Over the course of my life, feminism has been a very powerful force for good, winning many crucial battles against the systemic sexism that unjustly oppressed women and forced them into a narrow range of choices in life. And feminism has also been a destructive, negative and politicized force that has ended up repulsing millions of women and men.
As a former liberal arts professor who would have been run out of academia on a rail if any of my colleagues would have seen the previous sentence, I had to deal with the cognitive dissonance engendered by those two contradictory definitions during the early part of my career. But fortunately for me, professor Christina Hoff Sommers wrote a book called Who Stole Feminism?, in which she coined the terms “equity feminism” and “gender feminism.”
When I read that book, the clouds parted, and my uneasiness on the topic disappeared. (Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t start discussing these ideas in staff meetings. Because: survival instincts.) But I realized that I am an equity feminist. I love women in general – my mom, my sister, female friends and girlfriends back in the day and my wife now, as well as my amazing daughters who came along later – and I abhor misogyny in all its forms.
Equity feminism is the ideology of those who want equal rights, opportunities, and non-discrimination and all other legal protections for women. The best thing about gender feminism is that it wants all of those things too.
Unfortunately, it also adds a lot of politicized, bad stuff (IMHO) to those goals, and is much more focused on the latter rather than the former. Although I would quibble that more accurate labels for gender feminism would be “politicized” “leftist” or “academic” feminism, I’ll use Sommer’s terms here.
Gender feminism is the dominant form of feminism in academia and the legacy media, which is a shame. It is leftist in orientation, with an adversarial worldview that sees males as natural oppressors prone to misogyny, and females as oppressed victims whose prime directive is to fight the patriarchy in all its insidious forms.
There is of course a grain of truth in that exaggerated notion: the “battle of the sexes” and “love/hate relationships” are clichés for a reason. Men and women regularly find themselves at cross purposes with each other, as suggested by the myriad stories, myths, jokes and plays on that topic, in pretty much every culture. See the Taming of the Shrew, for example. (I highly recommend it, and I think this Shakespeare kid has got a big future!)
Although most gender feminists won’t explicitly say that males are morally inferior to (or worse than) women, the ideology implicitly holds that view. Women are naturally cooperative, empathetic and supportive, whereas men are naturally competitive, callous and aggressive. Much masculinity – possibly most? Maybe even all? – is toxic, but there’s no such thing as “toxic femininity.”
“Mansplaining” is condescending sexism, but “womanlecturing” has never happened, and is also perfectly justified when it constantly happens. 😊 And “manspreading” is always and everywhere an intentional affront to females, with NO biologically-related explanation.
[Insert PSA here: “Each year, millions of American men experience the trauma of ATCT. But Accidental Testicular Compression and/or Torsion is no laughing matter, and it should not be the subject of cruel mockery or offense. Your donation of as little as $5 per month – payable to Martinsimpsonwriting.com – can help us raise awareness, along with the funds needed to combat the bigotry coming from ATCT-deniers in the non-testicular community. For a donation of $10 or more, we’ll even send you an ATCT ribbon – never mind what shape or color it is! – that you can proudly wear, to show your solidarity with the cause.”]
Outside of academic and leftist circles, gender feminism has gotten a bad reputation, mostly because of its more hostile and radical (even if “mainstream”) advocates. For example, Catharine MacKinnon is an influential, Yale-educated, widely published senior law professor at Michigan, famous for such quotes as, “The arena of logic was made by men for men; it was expressly founded on the exclusion of what is not male…” and “Feminism, Socialism and Communism are one in [stet – she meant “and”] the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism.”
Simone de Beauvoir, author of the groundbreaking The Second Sex claimed that women shouldn’t be “authorized” to be homemakers. In a famous interview with Betty Friedan, she argued that if women are allowed the choice of staying home and raising kids, too many will do so. (Because ladies, your gender feminist overlords know better than you do how you should run your lives.)
Sidebar: It turns out gender feminism has infected some search engines and “fact checking” sites, too. Because as I was writing the previous paragraphs, I wanted to confirm my memory of de Beauvoir’s creepy authoritarian “women should not have choices” quote. So I did a quick search for, “Simone de Beauvoir quote from debate with Friedan ‘women can’t be allowed the choice to be homemakers because too many of them will take it.’”
The first result I got was “There is no verified record of de Beauvoir saying” my quote. Instead of giving the actual quote, the software gave me several paragraphs of an interpretation that softened de Beauvoir’s actual position, including these lines: “She emphasized women’s freedom…and that true liberation requires the ability to choose roles beyond traditional domesticity.” Which is really interesting, because that statement is much less objectionable.
Oh, and it’s also [begin Kinison filter – THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF WHAT DE BEAUVOIR ACTUALLY SAID! OH! OHHHH!!! – end Kinison filter], i.e. that women should NOT be allowed to choose traditional roles.
I then went to Duckduckgo.com – which I recommend, as I’ve found it to give more unbiased responses – where I found the actual quote: “No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will take that one.”
Which, you may notice, is almost exactly the prompt I asked for in the search engines that claim that it doesn’t exist. It’s a sad day in America when the one place you cannot confidently go to check some facts is a Fact Checker™.
Where was I? Oh yeah.
