What Feminism Needs

Feminism has had any number of different directions, and some have been better than others. I am writing now about what feminism needs in order to actually work as advertised.

The first thing that feminism needs is discipline. You cannot just say the first insult that pops into your mind. You cannot be hateful to your potential allies. You cannot be influencing your followers to be so mean-spirited that all men and most women will be against you. Feminism needs to figure out what works in politics. And then it needs to apply it in a disciplined and effective manner that is demanded of all people who have any kind of power.

Another thing that feminism needs is realism. While there are any number of Lesbian and unattached women, most women will want to be with men and most women will want to have children. While the women who don't want that should have the right not to have that, they will never be the majority of women. If feminism seeks to actually benefit the majority of women, it will focus on making family life a better experience for the women. Otherwise the family women come under control of patriarchial entities such as the Church and the Mosque, and while the feminists are out there in Manhattan or San Francisco shagging each other the majority of women live under conditions of domestic violence and produce more patriarchial reactionaries.

Feminism also needs perspective. Very few people will buy into political correctness completely; and that someone disagrees with a part of feminist ideology does not make him a misogynist. There are enough real misogynists in the world that it is irresponsible to call the next person a misogynist just because he does not agree with you about everything. A misogynist is someone who hates women as such, not someone who does not completely buy into political correctness. And once a woman has dealt with real misogynists from a close distance, she will be much less likely to throw around such terms left and right without looking at whom she is dealing with.

This leads to another thing that feminism needs, and that is: Discernment. It is seeing whom they are dealing with and treating them accordingly. Someone is not made an enemy of women by being male or by not being politically correct. Taliban is a real enemy; Michael Murphy is a real enemy; I am not a real enemy. And the sooner feminism understands such things, the less time and energy it will be spending attacking its potential allies and the sooner it will be able to make real progress against real misogynists and real wrongdoers.

It also pays to recognize more of political reality. Hatred - especially blind, misdirected, stupid hatred - does not fly. Instead it hurts a whole bunch of people who do not deserve it, and it makes oneself look like a piece of trash. Most of the nastiness of the feminists come on the shoulders of liberal men who have had the least to do with oppression and subjugation of women and who for the most part wish women well. If you want to fight real wrongdoers, go after the Taliban, go after the Fatherhood Foundation, stop bothering liberal men in the academia and in the cities. They are not the ones at fault.

I would not be saying this if I did not care. I want women's lives to improve; but they will not be improved if feminism continues with the kinds of grievous errors of which I've been speaking. The hateful elements in feminism seriously hurt the women's cause. And if they are really there for valuable purposes, rather than simply to vent their spleen, then they will take this into consideration and adjust their tactics and their behavior to better serve the cause of which they claim to be a part and to do less to sabotage it.