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It’s Time for Feminism to End
Feminism began with goals that were both laudable and achievable, and it achieved them: women are today the legal equals of men. For decades now, since legal equality was achieved, feminism has been harmful to women.
Feminism has always had its destructive aspect, its misguided insistence that women adopt male practices that, for reasons of simple biology, work against women. The sexual realities for women are different, completely and ineluctably different, from those for men. Encouraging women to disregard those realities harms women. Women aren’t men, and they can’t act with the casual disregard for responsibility and consequences that nature has gifted to men as an unfortunately viable option.
There is another, more subtly corrosive quality to feminism: in an era when people talk of “safe spaces” and worry about “micro-aggression,” feminism has unwittingly removed the cultural safeguards that made it possible for women to comfortably coexist with men in public spaces. The quotidian gestures of male chivalry: opening and holding doors, walking on the street side of the sidewalk and the down-side of the stair, refraining from vulgarity and profanity in mixed company, etc., have long been resented and denigrated by feminists as lesser examples of toxic masculinity. That’s a mistake, and one with consequences: these gestures serve as an assurance to women that men are aware of the differences in physical power between the sexes, and choose to harness that power in token acts of protection.
Has feminism made women safe from men? No, as the “me too” refrains make clear, it has not. Human nature in the realm of sex is deeply wired and impossible to change quickly, if at all. What is possible is the accretion of social patterns of behavior that create safeguards for women, patterns that encourage safe behavior by both men and women. Feminism, having achieved its legitimate legal goals, has left as its only purpose the destruction of femininity and, along with it, the social safeguards that protected women.
It’s time for the feminist movement to accept victory and go home.
Published in Culture
Henry, nicely put.
Have you read Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son? Your post is very much in the same vein. I used to enjoy teaching the Letters because they were so very much against the modern social grain, and I don’t think my students had ever read those conventional sentiments expressed so well as Chesterfield wrote them.
yet there is the TERF movement. that battle is not done yet.
TERF?
“Last Ebb Feminist” has kind of a ring to it, no?
I saw the headline and the byline, and I could’ve hit “like” right there. Agree, agree, Henry. Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Women want to be men’s equals yet they complain about toxic masculinity and want “safe spaces”. You can’t have it both ways.
Gestation.
As long as the relative biological investments in procreation are as vastly different as they are between the sexes, men and women will approach sex and relationships in very different ways.
I suppose we could increase the cost of sex for men, for example through exorbitant mandated paternity costs, until it began to approach the life-changing impact it has on women. That might curb male appetites quite a bit, if we were really draconian about enforcement. Or we might decrease the cost for women through abortion and contraception (as, in some respects, we have).
But neither changes the fundamental nature of the human mammal, which has evolved over millions of years to approach sex differently from each side. There aren’t many motivators as profound as sex; we aren’t going to change these deeply instilled behavior traits, however we exaggerate or ameliorate the impact of sex.
Men and women are different, and we should embrace that.
Feminism was over when nobody actually opposed equality in hiring etc.
Oscar Wilde said there are only two tragedies in life: Not getting what you want and actually getting it. Feminism is choking on the latter.
Even the term sounds increasingly dated.
Not sure what follows. Hopefully a widespread affirmation of a rediscovery of what matters, however fleeting that return of sanity may be.
Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminist. Not really radical, just women that want to keep dudes out of locker rooms, women’s sports, women’s clubs,… The Planned Parenthood president that was aborted at 8 months was the result of a TERF fight.
Sounds like pre-feminism to me.
I just took a look out the window, and as far as I can see feminism is still with us.
I am hesitant to ask how it manifested xerself to you.
Right. That’s called “marriage.” And the socially-enforced expectation thereof.
Well, not really. I’m old enough to remember when, for example, girls had to take Home Ec and boys had to take Industrial Arts. When there was a girls field hockey team, but no girls’ soccer team at the local high school and, of course, no football or baseball/softball either. (Girls did have a basketball team, as I recall).
