Here are six ways that feminism insults, belittles and demeans the women it is supposedly supporting and encouraging.
1. Yes Means Yes
The new Yes Means Yes affirmative consent law in California achieves a few astonishing feats: it turns normal, consensual sex into rape and it strips the accused of due process by requiring confirmation of consent at all stages of sexual encounters.
(...) I have yet to have a feminist give me a clear answer to one simple question: “I have never, ever once requested permission from a man to have sex with him—am I a rapist?” What underlies the whole affirmative consent program is the idea that women are emotionally crippled, fearful, insecure and immature weaklings who cannot possibly make their thoughts and desires clearly known to adult partners.
2. Trigger Warnings
Trigger warnings are the most ridiculous, patronizing and infantilizing creations ever to come out of feminism. (...) Exactly how pathetic do you have to be to confront words describing situations you might find upsetting and require authorial permission to stop reading? Know what I hate? Reading about adults who kill infants. It makes me feel sick to my stomach, so when I see headlines like “Mother Microwaves Baby,” I don’t read them.
(...) But feminists adore trigger warnings because it reinforces the idea that women are ruled by their emotions, are incapable of recovering from trauma and are just generally hysterical nitwits unprepared to confront adulthood and reality.
3. Domestic Violence and the Duluth Model
One of the most frustrating things about watching feminists deny that women can be and are violent in their personal relationships is that feminism is in essence denying that women are fully human. In order to perpetuate the narrative that men are violent monsters who must be controlled by women lest we all end up chained in basements, feminists deny the full humanity of men and women.
(...) The Duluth Model—which emphasizes that no matter what injuries a woman has inflicted on a man, the man should be considered the perpetrator—also reinforces the idea that women are equivalent to children who must not be held responsible for their actions because they lack the maturity and rationality to understand what they are doing.
4. Affirmative Action for STEM Programs
Women are encouraged to ignore what their natural needs and wants are, enter careers that they are only nominally qualified to be in and guess what happens? The vast majority of women with STEM qualifications are not working in the field at all. Money and time wasted, all because feminism thinks women should be forced into ideologically defined roles (Engineer! Astrophysicist! Chemist!) that meet their fantasies of “equality.” Feminism insults women by telling them that their natural interests are wrong and they are too stupid to know what’s good for them.
5. Microaggressions
If trigger warnings are the dumbest thing to come out of feminism, microaggressions are a close second. The very definition of pettiness, microaggressions are teeny-tiny irritations that women are encouraged to nurture into long-standing grudges until they spill out into hysteria and mania. Did you once go for coffee with a guy and it led to sex? Any time a guy asks you for coffee, it automatically means he wants to fuck you! Were you one time slightly uncomfortable in an elevator with a guy you sort of knew but not really? Men on elevators will attack you! Did a guy on an elevator ask you for coffee? Sexual harassment! Alert the presses! Asking women for coffee is a way to remind them that elevators are perfect places to rape!
What feminists refer to as microaggressions, the rest of us sane adults call life.
(...) The concept of microaggressions encourages women to think that every single thing in the world is, or should be, about them. It encourages breathless levels of narcissism, solipsism and just plain delusion. You know who else thinks that everything in the world is about them? Two-year-olds.
6. Street Harassment
When researchers at Loyola University asked men and women whom they preferred to make the first move, 83% of men and a whopping 93% of women preferred that men do the asking. Any man who reasonably expects to initiate a relationship with a woman had better be prepared to suck it up and put himself out there to risk rejection, and potentially very humiliating rejection.
Is it really any wonder that some men, particularly those of lower socioeconomic standing, might mitigate against rejection by injecting some levity or a degree of inappropriateness into their approach? Poor men, and poor men of color in particular, are of the least social value to women. Women still want rich guys. Big surprise. And women want men to approach them. Now take a white woman and have her stomp through economically deprived New York neighborhoods with a scowl on her face, acting like she owns the damn place, and what do you think happens? She gets a few comments. And then promptly begins to shriek about street harassment.
(...)The broader culture treats women as adult humans capable of making choices and dealing with the consequences of those choices, just as we expect all men to do. Feminism is the social movement pushing to treat women as large children who need protection from their own actions.
The earliest waves of feminism fought long and hard to give women all the rights and some of the responsibilities of adulthood. I would like to see women achieve full equality by accepting all the same responsibilities that men do. The only thing standing in the way of equality that I can see is feminism. And we don’t need a movement that undermines women’s agency and adulthood.
We don’t need feminism.