Why feminists are bad

In the UK there has been a small increase in the number of women who identify as such. It's a similar picture in Europe, with fewer than half of men and women polled in five countries agreeing they were a feminist. However, people do not appear to reject the term feminism because they are against gender equality or believe it has been achieved.

The same study found that eight out of 10 people said men and women should be treated equally in every way , with many agreeing sexism is still an issue. This appears to represent a shift in attitudes over time. A study of 27, people in the US found that two-thirds believed in gender equality in , up from a quarter in If many believe gender equality is important, and still lacking, then why do relatively few people - including young women - identify as feminist?

It could be that they do not feel the term speaks to them. The term feminist is less likely to appeal to working-class women, polls suggest. Almost one in three people from the top social grade ABC1 - those in managerial, administrative and professional occupations - called themselves a feminist in a poll. This compared with one in five from grades C2DE, which include manual workers, state pensioners, casual workers, and the unemployed.

But those from lower income backgrounds are just as likely to support equal rights. Eight out of 10 people from both groups agreed men and women should be equal in every way, when asked for a poll. This may suggest lower income groups support the principle behind feminism, but aren't keen on the word itself. Three-quarters of all the women polled said the feminist movement has done either "a lot" or "some" to improve the lives of white women.

Another hurdle may be some of the stereotypes and misconceptions associated with feminism. In her introduction to the recently published anthology Feminists Don't Wear Pink and Other Lies, curator Scarlett Curtis refers to the stereotype of feminists as not wearing make-up, or shaving their legs or liking boys.

These stereotypes have persisted through the ages. We are typically aghast when reactionaries accuse the maligned of perniciously employing this rhetorical immunity, but they are not wrong to see how the trick might be exploited.

The irony is only that they know this possibility in virtue of their own projection. For all Max's talk of equal opportunity "It isn't the same as equality of outcome! He's there! You just can't see it! But trust me! I'm a priest of Tumblr and we can see it, you stupid heathens! For Max, it is all a crusade. The struggle against the church, the state, the women. It is a battle about genuine issues: issues maligned by a majority too easily beholden to the prevailing taste consensus. The stakes are high and immediate, persuasion by comment section possible and, moreover, important because the trouble with most people is that they "haven't really thought about it for two seconds.

Libertarianism follows from recognizing of a colluding party system within a power-hungry state too quick to shut down big questions. Men's rights activism follows from the bizarre misapprehension fueled by a disconnect between the opinions of visible intellectuals and the average populace that feminism has reached suffocating heights of power. He is a rebel with one cause in three bodies, and the pushback — from friends, from me, from the nation's opinion apparatus itself — only therefore fuels his indignation toward a society too willing to neglect inconvenient truths about the world.

In activist circles of any kind, it is common to hear that injustice is a kind of sight that cannot be unseen. All of it seemed so hyperbolic until I started noticing it. Now I notice it in everything. The "it" is typically some kind of institutional bias: the ways in which women are routinely encouraged to defer to male judgment; the way in which race, without overt malice, permeates even simple American interactions.

Before, we were post-gender and post-racial, without need of an Equal Rights Amendment, on track toward total marriage equality. Then you hear something, or live it, or read it, or see. The world today is now more like history, and the motives of the people in it are more suspect than before. Reviewing my notes from my first night speaking with Max, I become more confident that his life is some strange inversion of the same epiphany.

One day, he is comfortable as a man and comfortable with what masculinity means in the world. The next, he can see behind the veil, and all that goes away. Social justice through a mirror, darkly: Men are the ones subject to genuine oppression, the ones whose issues are taken as uninteresting and unimportant. They are the ones taking terrible jobs and being drafted; committing suicide at incredible rates; losing their children, their spouses, and their homes while nobody else seems to care; shouting in the wilderness while a feminist majority squelches their dissent.

I am not the first to notice this. Last year, John Herrman noticed the same inversion in the Awl. In other words, they too believe that unsolicited public attention is inherently aggressive, but only when that attention takes the form of criticism, and only when it comes from women.

They live this belief on the streets, where they are nearly unaccountable, and argue it online, where they are totally accountable. Looking at my notebook, one observation, underlined at the time, stands out: "Max says he needs online MRA communities because on normal internet, he gets shouted down and talked over. If men's rights activism has a Gloria Steinem, a kind of central activist figurehead, it is Paul Elam, the founder and publisher of A Voice for Men.

The website is one of the oldest and, if there is such a thing, most respected hubs for MRA activity. Elam and his staff do, at the very least, engage in genuine advocacy on behalf of men. Moreover, they don't typically stray past boorishness and into outright campaigns of harassment, although I cannot help feeling myopic in citing this fact as some kind of high water mark amongst the MRA set.

I send him an email, and he writes back quickly. We arrange a call. Like Max, Elam sees his issues as a crusade, his atheism as important, his politics as moral in their antisocialism. He was a substance abuse counselor by trade. It was in this context that he began to see.