Because gender feminism is coded political and lefty, when a conflict arises between equity feminism and lefty politics, gender feminists almost always go with the politics over the equity. For example, gender feminists who proudly tout their support for leftist female politicians – Hillary, AOC, Pelosi et al – absolutely hate Margaret Thatcher, Marie Le Pen in France, the lesbian leader of AFD in Germany, etc. And they will ALWAYS vote for a male leftist over a female conservative. (You may have noticed the same thing re: race. Lefty black activists love them some Kamala and Ketanji, but Clarence Thomas and Tim Scott are “house-N-word Uncle Toms.”)
Because it’s less about supporting females or blacks than it is about supporting leftists – which is why Virginia lefties happily voted for snow-white Abigail Spanberger over very black Winsome Sears, for example.
I don’t even blame them for that, because I’m the same way in reverse. I’ll happily vote for a black lesbian conservative over a straight white male leftist every day of the week. But that’s because I’m an openly non-racist and non-sexist conservative, whereas the lefties who despise Thomas and Thatcher are pretending to be pro-black and pro-woman when they are actually politics-over-race-and-gender voters.
Me too. Except that I’m not a virtue-signaling hypocrite about it.
Among all the other flaws inherent in gender feminism, it checks two of the cultural boxes that I most hate: double standards, and the selective empathy that necessarily accompanies them. (Regular readers might be forgiven for thinking that I possibly harp about these too much, but I think it’s appropriate here.)
Since gender feminism is grounded in a Manichean dichotomy that can be summarized with only slight exaggeration as “women good/men bad,” it is naturally prone to double standards. That’s why gender feminists would condemn as offensively sexist a higher education system in which the student body was 60% male and only 40% female. But since the student body in American colleges today is around 60% female and 40% male, that is both hunky and dory.
It’s also why, if you live to be Nancy Pelosi’s age (i.e. 2178 years young) you will NEVER see a jury with 9 females on it argue to acquit a father who murdered his three children, no matter the circumstances involved.
By the way, on the “you can’t trust fact checkers” front, here is the statistic I just found on Educationdata.org when I was researching the college paragraph above. Under “college enrollment by sex,” the first item is – and I swear I am not making this up – “39.7% of enrolled undergraduate students are male; 54.5% are female.”
Um. That comes out to 94.2%. I guess the remaining 5.8% are chromosome-less?
Man, as soon as I reach my fund-raising goal for the scourge of ATCT, I am going to pivot and start raising awareness for ASFLO-CAG (Americans Suffering From Lack of Chromosomes and Genitalia).
As surely as night follows day, selective empathy shows up in the immediate wake of double standards. If men are oppressors and women oppressed, it’s only right that women receive all of our empathy, and men none. Meanwhile, in the real world, both genders have real problems. (And don’t remind me about the ASFLOCAG community, because I’m already on it!)
While women attempt suicide more often than men, men kill themselves way more frequently. Male biology means that men seriously physically harm women more than women harm men, but even there, domestic violence is way more evenly distributed between the sexes than I would ever have guessed. Men get much worse treatment in divorce courts than women, are more likely to be murdered, are more likely to be imprisoned, etc.
Many crises are gender coded. Women are pressured over their appearance, and thus are prone to more eating disorders and body anxiety, while men are pressured over their ability to earn and provide, and thus are more prone to job-loss-related (or mediocre-employment-related) depression and suicide, as well as strokes and other health declines in the wake of job loss. Social media exploits women’s generally higher sociability and anxiety, resulting in more female-on-female cyber bullying, and more unhealthy, narcissistic, competitive selfie-mania; online porn exploits men’s generally stronger sexual appetites, resulting in more solipsistic isolation, and creepy incel frustrations and alienation.
Gender feminism is a subset of identity politics, which reserves all empathy for the in-group, denying the vulnerabilities and the equal value of the out-group, thus consigning them to a kind of second-class citizenship.
So women are victims and deserving of help, but men aren’t. And black lives matter, but blue lives or white lives or Asian lives don’t. And rich people are mostly evil and always suspect…except for leftist billionaires like George Soros and Tom Steyer, and leftist millionaires like Bernie and Pelosi and Hassan Piker. And no one is above the law (especially conservatives), except millions of illegals, who should be completely exempt from that law and must be given amnesty.
It might be naïve of me, but I think that equity feminism now has widespread acceptance, as gender feminism is waning. Just like old-school anti-black racism is no longer welcome in mainstream or polite society – one use of the n-word cripples careers, unless the speaker is a black rapper or activist, who will drop a list of “house n-words” (i.e. blacks who have rejected anti-white racism) at a moment’s notice – old school misogyny is also verboten.
But the extremism and the misanthropy inherent in gender feminism have turned off the majority of all but the far left. I don’t think that young women who shy away from the label “feminist” are rejecting equity feminism. They just don’t see the average male as a predatory oppressor, and their natural enemy. They don’t believe that “trans women are women,” and they don’t want to be bullied about that. They don’t like being told that they shouldn’t be able to choose to have and raise kids, and they don’t like being told whom to vote for.
In fact Donald Trump, who probably says more things that are off-putting to women in general than any other modern politician, only lost married women to Hillary Clinton by 2 points in 2016, and he won a majority of married women’s votes in 2020 and 2024. Which has to drive gender feminists absolutely crazy!
I think it’s a cause for optimism that many people now share my position. They’re feminists, but not THAT kind of feminist.
Remember: September is ASFLO-CAG Awareness Month, so spread the word!
0-0-0
If you enjoyed this column, please share it, and click Subscribe (on the bottom of your phone screen, or the right side of your computer screen) to receive a notice when new columns post.
Martin Simpson 