The top 3 things feminism gets wrong

Just three of the many reasons I am not a feminist

According to the conventional wisdom of our times, I should be an ardent feminist. 

To say I was raised in a pro-woman home would be an understatement. When I was a child, my father worked from home and so it was he who would drop me off and pick me up from school and take care of me on the school holidays while my mother was at work. My mother was — is — an extremely liberated woman. She was always critical of the feminist movement, but she was every bit as assertive and confident as anyone claiming to stand up to the patriarchy. My six aunts who helped raise me are all proud ball-busters. It was basically a matriarchy. 

In college, I was a part of a women’s collective fanzine called Harlot. Later, when I was an adult, my father actually wrote a book on the history of misogyny. A book entirely dedicated to the history of brutality against women, and its social and cultural consequences. While I never described myself as a feminist, I used to think of myself (and still do to a large extent) as a female supremacist. I believe in the power of woman, a power that is unique and transcendent.

So it is in this context that I say: feminism is not just wrong, it’s toxic. It has done harm. 

This is not about the women who fought for the vote, or for woman’s emancipation in the eyes of the law. It’s not about the working class women who fought against the vicious corporate tyranny like Mother Jones, who would find today’s feminist activists unrecognisable. 

It’s time for self-described feminists in advanced democracies to face up to the fact that we have been freed from both physical and legal bonds, and yet we cling to past victimhood. This despite being the most privileged and comfortable women in all of recorded human history. 

This essay looks at the present. And in the present, I see western feminism as a movement chasing down ghosts of oppression and feeding women a host of lies that directly contribute to unhappiness.

Here are the top three things that feminism is wrong about:

 1. An insistence that nothing has changed for women 

All of the attention on the recent BBC documentary The House of Maxwell, has fallen on Ghislaine Maxwell’s connection to Jeffrey Epstein. But in the very first episode was revelatory moment in which media tycoon Robert Maxwell (who gained notoriety for, among other things, stealing his employees pension money) challenged male journalists as to why there were no women in the Daily Mirror newsroom.  A man off camera responds, pathetically, that it’s because women are unable to pick up the large heavy bundles of newspapers in the morning — that’s why you don’t get many women journalists, he claimed. Maxwell immediately dismisses this nonsensical answer, saying that it sounded like women were being kept of of interesting jobs because of a false idea about carrying newspapers. He then asks the men in the audience — all were men, no women —when the last time any of them had to lift one of these bundles. All the men shifted uncomfortably in their seats, saying nothing.  I found myself cheering him on.

This conversation was like something written into a contemporary woke television drama. But it happened in 1984.

I often see snippets of mainstream culture from the 70’s, ’80’s and ’90’s and am surprised, as I’ve been conditioned by feminist complaints about their supposed lack, by the many feisty, empowered women scattered throughout the highest cultural and political echelons. From Joan Jett and the Go-Go’s to Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir, women have been large and in charge for decades now. 

But to hear young feminists today, you’d think that all girls are still chained to kitchen sinks and prohibited by their scary dads from learning to read. They cry endless tears that girls need to be “empowered”, as if somehow this hasn’t been happening my entire life. It’s as though all the groundbreaking women of the late 20th century have been airbrushed out of history.  As far as liberal-left women are concerned, they are hacking their way through totally virgin territory. None have come before them. 

Another example: noted sociopath Amber Heard hilariously thinks society has yet to come to terms with unmarried mothers, writing in an Instagram post announcing the birth of her child: “I hope we arrive at a point in which it’s normalized to not want a ring in order to have a crib.”

Has Amber taken a look around once or twice in her thirty-odd years on this earth? Does she really think that it’s shocking to have a child out of wedlock now? Of course she doesn’t. Victimhood is now the favoured tool of the elites and celebs to preserve their special status, and she is using it exactly as legions of her peers do. (Note that Amber paid another (presumably much poorer) woman to gestate and give birth to this child, which is casually glossed over in favour of Amber’s chosen narrative of Brave Single Mom.)

