I had long looked on the feminist project with an indulgent eye, feeling, along with Bertie Wooster, that girls will be girls and must be allowed their little enthusiasms. But I had assumed that after accomplishing the legitimate goals of the movement — equality before the law, and equal opportunity in education and employment — they would depart the field and find something else useful to do with their time, perhaps leaving behind a few stout sentries to defend their gains.

That’s not what has happened. Modern feminists have set about to remake society to comport with two bedrock, inviolable feminist principles. The first of these is that there are no significant differences between the sexes, that any apparent differences are the result of social conditioning from the earliest ages. To suggest that women might (in general) possess innate differences in some characteristic — greater empathy, let us say — is to mark oneself as a misogynist of the first order. The second principle is that any male-dominated organization or occupation would greatly benefit by increasing its female membership, as women bring a number of innate characteristics — greater empathy, for example — which their male counterparts woefully lack. To question this is to mark oneself as a misogynist of the first order.

In their efforts to align the rest of the world with these principles, feminists have encountered an unexpected obstacle: the wrong sorts of things make people happy. They are in the position of the dog food company of legend that went to enormous trouble and expense to develop and market the world’s finest dog food, only to find themselves faced with one minor problem: the dogs wouldn’t eat it. Whereas the dog food maker recognized its failure and didn’t attempt to breed a new sort of dog with a taste for its product, modern feminists are diligently working to produce a new sort of human more amenable to what they have on offer.