He remembers the first time, working for a men's treatment facility in Houston, waiting in the hall with an invited speaker, a woman about to go in and address the clientele. At that point I thought, Something needs to be done about this. The trouble continued. Elam could see the truth. Nobody else could see. While the issues of paternity rights and the destruction of the family would come later, Elam's transition from counselor to pseudo-civil rights hero grew naturally out of his prior life.

He recites a litany of charges against modern psychotherapy, its anti-masculine focus on effusively articulated feelings. If one dismisses for a moment the bizarre unreality of men subject to brutal gendered discrimination, it doesn't sound terribly different, in sense or scope of conspiracy, than the complaints of feminist academics so often mocked by men of Elam's kind.

Because a lame man recognizes that we are walking straight, while a lame mind says that it is we who are limping. Elam isn't without his objectivity. Unlike Max, he knows, for example, that his position is a rare one.

Elam is not convinced that most people normal people; the women in his office, if there were women in his office take his crusades as common sense and only don't say so out of fear. His manner gives rise to a suspicion that he has been lonely a long time, not in the literal way, but self-consciously stranded in a shrinking section of the world. He is committed in part to his work because if more ground is lost, he will be lonelier still.

If more ground is lost, there may not be room at all. Men are suffering, he says. He is suffering, but he doesn't say that outright. All of it breeds a certain paranoia, one I encountered in all the men I spoke to. A feeling likely justified by the ordinary reaction to men's rights activism, that outsiders, especially outsiders writing for mainstream publications, are not to be trusted.

That they agreed to speak to me at all remains surprising, especially in Max's case: He is friendly, willing to sit down, but insistent that his identity be protected. He seems, like so many zealots, to believe at once that he is righteous and vital and also that speaking out under his own name will bring unsavory consequences beyond his willingness to suffer.

At one point during our conversation, Elam says: "I'm just going to be frank with you, I've been through countless interviews with the media. Indeed, none of the men I spoke to about these issues are anything but friendly, almost eager to persuade. I suspect that this is because I am, despite everything, a straight white man. To Elam, and to Max, I am a heretic, but I am not an infidel. I can still be saved. I see Max again a few nights after our first meeting. I relate some of my conversation with Elam, and Max is quick to echo his bafflement.

We're just these angry, hateful dudes, you know? Like, we can't get laid, we hate women, all of that. There's a temptation, brought on by the claustrophobia of extended conversation, a bit by empathy, and a bit by drink, to be taken in by the spirit of the argument.

Men face certain social difficulties idiosyncratic to our sex, and while they are not systemic in the way that women's issues are, nor half so severe, I find it easy to sympathize with Max's frustration.

In the bar, insulated as we are, when he begins talking about "just wanting human rights," I can only see his face, hear the exasperation in his voice, connect, instinctively, to that face and voice in part because they are well-mannered and in part because they are like my own.

In that moment I can, if I like, forget that these issues, legitimate enough on their face, are carried out from a place of one-upmanship, that their expressions, except in rare cases, are solely as debating points, hurled between invective and harassment and the oldest hack tropes about women's bodies and choices.

I can forget those things, if I like. I'm only a heretic. A presentation at last summer's International Conference on Men's Issues. We can't even see how far it's gone yet," he says. He is almost starry-eyed while saying it, his voice quieter, slightly higher. Sincerity isn't quite the word so much as it's performance. Max knows how to tone the romantic's innermost profundity. Perhaps he doesn't do it consciously, but he's stealing from the movies all the same.

At once ideological, forceful to the point of edgy outsider charm, and eminently reasonable, asking only for a consensus over what any fool can see. It isn't surprising that this seduces so many young men.

It's all terribly reasonable, until it isn't. This night corresponds with a particularly bad episode of police misconduct in Ferguson , and at some point we stop talking about the plight of men to watch a news live stream on my phone. Max's reaction is immediate: "This is crazy," he says a few times. I know people who say this isn't about race, but I don't get it. Like, this is obvious racism. Then they'd actually be oppressed. And I believe all of this and I come to you, a men's rights activist, and say I want to get involved and help.

Shouldn't I be concerned that a lot of people on your side don't seem to be doing legal or political work so much as sending death threats? No, Max says. The extreme behavior is mainstream in feminism these days, not in the men's rights movement. Elam claims much the same thing. Speaking about the men's rights conference he organized last summer, he explains, "Feminist activists have come out and pulled fire alarms, harassed attendees, interrupted and protested.

When we had a conference on men's issues in Detroit, there was a demonstration, pressure on the hotel to shut us down. We eventually had to change venues. How much of what is really going on are you paying attention to, sir? Max never asks me that question outright, but I can hear it, minus the "sir," beneath a lot of what he says. I ask about the harassment of feminists — of women in general, on the street, in their homes, by classmates and strangers.