Interestingly, during the Great Trans-Bathroom debates, I discovered that the provision of separate “Ladies’ Rooms” for women were a big and liberating innovation back in the day (we’re talking late 19th and early 20th c.). Before then, women had to somehow make do with public facilities that were shared and probably pretty nasty not to mention scarce. Men can make do with an alley, after all. A woman in a long dress (not to mention a corset) needs a real restroom.
Flash forward to the 1950s when, my mother tells me, long car trips were made torturous by the dearth of clean, safe public toilets along the route. Even restaurants didn’t always have them.
And I remember similar trips in the sixties when we might find a dank, stinking gas-station restroom here and there along the way, but that was about it. We learned to piddle by the side of the interstate, of course, but it was an embarrassing and messy business for us…and, infuriatingly, not for our brothers.
Plumbing is about plumbing.
As Henry points out, there are differences between men and women, and bathrooms and locker rooms are where those differences most need to be accounted for. That’s where we gals repair to cope with the manifold hassles attendant on biological womanhood.
If you aren’t a biological woman, you can use the rest of the freakin’ world.
Man, I wish I had written that. Well put! Men and women are equal legally, but will likely never be equal in other areas, no matter what the social engineers try to do to achieve “parity”. The recent entry of men into women’s sports has made this fact perfectly clear, yet the cries of “Foul!” from real female athletes go unanswered.
I agree with you about separate toilets being a great development (and one that still is desperately needed in many areas of the two-thirds world). However, in the U.S. we’ve always had shared, single person toilets in places like our homes, small public gathering places, and family toilets in highway rest stops and airports – so that’s not new. We shouldn’t freak out when clean, one person facilities can be used by both sexes who are respectful of that cleanliness.
Where I don’t agree with you is about sports. I’m probably about your age (high school in the sixties) and public school competitive sports for women had totally disappeared in my high school. My mother (who would be 110 now) was very involved in competitive sports in that same high school. But in my mother’s day, sports for men were not televised and had not yet taken on the aspect of preparing for a high paying professional career. I’m not sure why it took feminist activism to bring back sports for women.
The feminist movement’s emphasis on a career having priority over family requires indoctrinated women to meet sexual instincts in a series of hookups combined with birth control and abortion. This formula results in most women “stuffing” their basic nature. Furthermore, it encourages lazy men to be predatory animals rather than faithful husbands and fathers.
Is it possible to reverse this trend? Maybe the Trans movement will provide feminists the incentive to rethink the trajectory of their movement? Perhaps a radical change in public school sex-ed will bring both men and women back to family thinking? I’m not very hopeful as I think too many men who squawk about the parts of feminism they hate are reluctant to commit to marriage and family when the sex outside of marriage that feminism has generated is now so free of undesirable consequences.
I agree—I think it will be interesting to see what happens if/when Roe is overturned and abortion is decided state-by-state. As David French pointed out recently in NRO, large areas of the country will continue to have legal abortion more or less on demand. But when citizens can no longer default to “well, Roe says its a woman’s right” and are actually able/forced to ponder the question of what sort of abortion regime they’re comfortable with, not in the abstract but in real terms, and the fact that citizens in Alabama could come to a different conclusion than citizens in Vermont…it might be a much more interesting and fruitful conversation.
Maybe.
It’s interesting to note how the left supports “states’ rights” when a state passes a law legalizing a liberal position, but they revert to the supremacy of the Federal government, and leftist Supreme Court decisions in particular when a state passes a conservative law . . . .
They are unprincipled as a matter of principle.
Our Canadian friends are the canary in the coal mine. A BC transgender woman has filed a human rights complaint against a woman who runs a waxing service out of her home because the proprietor won’t wax “her” scrotum.
I remembered an old Feminist Slogan in the middle of the night and by morning I’d forgotten it. Presumably because I’m getting to be an Old Feminist.
So I turned to the Interwebs, and came across this website “70 Plus Catchy and Best Feminist Slogans.” I love them. I want to write them on big signs and carry them in the next Women’s March. And yes, I have a feeling that Rahul Panchar, “Creative Marketer and Blogger By Heart” may not be a native English speaker.
