, Patriarchy Theory, Institutionalized Sexism, Male Privilege, the Pay Gap, The Glass Ceiling, and that we live in a rigidly enforced climate of nightmarish misogyny, all of which are demonstrably untrue.

It’s because of this that I recommend people who genuinely believe in equality for all to consider using a different term such as ‘egalitarianism’ (which actually means equality - literally - and doesn’t imply action on behalf of only one gender, the way the word ‘feminism’ does).

You don’t have to start loudly decrying feminism the way I presently do, but you might start taking people who claim to be feminist up on it when you hear them saying sexist, derogatory, scapegoating things about ‘men’ and try remind them of what your belief in feminism is, that they should be devoting equal care and concern to both males and females, if their use of the word is to mean anything.

And actually, that’s how all this started for me: I really believed feminism meant equality and that all the feminists I knew felt the same as me. But I just saw more and more things within that movement which didn’t make sense at all, just lots of bigotry and Nazi-level scapegoating of a group of people based only on their genetic code.

So then I started - not on purpose, really, it just started happening on its own - I started reversing the genders of any statement about ‘MEN’ in my head and seeing what I thought about it then, when it was being said about a woman, or ‘women’, instead. If you do this for a little while, you cannot help but immediately see that even non-feminists in our society every day make remarks just as a matter of course that - if said about women - would be considered indefensible hate and would have you punched in the head and thrown out of whatever room you were in and lose you your friends and perhaps even your job (all of this only if you were a man, of course).

Or try this: put the word ‘black’, ‘gay’, or ‘Jewish’ before the word ‘men’ and consider what you think of any feminist statement then.

Without the ideological narrative propping up and creating justification for their vitriolic behaviour, it becomes obvious that the words and actions of even moderate feminists are deeply contemptuous and hateful, and that’s why I say feminism is a hate movement. You know, because it is.

Anyhow, hope that helps a little, and even if you ignore all of it, good luck with your path, it sounds like you have your head screwed on correctly anyway and want to do your best in the world for everyone. And that’s alright with me.