2. Fiddling while Rome burns

News flash to middle class, white collar professional women: insinuations that you are using your body to distract men — even if it’s done in a national newspaper — are not acts of aggression. (For US readers: this week UK Labour Party Deputy Leader Angela Rayner is being treated like the ultimate victim because some anonymous Tories told a journalist she flashes her legs at the Prime Minster to throw him off during parliamentary debates. Cry me a river, Angela.) 

So much of Internet feminism is women venting about passing interactions with men. Being told to smile more by a total stranger, while definitely annoying, does not oppression make. My favourite Tweet of all time, by feminist-baiting podcaster Dasha Nekrasova, is “bitches be crafting victim narratives.”

With the victim narrative comes the entitlement to special treatment.  “Women need to see themselves represented in video games/the entire video game community is geared toward men”

I have never played a video game in my life, but I feel like “the entire video game community” is geared toward getting human beings to sit on their asses for hours at a time, interacting with a digital platform and never seeing the outside. Does it matter how many of them are women? 

Or check this “news” segment in which three highly privileged women complain to a national audience about how tough they have it, featuring that widely loathed tool of the establishment media, Taylor Lorenz. The interview was widely mocked as Taylor cries fake tears about being called the c-word on Twitter — despite the fact that she herself has left a trail of damage behind her as wide as a hurricane’s wake. 

Meanwhile, as I wrote in Feminist Current this week, the most vulnerable women in society are being treated only slightly better than women in gulag. Women in prisons and homeless shelters are sharing cells with men, they are being forced to shower with men — some of whom are HIV positive and many of whom are sex offenders. Never mind the added insult that sex crimes committed by men are being recorded as having been committed by women. And by sex crimes I don’t mean catcalling or mean Tweets. I mean raping children. 

A convicted child rapist claimed to be a woman, and was sent to serve his sentence in a woman’s prison. This article from the Irish Examiner describes him as a woman throughout.

3. Denial of female sexual agency and desire. 

Of all of the things feminism is wrong about, this may be the most difficult. Sexuality is an intense, complex and volatile thing. Handled incorrectly, it causes shame, rage, jealousy and all manner of other extreme, negative, emotional responses. When I was growing up, the main driving force of sexual toxicity was coming from the right. In the West, right-wing attempts at controlling human desire and its many sub variants were in their death-throes by the 1980’s but were still able to do some puritanical damage. Now far worse the damage is being done by the opposing force: our overly permissive culture driven by the left and mainstream feminism. Feminism’s shallow and contradictory analysis has done nothing to guide young women through the minefield that is sexual desire and its accompanying responsibilities. Pushing for access to birth control and abortion were the main things feminism achieved — and with several decades of that behind us, it’s clear to me that even there the results have not been unequivocally positive. 

Feminists send young women extremely contradictory messages about sex and bodies. On the one hand, we claim that there are no consequences to no-obligation sex, or oversharing of your body. On the other, we treat every erotic encounter as a rape threat. Feminism tells women that the locus of their oppression is their bodies, which is demoralising (see the rise in women butchering themselves to appear male) and confusing (since the majority of girls and women enjoy clothes and makeup that make their bodies look good.) What pleasure signals we have sent girls seem to have translated into damaging promiscuity. Taken as whole, from my middle-aged perspective, young people’s boundaries seem to be seriously off, and that is in part because we threw away a clear, delineated (though flawed) moral framework and replaced it with feminist sloganeering.

Just because I criticise feminists doesn’t mean I think men are blameless

But feminism did not spring out of nowhere. It did not rise to prominence in a social vacuum. All the damage done by feminism was done hand-in-hand with multiple generations of men who absconded from their responsibilities toward women; men who enjoyed all the benefits of free love culture and bore few of the costs; men who devastate women emotionally for years with a refusal to commit, simply because they do not have the pressure of time bearing down on them. (Now that is privilege!)

No problem endured by women can really be solved without healthy relationships with men, and vice versa. Men and women, in even our embrace of same sex love, are still irrevocably, deeply, entwined. We need each other more than feminists will ever admit, but reaching a detente in the eternal battle of the sexes would go a long way to improving lives.