A series of discussions about men, women, and feminism. In particular, some of the bad outcomes of certain types of feminism, and who is to blame. The video that sparkes this discussion is listed below. But to summarize, this lady argues that classical feminism has somehow been captured and used to promote values and messages that are actually counterproductive to the feminine interest and wellbeing, and reflect a forced adoption of masculinized values that have robbed and subordinated feminine culture. She feels like feminism and even ownership of femininity itself have been taken from women, to some degree. And she’s not happy about it. 

She’s got a pretty good handle on things. She lacks understanding of some people on the other side of things from her. And I don’t mean trans activists or other kinds of feminists, I mean men. And religious people or “common people”, she doesn’t understand them very well either. She still has a contempt for both that holds her back.

    When she’s made her peace with them, she’ll be even closer to the center. But she’s doing great work. This reaction was an almost necessary reaction. It was inevitable that some feminists would eventually realize that the arguments behind trans activism actually undermine feminist interests and would start pushing back and defending their territory. Feminism is an inherently partisan ideology. If you dissolve the borders between the sides, that partisan advocacy becomes incoherent. Part of fighting a war is being able to identify who is on your side and who is the enemy, what territory you’ve taken and what territory remains hostile.

    And to answer Benjamin’s question about where to go from hetr, the answer is that just because all systems are prone to error doesn’t mean you can afford to have no system. Any system is better than none. Any stability and predictability creates greater positive outcomes than no system. So you have to be courageous. And the good news is, sex is so simple that literally every other animal that is much dumber than us can figure it out just fine. I think if everybody were forced to get off the internet and walk around naked for one year, we would all figure it out.

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After saying this, I was told by someone that men are to blame for feminism having been hijacked by gender ideology (trans activism), and for taking being female away from women. I was also told that “men think they can do whatever they want and have been oppressing women for thousands of years, and trans activism is just the latest injustice against women by men, seeking to take even being a woman from us.” The writer also blamed men for hijacking feminism and making it about being like men, including sexually, focused on short term pleasure, for their own selfish benefit. Men tricked them into it. 

    And I think she also made a dig at my manhood. She said that “This woman (meaning the woman in the video) isn’t missing anything, but you certainly are, and I don’t mean your dick.”

   That seems to be a response to my comment that it was a good talk but Helen could benefit from more understanding of men. I assume what she means is that, like Helen, she’s unhappy with the results of modern feminism and trans activism, but is still also very unhappy with men, and even blames men for these developments.

  Although she said that it wasn’t my dick that I was missing,  bringing it up like that does seem to imply it in a backhanded way. Or maybe she means that because I have a dick, that I am a dick, and I’m espousing typically male oppressive idiocy. She could have disagreed with me without bringing up my penis. So clearly she has a bit of a fixation on my identity as a male, specifically associated with a certain offensiveness.

    In any case, my suggestion that it might be worthwhile for Helen to add to her wisdom wisdom by gaining a little more understanding of men was not welcomed. Apparently women know all they need to know about men, which is that they’re the worst and are the blame for everything.

    To all of which I replied… 

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    And that’s why you can’t espouse a reductive ideology without it leading to bad outcomes. There isn’t a good for women independent of men, any more than there is a good for men independent of women, or a good for white people independent of blacks, or young independent of old. And if you try to pursue it, it inevitably devolves into an ideology, which are defined by reducing the totality of truth, goodness, and beauty to something less than its unified self. It reduces the human story to something less than what it is, and so mangles it, creating new problems.
     Some men think strength means you can do whatever you want, and some men are also right about that. Try to prove them wrong. I’ve been beaten up plenty of times by people far stronger than me. And it’s hard to argue with them that they can’t do it when they are, in fact, doing it. The proof is in the pudding. 
    But some men haven’t believed in that creed of might makes right. Or at least they have redefined might as something more like moral virtue rather than mere strength. And these men have been fighting those others for millenia. In fact men have fought and died and worked and suffered, for women specifically, for milennia.

