Congratulations to all of the radical feminists. You win! (for now)
More broadly, I am convinced that if feminism is to have a positive future, it must reinvent itself as a gender equity movement advocating for both sexes and against all sexism. Focusing solely on female disadvantage was perfectly understandable when, whatever paternalistic benefits women might have enjoyed and whatever burdens men might have suffered, women were the ones lacking the basic rights of adult citizens. But today, there is simply no moral or rational justification for any fair-minded feminist to ignore (for instance) the more lenient treatment of female offenders in the justice system or the anti-father biases in family courts. The concept of feminism as equality of the sexes is increasingly on a collision course with feminism as a movement championing women.
In its present form — as a secular cult that should call itself the Sisters of Perpetual Grievance — feminism is far more a part of the problem than part of the solution. It clings to women’s wrongs and turns women’s rights into narcissistic entitlement. It is far too easily prone to bashing men while painting women as insultingly helpless and downplaying their human capacity for cruelty. (The notion that abuse and dominance would not exist without patriarchy is not only naively utopian but utterly sexist.) It is also deeply irrelevant to most women, only 5 percent of whom consider themselves “strong feminists,” even though 82 percent believe that men and women should be social, political, and economic equals.
Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/09/23/yes_patriarchy_is_dead_the_feminists_prove_it_120031.html#ixzz2g2VIp3hg
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It’s not like me to disagree with Clayton’s writing but I have to here. I take exception to the phrases, “Focusing solely on female disadvantage was perfectly understandable when, whatever paternalistic benefits women might have enjoyed and whatever burdens men might have suffered, women were the ones lacking the basic rights of adult citizens.”
That might have been the American experience but in the UK certain classes of women have, since Tudor times, been able to vote when some classes of men – the majority – could not.
It was 1911 when the first working class man was voted in to Parliament and it was only a few years later in 1919 when the first woman was voted in. Between those two dates there had been 4 years of the First World War (1914-18).
So all American radical feminism has achieved is export its own peculiar brand of victimhood overseas, like a 19th century colonial power, and like America’s current (and 2008) fiscal recklessness, thereby infect the rest of the world.