How much is he paying attention to, for that matter? He shrugs it off. But it's not, like, organized, anyway. Guys catcalling don't have meetings to plan it. Years ago I was standing on a metro platform with a woman I knew. It was around 3 in the morning; we'd walked a mile to our train.

She says it's the first time she's gone that stretch of road without being catcalled. I ask why. The answer is obvious. She says most men won't do it if the woman looks like she's with her owner. Other headlines coincide with our time together.

Max blames both on religious extremism and says he can't understand why "the good Muslims" don't denounce terrorism. Extreme behavior is a sore spot for any movement, and nobody is more forgivable than one's own.

Max concedes that some MRAs and associated activists go too far. You can criticize these people, you can try to debate them, but threats are way out there. So does he denounce the violent elements on any of his forums?

He has tweeted unkind things to feminists. Does that encourage the ones who cross the line? It's super fringe. They're not going to stop just because I say so. The feminists. All of us. You know? Just ignore the crazy shit. Near the end of our call, Elam had this to say: "Of course there's anger out there. I've never seen a social movement, including women's liberation, the black civil rights movement, gay rights, that did not involve some anger.

So this whole idea that oh my god they're angry is rooted in the very misandry and the very bigotry that we're trying to address. Perhaps Elam is simply more self-aware than Max is, but it is difficult to hear them talk this way and maintain credulity.

It all sounds a little I'm maligned, and I'm oppressed, and society is too backward for the revolution I'm bringing , but I don't say so. I ask Max if he has a girlfriend. Yes, he says, that they've been seeing each other a few months. A couple of weeks go by. Their gender equality is useless, it has no real power, they just a piece of paper written and declare to be a law.

A law that is useless for loving one another, a law of selfishness and term used is rights. A change that you though will be forever, a change that you think is good. A change that will cost your country, your home, your birthplace will fall. First of all, we support feminism not because we think we are weak, but because there are many areas where women are not getting equal opportunity men.

We speak for the women who face denial of education and opportunities just because they are expected to just raise children and do household chores. Secondly, please understand that feminism is not some sort of anti-men program. We talk about equality between both the genders. So please take this myth out of your head that feminism is only about women empowerment. We are not going out on the streets and kill men.

I totally agree that women have come a long way now. They are proving themselves in every field. But, there are still areas where women are not getting equal opportunities. There are countries that still faces discrimination against women.

Talking about the traditional gender roles…… Then dude…….. Women raise children. Let them discover themselves.

One such girl in my class poked a hole in a condom once because she wanted to get pregnant by her boyfriend without him knowing. So, why is it okay when women do it, particularly women who claim politically to stand for feminism?

Not when prison rape jokes are considered amusing. Life is way too short. I think feminism has one area where womens views have completely been ignored. Most women who were in the movement I mentioned were college and elitist types that used to be into this movement are lucky to have it those of us that must clean toilets for a living kinda got screwed. I would have loved to stay at home with my son whos father ran out in him to start another family. But thanks to this movement 2 of the parents must work.

Men treat us much worse than ive EVER saw my grandmothers treated. And they were treated like ladies. We are treated like trash. For of years women did womanly things that were not considered less than…it was only after the renaissance women were put into this weaker state. Thank you for sharing about 4 reasons anti feminist women hate feminism and what theyre missing with us, these will be really helpful to many..

I love reading this blog; it talks so much about planning a great idea about it. Keep sharing such informative articles in future, will be appreciated. Thank you to the author for point 4. We sell our labour in a market and so much of our interaction is transactional. I have always thought that feminism is centred around getting women into this alienating workplace. It is great to see a feminist taking a different stance — that caring is just as important as wage-earning, and women should not feel that liberation requires career obsession.

Feminism should not require women to take on the traditional role of men. It should be up to everybody to choose the role that works for them. The writer above points out the problem.

A small vocal minority on social media claiming to be feminists are muddying the waters for everyone about what feminism actually is. Feminism supports the equal personhood of all people regardless of gender. But just like the Black Lives Matter movement reflects that while all lives matter not all lives are at equal risk, feminism recognizes that while recognition of the full personhood of people of all genders matters, the recognition of the full personhood of people of all genders is not at equal risk.

In one area in particular which is parenting family court involving visitation and custody issues. Courts automatically give women custody which is part of the problem and women have no problem with this yet complain about only being seen as mothers. From working in the courts if true equally really existed there would be a lot of women who would not be custodial parents; then women would not want equality.

Yes I am a minority woman. Toggle navigation. How often do we hear women scientists themselves say 'I'm not a feminist'? Many of us have walked those shoes ourselves. By Ginny Brown Published on May 14, I actually like cooking for my husband. These things make a difference. All of this makes it harder for men to get through the world. Posted in Voices. Tagged Under: season4.