Social movements have the habit of empowering the people who least deserve it and coming down hardest on the people who likewise deserve it the least. When Soviet Union fell, it was not the real wrongdoers - the corrupt bureaucrats, the KGB, the military hazers - that suffered the most, but the honest, dedicated, hard-working people such as teachers, doctors and scientists. So it comes as no surprise that the gender movements of the last two decades - both feminism and reaction against feminism - have likewise had similar results.
When political correctness swept America, I, as someone who'd lived in both Soviet Union and America, knew how thoroughly it was misconstrued. It maliciously attacked the very kind of men that are inclined to be sympathetic toward women - the men in liberal cities, liberal academia, feminism-influenced cultures - while doing nothing to change the conservative cultures that are not sympathetic toward women's empowerment and believe in violence and oppression toward women as a natural way of life. It went after love, after beauty, after romance, after sexuality, claiming these things ridiculously to be the reason for the oppression of women, while doing nothing to address the real reasons for oppression of women - belief that women are evil, belief that the man must be head of the family, belief that controlling the woman is masculinity, and belief that women are to blame for the world's suffering or are "whores" or are "sluts" or are "bitches" or are exploiters of men. They hyper-focused on minor issues while completely ignoring real issues. Meanwhile they did nothing whatsoever to address real wrongs facing women - the biggest of these wrongs having always been, and remaining, real brutality and real oppression in which a vast chunk of married women around the world and in the West live daily; a real wrong that they either ignored or for which they blamed its victims.
The feminism of 1990s resulted in many men losing their jobs, being robbed of their income, or put away in prison, for things as minor as telling a female co-worker that she was pretty, or for accusations that were proven untrue. These men were very rarely real, severe abusers. The real abusers, and especially the cultures that encourage real abuses - the Muslims, the ghetto, the Nascar Republicans, the Christian Right - were not touched by political correctness. They sneered at it, despised it, proclaimed it ungodly or sissie or foolish, and then, in the following decade, took over and went, not after excesses of political correctness, but after women's rights as such.
In the decade of Bush, Bin Laden, and Eminem, women came under a huge assault from all directions. And just as in case of 1990s feminism, it did not touch the real wrongdoers such as the world's Catherine McKinnons, many of whom remained in quite comfortable state in liberal cities or in the academia, but rather came down hardest on the shoulders of good women - women who liked men enough to be with men and were by the men they'd elected horribly punished for having made the error of liking them. Here are just some of the more publicized cases.
"Candice," a nurse in Kansas, lost her child to a man who'd broken her head so badly that she needed forty stitches. The brute who did this got full custody. "Leslie," an engineer in Indiana, not only lost her children to her severely violent ex-husband, but is now living out of a truck because her whole income has been garnished to pay child support to that man. "Jeanne", a resident of Richmond, Virginia, who has been exposing abuses in family courts after having left a severely brutal relationship, has had many attempts on her life and has a price on her head. In Australia, a man named Arthur Freeman threw his four-year-old daughter off Melbourne's West Gate Bridge to her death, even though the child's mother had repeatedly warned the court of his violence. On average, four women and nine children in America die daily as a result of domestic violence. In allied countries such as Australia, it is worse.
The name of decency - and secrecy of family courts - has been used as an accomplice to these and many other related wrongdoings. Both have been used to silence the truth and to allow real, severe crimes against women and children to go on unchecked. Meanwhile the name of family has likewise been used to maintain these real, severe abuses, and to severely persecute any woman or child who tries to get away from them or to expose the truth of what actually happens behind closed doors. So now, a fake disorder known as Parental Alienation Syndrome is used against women in case either woman or the child reports sexual abuse or real brutality, and the children are given fully into the custody of the rapist or the batterer.
Because of the abuses of the political correctness, there has been a strong constituency not only against political correctness, but against women's rights and against women period. Men's movement - also known as father's rights movement - led by such figures as Glenn Sacks in Canada, Ash Patil and Barry Williams in Australia, and the Fatherhood Foundation in the United States - has been spreading misogyny and deception, making such claims as that 90% of mothers are abusive; that all women are liars; and that patriarchial nuclear family is the only viable way to raise children, nevermind that the most successful man in the world - the President of United States - was raised by a single mother. In Australia, a group known as the Black Shirts has been picketing and assaulting women who've left severely violent husbands. There have been women collaborating with these men as well - mostly older women who are not subject to family violence but want the freedom for their sons to inflict it on their daughters-in-law. All of this, in the name of family.
The correct response to these people is that a man who cares about his family would not be beating his wife or raping his children, and that their use of the name of family to justify such behavior is abuse of the name of family. A man who genuinely is a good father will not need such movements on his side, and a man who does is not a good father. So calling such groups men's rights or fathers' rights is a misnomer. The correct name for the above is wife beaters' movement, in much the same way as correct name for 1990s political correctness is not women's empowerment but harpies' empowerment - both, at the expense of women and men who are neither of the preceding.
As the excesses and wrongs of 1990s feminism became obvious to more people, feminism lost much of its say in society. But that is not the right course to take either. Clearly there is a need to confront violence against and oppression of women, and there is very much a need now for a better construed feminism. A feminism that recognizes the woman's right to be feminine and to be with a man, while supporting women against men who would abuse them and their children, is the feminism that is sorely needed right now and for as long as there are men in the world who think that violence against women is their God-given right or their masculine entitlement. And it is time that both women and men of goodwill work together to create and to apply this real, positive feminism that actually has a possibility of improving life for the women of the world.