In response to a discussion of how the modern version of feminism took over the popular movement and became the dominant voice of female advocacy and identity in our culture. 

Third wave feminists have won. And now they’re all so happy! 
    And as a result, all our social problems have declined, our children are happier than ever, women are working and having fewer families and all their anxieties and depression and lack of satisfaction have subsided, and the relations between the sexes have never been better.

    In every generation, people seek to come up with a new explanation of what exactly is wrong with the world and how they’re going to fix it. And they turn the world upside down. And in every generation we discover new problems and have new things that make us unhappy, and we realize that the solutions we enacted to solve our previously identified problems and that were supposed to make everything better haven’t really made any difference to how we feel.
    Someday people will realize that there is no magic bullet. And things like the family and marriage and work and government and all of it are all just ways that we manage the fundamental problems of mortality and the human condition. Nothing gets solved. We just exchange strategies. And none of them are perfect solutions, and so much of their outcomes are dependent on chance and on ourselves and what we do with them.

   You can give the problems we face many names. Capitalism, sexism, socialism, greed, witches, patriarchy, war, poverty, decadence. These are merely the faces of the world and the faces of one ourselves. How we see the problem, who we blame, how we respond, the framing, the circumstances, all of that changes. But people don’t, and the world doesn’t. And in the process we often lose or cripple what we have and built to get us to where we are, in the hope that we’ll end up somewhere else. Life is tragic. But some things help us face that tragedy, and some better than others. But none perfectly, and none universally.
    Like so many movements, the feminist movement overpromised and underdelivered, and women found that the same structural struggles and problems and deprivation and restrictions that men had felt in a life of work outside the home would also be theirs now. Not that something didn’t need to happen and that there wasn’t a need that had to be addressed. But we almost almost always radically misunderstand what it is and how to adapt to it. And we were so quick to assume we knew what the problem was that we never really counted the cost of our solutions, or took thought for how to preserve what we were giving up. 
    As a man who has spent his major working years taking care of the kids while my wife worked, I’ve had a chance to experience the difficulties of switching roles. It was hard for me to learn to find fulfillment in my family, absent a career. But I learned a heck of a lot about just how great and how good for you and how fulfilling and how complex and challenging being a homemaker and raising children really is. And my wife has learned a lot about the downsides and costs and tradeoffs and compromises you make in a career, even a very successful one with great employers in your field of choice.

   And after ten years of it she’s wondering if she could move out of it and into a home role while I go back out into the working world. Of course I’m not sure that will solve all her problems or make her perfectly happy either. They’re both positions with tradeoffs. You make sacrifices inside the home and outside, of careers and within them. And it will be harder for me to replicate her success, having spent the last decade at home. So it might not be easy to make that switch. And it’s not a switch I’m completely eager to make myself.

   People can find happiness and meaning, and unhappiness and dissatisfaction, anywhere. And a lot of that is up to you. But we’re always chasing some horizon, thinking if I just change this or that, that it will all be different and I will get exactly what I want without any tradeoffs of downsides. I’ll get that heaven that I deserve and that other people seem to have.

   You can spend a lifetime chasing those hopes. Our country certainly has. That doesn’t mean we can’t change what we’re doing, or that circumstances might even demand it. How do you think I ended up in my current situation? But we need to be more honest with ourselves and with others. About our limitations, about the limitations and demands the world puts on us, and the limitations of our own nature. We also need to be honest our struggles and listen more honestly to the struggles of others. And then, maybe, we can work something out and try to help one another. 

    No one escapes life. We all struggle through. And a big part of how we do that is through our relationships with one another, though our families. And relationships are always going to be a challenge and a problem and will always demand a lot of all of us. But avoiding those challenges isn’t a sure route to happiness either. Everything carries a cost. But family, however you choose to arrange it, is the greatest tool ever devised for weathering the storms that life is prone to throw at us, and is also the greatest tool ever devised for mutual help and development. We might imagine more ideal solutions, we might imagine the development of some mechanism or solution or structure that will give us each individually everything we want with none of the limits, costs, struggle, or compromises of relationship. But so far we’re not doing great. We’ve pulled down a lot of the old world, but have yet to show up with any widespread solution to this vast field of human need and endeavor.

    We can put our hope in the government or in the universities, in sociologists and sexologists and psychologists, that some expert will come along who can order everything for us to make us strong and happy and secure. At least the old kind of security belonged to us and was in our own hands, in the hands of each family, each couple. It was a technology and power that belonged to them and didn’t depend on some intellectual or government official or social scheme or tax scheme or program. It was at least up to us. 

   Whatever we may have gained in the modern era, we’re losing something important if we think that family is the enemy of our success and happiness. But young people especially are acting like that is the case. I don’t blame feminism for that. Or the patriarchy. We’ve lost our vision for what love is, what it really is. What the relationship between the sexes means. That’s not something you can take apart or put back together in a day. And its failure can’t be easily laid at any one door, when all of us everywhere across time have participated in it and contributed to it. 

    We’re not alright. Men or women, young or old. We’re not doing as great as we say we are, as we said we would be. Losing our need for one another hasn’t made us less dependent or more free. Not in absolute terms. It’s merely shifted who and what we’re dependent on, and where the costs must be paid. That may not be an argument for going back, and maybe that’s never been an option. But it might be an argument to keep going forward, seeking a new direction with both eyes open.