– A Woman’s place is all over
– Better to be solid than lovely and pointless
– The wage hole exists.
– Women who look for correspondence with men need desire.
– Women can do and also men or shockingly better
– Women conceive an offspring without man
– Just have a go at rejecting a large portion of the planet
– Feminism does not mean enemies of men, it means genius human
– Women likewise have a decision
– Fight for the privilege of ladies’ vote
– Men of value don’t fear uniformity
– How long should ladies sit tight for balance
– Women are something beyond bodies
– No moms, no establishing dads
– Women in battle, encourage them
I want to make a whole bunch of signs with these slogans and bring them to the women’s march…I especially like “WOMEN CAN DO AND ALSO MEN OR SHOCKINGLY BETTER!” Yeah! Take that, Trump!
I’m uniformiphobic. I wonder if that makes me valueless.
No one should be required to wax someone’s scrotum.
It’s in the Constitution, though it may need to be spelled out specifically in future.
Henry, when do you think that “feminism” achieved its laudable goals?
I put the term in quotes, because there are multiple definitions of “feminism”. Women gained the right to vote in the US (nationwide) in 1920. Are you referring to this period? My impression is that you are referring to the feminism of the 1960s.
I find myself becoming increasingly critical of the feminism of the 1960s. The more that I look, the more it appears to have been nothing but a frontal assault on motherhood within marriage.
It has been supported by a relentless and almost unbelievable campaign of lies and propaganda. They teach young girls to be sluts and, frankly, to feel guilty only if they feel guilty. They even teach that there are no significant size or strength differences between men and women.
I know that this latter sounds unbelievable. One of my principal sources for this is Brett Weinstein, a biology “professor in exile” after the Evergreen fiasco a few years ago. Weinstein reported both hostility and disbelief when he would tell students about significant sexual dimorphism in humans. He described having students line up, by height, to demonstrate that there was little or no overlap between the sexes.
It is difficult to believe that kids could reach college age without understanding this obvious fact about the world.
Jerry, I intended the second half of that first sentence to answer your question: the laudable goal was to secure equal legal status for women. By that, I mean that the law would treat men and women equally, not in terms of mandated outcomes, but simply in terms of rights of property, contract, medical autonomy, and personal liberty. I approve of that equality.
I think legal equality under the law has been achieved. I think the infamous male/female “pay gap” issue is essentially nonexistent, founded on a misunderstanding about the different choices men and women tend to make when left free to make those choices. I think the sexual revolution has been bad for women.
I don’t believe that there are many villains here, just fallible people making sometimes shallow, sometimes good-faith assumptions and acting on them. But I do think a tilt back toward a more conservative culture, where the sexes are concerned, would be beneficial for the weaker sex.
Henry, I follow you, but I’m not sure when this came about. I suspect that it varied from state to state, and that most of the equal rights (in your sense) preceded the 1960s.
I do seem to recall that it was not until the early 1970s that Arizona changed its community property law to eliminate the provision granting sole management and control of community property to the husband. Even before that date, the wife’s separate property was in her sole management and control.
I’m not sure what you mean by “medical autonomy.” I agree with medical autonomy for women, though I do not think that this principle includes abortion.
I think you’re looking for a specificity I can’t provide. I’m sure it happened piecemeal, as the various restrictions on women’s rights were overwhelmingly at the state level. When I say “feminism,” I mean the broad push for legal rights, equality of outcome, social status, abortion rights, etc. — only that first portion of which I think was good for women and our culture. I think it all qualifies as “feminism,” which, as you point out, is pretty diverse.
I’m not speaking specifically of the cultural revolution of the late 60’s. Women’s suffrage was part of the feminist movement, as was the push for legal abortion.
When I say “medical autonomy,” I’m thinking specifically of the rights of women to be fully informed of their medical conditions by their doctors, and to have the same rights as men to make their own medical choices and to have the same say regarding psychiatric institutionalization, etc. I know it’s popular to use vague talk of medical and health care as a euphemism for abortion, but that’s not my intent. I’m just talking about health care.
Has it achieved victory? What if you are wrong?