    That’s part of the story of men, as much as the other side. There are and always have been degenerate males, and there are and have been noble males, just as there are and have always been noble and degenerate females who have taken part in both the triumphs and the tragedies of moral life. It’s not clear at all from either history or psychology that women are in any way innately morally superior to men, only that their virtues and vices take different forms. 
    Casting all of humanity and all of history in terms of a simplistic, oppositional gender narrative is exactly the result one would expect from a reductive ideology. Worse, it’s a counterproductive ideology, one that deprives itself of goods, allies, and even its own history for the sake of resentment and a clear identification of “the enemy”. 
    But men aren’t the enemy, they’re half the species. They’re your fathers, your brothers, your sons, your neighbors, your coworkers, your friends. They’re as much a part of you as you are of them. We have walked down the long and twisting roads of history together. We are made up, quite literally, of one another, a man and woman together producing each single part in the hereditary story of who we are. I am ten thousand mothers, and I am ten thousand fathers, and the labors of both and failures of both live in me. 
    Even the changes of recent history are the work of men as well as women. Women didn’t win any war to get the position they have. They didn’t defeat men. They didn’t start a new species and society without them. Men voted for those laws. Men fought and died to protect those freedoms from external threats. Men made room for women; they gave up territory voluntarily, or secured it by restraining those who resisted. If men as a whole had ever actually been seeking merely domination of and exploitation of women, they would have done it. They could still have it now if they wanted it. But they restrain themselves, because that’s not what they wanted or were seeking or doing, and they fight to restrain and hold back those who do want that. And women aren’t without their own means and ends. 
    You can’t carry on a campaign of vengeance on a whole sex for thousands of years worth of grievances. If you try, you’ll only make yourself into a resentful and angry and bitter person, and you’ll isolate yourself from half the species, plus whatever part of your own half still believes that our partnership is more than a mere total farce. You’ll lose perspective on your own personal moral responsibility and agency by investing it entirely in the actions of another group.
    The line that divides good from evil doesn’t divide along lines of sex, whatever that means these days. It runs down each human heart. We can’t make a container for a whole sex that contains all the evil, while that of another contains only good. I learned that from my mother.

     My mom, my sister, my grandmothers, my aunts, all were strong and capable people who had far too much dignity and respect for themsleves, as well as love and respect for others, plus a recognition of their own humanity, with all its universal faults and virtues, to succumb to any simple, reductive gender ideology. My mom would consider it profoundly dishonest, as well as humiliating, selling all the women of the past (and present that aren’t on board) short as mere puppets and pawns, perfectly angelic infants chased around by big scary male monsters. That’s not only dishonest to women, it’s dishonest to men, who were and are more than mere universal tyrants and monsters. But some people believe that even to the point of blaming men for feminism and its recent negative developments and products. As if women weren’t capable of producing something destructive. Something that could, without care, without oversight, somehow go wrong in some ways and cases. 
     This is much like the outcry against online bullying and the outrage over the negative effects of social media on girls, that carefully ignore the fact that it’s largely girls who are committing as well as as receiving the bullying, that girls are the ones girls are meeting on social media and being bullied by. Girls are suffering and someone deserves blame. Since it’s not possible to blame girls for anything that happens to them, because they’re not agents, merely helpless victims, we had better turn our eyes toward the alternatives.

    Boys don’t suffer as much as girls, making them unable to be part of the victimized crowd, because sadly they just don’t use social media as much, and when they do they interact socially far less and far less personally. They’re more into video games. So by and large they’re not the enemy that girls are encountering on social media, even if they do make the occasional contribution. They just aren’t invested enough to matter. 
    The enemy that women encounter on social media is themselves. They matter there, they are powerful, and they are trying to get something more from it. Even the platform can’t really be blamed, it just provides the means and opportunity for women to interact and treat one another as they are inclined, with the benefit of a little digital distance.

     Even if you could remove all men from the world, it wouldn’t be the end of violence or the oppression of women or their suffering or subjugation. It might take different forms, find distinct expressions. I think social media is actually a lesson in what such a world would be like. But all the good and all the evil of humanity would still exist, even if the last man were eradicated and women freed forever from their influence. Because it isn’t along lines of sex that good and evil are divided, but among all. And rejecting all the good in an entire group, while assuming only good in your own, is a quick step down a dangerous path. 
    You can’t defeat sexism with sexism, you only escalate the conflict and alienate your allies and partners. And humanity isn’t the sort of thing where good and evil can be sectioned off into compartments of sex without doing violence to the very nature of the species. The marriage between men and women is the basis of our species-life. We don’t have any life without it. We don’t have any good without it. That is why there cannot be a coherent and non-degenerating feminism any more than there can be coherent and non-degenerating masculinism. To create it is to do violence to the species identity. It must inevitably sicken, it must inevitably become unbalanced and distorted over time, it must inevitably go wrong to the ruin even of itself.