It has achieved the opposite of its stated goal.
Feminism claims to stand for two things above all: women’s equality and enabling women to be strong.
Regarding the first aim, no decent man or woman opposes the concept of the equality of the sexes. But people who do not call themselves feminists have a problem with the feminist notion of equality: Most feminists have conflated equality and sameness. And that’s a huge mistake; the sexes are equal, but they are different.
A second major problem regarding the feminist claim to aspire to women’s equality is that feminists frequently provide false evidence to prove that women are not treated as equals. The best known example is the false statistic that American women earn about 25 percent less than men when they do the same work for the same amount of time.
Another example was relentlessly expressed during Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency, and especially since her defeat: the assertion that she was the victim of misogynistic comments and that she lost because she was a woman. None of it is true. But it keeps feminists thinking of women as victims — and people who think of themselves as victims are rendered weak.
Which brings us to the second goal of feminism: enabling women to be strong and making women strong.
In one of modern life’s bigger ironies, feminism has actually achieved the very opposite. In America today (as opposed to, let us say, Saudi Arabia, where it does take strength to be a feminist), the more stridently a woman identifies as a feminist, the less strong she is. Feminism has created what is undoubtedly the weakest generation of women in American history. My grandmother, who never heard the word “feminist” and who never graduated from high school, was incomparably stronger than almost any college-educated feminist I have ever personally encountered, or the many I have read and listened to.
My grandmother (and, I suspect, yours) would never have felt the need to retreat to a “safe space” when encountering an idea with which she differed. Yet we have a generation of young feminist women who are so weak that even if it is a woman who comes to their campus to argue, for example, that when all relevant factors are taken into account there is no gender wage gap, they seek the comfort of stuffed animals, balloons, and Play-Doh in “safe spaces.” They also need “trigger warnings” alerting them that they may read something that disturbs them.
I first suspected that feminism was a cover for weakness when as a young man I engaged in a public dialogue with the mother of modern feminism, Betty Friedan. At one point I said something with which she disagreed, and after calling me a “male chauvinist piglet,” she stood up and walked off the stage. No man I have ever argued with has done that — and, believe me, I said far tougher things to many men than I did to Ms. Friedan. (For the record, when I neither apologized nor asked her to return, she voluntarily returned to the stage.)
Nothing has changed since that evening (sometime around 1980). Feminists still find intolerable words that men routinely use when addressing other men with whom they differ.
In one of their presidential debates, in responding to an attack on him, Donald Trump called Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman.” His remark was universally condemned as “sexist” by feminists (both male and female). But didn’t Mr. Trump mock Marco Rubio’s height, label Ted Cruz “Lyin’ Ted,” and offer other similarly negative descriptions of male competitors? (And, by the way, tens of millions of American women also find Hillary Clinton nasty.)
Feminists still find intolerable words that men routinely use when addressing other men with whom they differ.
Modern feminists are afraid of life. They are afraid of differences of opinion, and especially afraid of men.
Here’s one example, as reported by the Boston Globe in 2014:
“A realistic-looking statue of a man sleepwalking in his underwear near the center of [the all-female] Wellesley College . . . has caused outrage among some students in just one day after its Feb. 3 installation” (italics added).
(I admit that I, too, was outraged about that statue — outraged that an idiotic sculpture depicting a man sleepwalking in his underpants is considered “art” and was placed there by the college’s Davis Museum.)
A petition signed by hundreds of Wellesley students said:
“It has already become a source of undue stress for many Wellesley College students . . . ” (italics added).
Clearly, “hundreds of Wellesley College students” are very weak.
Feminists are outraged and unduly stressed by much of life itself, and particularly by all but the most feminized men. Nearly every time the words “misogyny” and “sexist” are used, they are untrue and only reinforce the conviction that feminists are weak.
When Donald Trump used the moniker “Miss Piggy” in speaking to the Miss Universe who gained 60 pounds within months of winning her beauty title, that was neither sexist nor misogynistic. It was insulting.
And when Donald Trump privately boasted to another man that he was so famous that women would allow him to “grab them by the p***y,” that, too, was neither sexist nor misogynistic. It was juvenile.
The male desire to touch the bodies of just about every woman they are attracted to is — trigger warning here — normal. It has nothing to do with hatred of women or viewing women as unequal. Gay men want to touch the bodies of just about every man they find attractive, and they don’t hate men or consider them unequal. Such is male sexual nature. Strong women know this. Weak women, a.k.a feminists, and their fellow male feminists (who are just as weak), deny it. It’s too painful for them to deal with.
You want to know what women are strong?
Here’s an example: Any young woman who announced in a college class that as much as she may want a career, she is more interested in finding a good man to marry. In other words, any young woman who announced that she isn’t a feminist.