Just recently we had a popular post: "The Will To Change Men, Masculinity, And Love By bell hooks". I can take a couple quotes from the preface of that book:
I had not been able to confess that not only did I not understand men, I feared them.
Militant feminism gave women permission to unleash their rage and hatred at men...
I think too many feminists do hate men, and to say "no true feminist hates men" is falling into the no true scotsman fallacy. Typically the loudest people in a group are the most extreme and I don't believe most feminists hate men, but I also think it's understandable how some people do believe that.
That's the myth I routinely have to bust to guys I meet who hate feminists. I ask if they think women should have the right to vote. When they yes, I say that's feminism. It's simplistic and I usually follow up with other basic rights until I get to the contemporary issues. I say that if they want all that stuff then they are also feminists. Their reaction after this depends on how entrenched or how stupid they are.
Polarization doesn't help anyone. Both groups are suffering as they retreat further and further into their own in-groups. It sucks and it takes a lot of conscious effort on all parties' part to overcome. And unreciprocated effort feels awful and risks pushing people away at an even faster rate.
I'm not sure we're really equipped, as a society/species to overcome that effort barrier given our current information diet (infinite) and our stupid monkey brains (very limited).
- the average feminist, advocating female supremacy and male genocide.
“The future must be in female hands, women alone must control the reproduction of species; and only 10% of the population should be allowed to be male “
- Sally Miller Gearhart, feminist icon of the 20th century, advocating female supremacy and the violent eradication of most males.
As in all extremist organizations, moderates have zero power. They are there purely as window dressing and cannon fodder and to give the movement a wafer-thin veneer of legitimacy and respectability. It is the tail - the extremists - that wags the dog. And feminism has shown their hatred of men far more than any love of them.
So what you're saying is that you, a commenter using a username on an internet forum are the true feminist, and the feminists actually responsible for changing the laws, writing the academic theory, teaching the courses, influencing the public policies, and the massive, well-funded feminist organizations with thousands and thousands of members all of whom call themselves feminists... they are not "real feminists".
That's not just "no true Scotsman". That's delusional self deception.
Listen, if you want to call yourself a feminist, I don't care. I've been investigating feminism for more than 9 years now, and people like you used to piss me off, because to my mind all you were doing was providing cover and ballast for the powerful political and academic feminists you claim are just jerks. And believe me, they ARE jerks. If you knew half of what I know about the things they've done under the banner of feminism, maybe you'd stop calling yourself one.
But I want you to know. You don't matter. You're not the director of the Feminist Majority Foundation and editor of Ms. Magazine, Katherine Spillar, who said of domestic violence: "Well, that's just a clean-up word for wife-beating," and went on to add that regarding male victims of dating violence, "we know it's not girls beating up boys, it's boys beating up girls."
You're not Jan Reimer, former mayor of Edmonton and long-time head of Alberta's Network of Women's Shelters, who just a few years ago refused to appear on a TV program discussing male victims of domestic violence, because for her to even show up and discuss it would lend legitimacy to the idea that they exist.
You're not Mary P Koss, who describes male victims of female rapists in her academic papers as being not rape victims because they were "ambivalent about their sexual desires" (if you don't know what that means, it's that they actually wanted it), and then went on to define them out of the definition of rape in the CDC's research because it's inappropriate to consider what happened to them rape.
You're not the National Organization for Women, and its associated legal foundations, who lobbied to replace the gender neutral federal Family Violence Prevention and Services Act of 1984 with the obscenely gendered Violence Against Women Act of 1994. The passing of that law cut male victims out of support services and legal assistance in more than 60 passages, just because they were male.
You're not the Florida chapter of the NOW, who successfully lobbied to have Governor Rick Scott veto not one, but two alimony reform bills in the last ten years, bills that had passed both houses with overwhelming bipartisan support, and were supported by more than 70% of the electorate.
You're not the feminist group in Maryland who convinced every female member of the House on both sides of the aisle to walk off the floor when a shared parenting bill came up for a vote, meaning the quorum could not be met and the bill died then and there.
You're not the feminists in Canada agitating to remove sexual assault from the normal criminal courts, into quasi-criminal courts of equity where the burden of proof would be lowered, the defendant could be compelled to testify, discovery would go both ways, and defendants would not be entitled to a public defender.
You're not Professor Elizabeth Sheehy, who wrote a book advocating that women not only have the right to murder their husbands without fear of prosecution if they make a claim of abuse, but that they have the moral responsibility to murder their husbands.
You're not the feminist legal scholars and advocates who successfully changed rape laws such that a woman's history of making multiple false allegations of rape can be excluded from evidence at trial because it's "part of her sexual history."
You're not the feminists who splattered the media with the false claim that putting your penis in a passed-out woman's mouth is "not a crime" in Oklahoma, because the prosecutor was incompetent and charged the defendant under an inappropriate statute (forcible sodomy) and the higher court refused to expand the definition of that statute beyond its intended scope when there was already a perfectly good one (sexual battery) already there. You're not the idiot feminists lying to the public and potentially putting women in Oklahoma at risk by telling potential offenders there's a "legal" way to rape them.
And you're none of the hundreds or thousands of feminist scholars, writers, thinkers, researchers, teachers and philosophers who constructed and propagate the body of bunkum theories upon which all of these atrocities are based.
You're the true feminist. Some random person on the internet.