I am a feminist. It is not common for most men to admit this, but I am. That being said, I consider myself a feminist in the traditional sense. I believe that men and women should be treated equally as far as job opportunities. I believe that women should have access to birth control and I respect a woman’s right to have a choice. I think it is stupid in our culture that women are consistently objectified in popular culture and in everyday life. However, I am beginning to notice a trend in modern feminism that I find very alarming: the rise of radical feminism.
I realize radical feminists do not represent the views of feminists as a whole, but, as a man, I find much of what they say disturbing. They believe men are less intelligent than women. They believe women are by far superior to men. They even believe that men are the cause of all problems in human history. In general, radical feminists bad-mouth men as an entire gender.
Feminism as a movement in the 1960s did not start for those reasons. The feminists of that time wanted to be seen as equal to men from both a legal and societal standpoint. They fought against workplace discrimination. They fought for access to birth control. They fought against the social convention that relegated them to being a housewife and baby maker. Feminism was never supposed to be a movement that portrayed men as evil just as the civil rights movement was never meant to portray Caucasians as evil. What these movements had in common was the desire for equality.
To me, the idea of perpetuating hateful speech about men and claiming that women are superior to men is quite hypocritical. Such claims make radical feminists no better than misogynistic men who claim that women are hysterical, overly emotional idiots. What’s worse is that the internet gives these radical feminists a somewhat legitimate forum for their hate speech.
In a practical sense, such radical ideas also undermine feminism as a whole. Most women don’t hate men. They may not like the way they are treated by certain men, but they usually don’t hate men as a whole. Because of this, the majority of women aren’t likely to be receptive to ideas of radical feminism.
Problems arise, though, when otherwise logical and intelligent women start subscribing to these ideas. They usually don’t subscribe to the ideas wholesale, but some ideas can start creeping into their worldview. On more than one occasion, I have heard women express the overused statement, “All men are stupid,” even while they were talking to me. Now, I usually know the point they are trying to convey, but it is nonetheless insulting to me as a man to hear that. Men hate being generalized because of their gender just as much as women do. It begs the question; who is going to take feminists seriously if they are no better than the men they are fighting against?
My main takeaway from this is that I am not against feminism, far from it. I like feminism and I believe it is a movement that needs to stay. The idea that one sex is superior to the other sex is what needs to go. So ladies, stand up for your rights as a person. Stand against misogynistic men generalizing about you, but don’t forget to stand up against hateful women who generalize about men. We all want the same thing in the end: to be treated equally as people.
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