feminism – Martin Simpson

I’m a Feminist…but not THAT Kind of Feminist (posted 9/18/26)

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.

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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!

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Our Lefties Are Loopy, but the Finns and Germans Have Lost It! (posted 7/14/25)

To start your week off on an upbeat note, I’ll recount how two girls under the age of 14 have applied the Simpson Gender Confirming Protocol™ to a surprised volunteer on the Fourth of July. The girls were swimming at the Little Platte Swim Beach in Missouri and waiting for the fireworks to start when a strange man swam up to them.

After asking them inappropriate questions, he allegedly groped them and tried to remove part of their swimming suits. They administered a SGCP™ maneuver to him (i.e. kicked him in the groin), then got out of the water and alerted their parents. The groper had apparently been identified by the SGCP™ as an intact male, because the police were able to catch him as he limped toward the parking lot a short time later.

The miscreant – one Carlos Climaco-Garcia – only had identification from Guatemala, and was found with someone with an ICE detainer. So the police reported that “the suspect’s citizenship status is unknown.”

Because of course they did. (I’m sure that his great-great-great-great abuelo and abuela came over on the Mayflower.)

Sure, technically this creep wasn’t claiming to be a female trapped in a male body when he underwent the procedure – the primary test subjects for which I’d invented the SGCP™. But the salutary effect the procedure had in this case is a testament to the incredible versatility of the SGCP™. Is there anything it can’t do?

It slices, it dices, it determines gender, it dissuades descendants of pilgrims who celebrate Independence Day by groping pre-teen girls.

It’s going to be tough to work that into my Nobel prize acceptance speech, but I accept the challenge.

Speaking of immigration-related foolishness, I’m beginning to suspect that Trump has planted a bunch of undercover agents in the leftist “peaceful riots” movement to discredit all leftist efforts to fight deportation. The only alternative is that that movement is littered with poor souls with Crockettian levels of intelligence. (Yes, I have turned Jasmine Crockett’s name into an adjective indicating barely detectable levels of brain activity.)

In every anti-ICE protest story, MSM and Democrat commenters describe ICE acting like the Gestapo, terrorizing blameless citizens, and arresting Gandhi-esque peaceful protestors for no reason at all.

And then video comes out, and it shows that the ICE officers were arresting a bunch of illegals and showing great restraint while violent mobs of protestors screamed and interfered and attacked them.

To pick just one example, we can look at the case of Jonathan Caravello. He is a Cal State Channel Islands (?) professor and a member of “an anti-racism, social justice union” which is now claiming that he was “kidnapped” for no reason by federal agents last Thursday, during a peaceful protest of an illegal raid by fascists.

Alternatively, he was “protesting” at the raid on the Glass House pot farm, where a lot of illegals were found. A US Attorney says that Caravello “was arrested for throwing a tear gas canister at law enforcement” and is charged with “assaulting, resisting or impeding certain officers or employees.”

Customs and Border Protection officials said that 10 of the illegals found there were juveniles, and 8 of those were unaccompanied minors. Oddly enough, the Glass House corporation has been “hit with multiple wage and labor law complaints in recent years,” and the president and co-founder has donated many thousands of dollars to Democrats in CA, including $10K to Ken-Doll Newsom.

Unexpectedly!

While we’ve all been told that you can’t judge a book by its cover, we’ve all also noticed that you can very often judge a book by its cover. And if you’ll look up Caravello’s faculty photo – the official one, that he posed for, knowing it would go on the university’s website! – you’ll see what looks like the cover of a book entitled, “Nightmare Journals: What if Charles Manson and A Crazy Karen from Libs of Tik-Tok Had a Baby?”

He’s got the wildly unbrushed long hair, the sad attempt at a beard. And the eyes. Always the crazy eyes. And again, this was an official photo! You just know that the photographer had to say something like, “Hey Jon, would you like to borrow a comb before I take this professional picture?”

And Caravello said, “No, no, I’m good. I’m going for the Jim Ignatowski from Taxi look.” And damned if he didn’t nail it!

He also has a pic on a CSU-associated Instagram page, a self-dramatizing shot of him posing with a fist upraised and a somber expression. (By the way, in that photo he’s got a SFPI™ [Simpson Face Punchability Index] rating of 93 out of 100.)

But before you conclude that the US of A is the most screwed up country when it comes to dealing with immigration, I’ve got to stop you right there. Because the nations of Finland and Germany exist, and they have been making complete fools of themselves on this subject.

I can’t say that I’ve thought a lot about the Finns during my life – around here, when you discuss the Finns, you’re talking about the Miami Dolphins – but what thoughts I’ve had have been positive. I like Scandinavian types, and I love the fact that plucky little Finland kicked some Soviet arse in the Winter War.

And I find a lot to like about Germany too, despite their…oh, let’s call it “uneven performance” in the 20^th century. But both Germany and Finland have in recent years decided that it would be a great idea to welcome a large group of Islamic immigrants into their countries. And things have not gone swimmingly.

Unexpectedly!

Finland’s population is one of the oldest in Europe, and whiter than Liz Warren. #wemustneverstopmockingher (The white part is irrelevant; I just couldn’t pass up a chance to mock the Albino Apache.) The majority (70%) of Islamic asylum seekers in Finland, on the other hand, are male and under 35, and they come from cultures who believe that foreign women who reveal more than their eyes are infidel harlots who are there for the taking.

Thus, a story in the liberal Helsinki Times that tried to downplay migrant crime, had to admit that “Certain nationalities…have been disproportionately represented in specific crime categories. Iraqi and Somali men, for example, appear more frequently as suspects in sexual and drug-related offenses.”

Odottamatta! (That’s Finnish for “Unexpectedly!”) (Research!)

So what have the Finns done to combat the (migrant) sex assault crisis? The town of Oulu spent 2.5 million euros to make the strangest video you’ve ever seen. As soon as you’re done reading this column, look it up – search for “Finland no-no video” – because I’m not sure I can do it justice with a verbal description.

But I’ll try.

Five Finns stand in what looks like a hallway – three women in front, and two men behind – and they gyrate and gesture to what sounds like a $4 synthesizer. They have grimly serious looks on their faces and never open their mouths, but a voice-over song repeats these lyrics, which I swear to you I am not making up: “Stop, don’t touch me there/This is my no-no square.”

It’s tough to pick which element of the video is more amateurish. The music is terrible, the lyrics are a joke, and I could “dance” as well as these people do. (And that comparison is not even damning with faint praise. It’s just damning!)

But the choreography. Good lord, the choreography! When they say, “Stop,” they hold a hand up to the camera, palm out. When they say, “Don’t touch me there,” they cross their arms in an “X.” When they say, “This is,” they point at their hips, and then they gesture vaguely at their thorax as they say, “my no-no square.” Then they hold both arms out to their sides, bent at the elbow with their forearms hanging down, and gyrate back at forth.

If you haven’t seen the great South Park’s parody of this very type of misguided liberal insanity, you have to find and watch the episode where the school has a mascot come to visit the children and sing a song to teach them about sexual harassment.

Search “Sexual Harassment Panda song,” and behold some satirists putting the Finns to shame. But trigger warning: that stupid song is an earworm, and you may find yourself humming it to yourself for several days.

I’ll try to paint the picture: A guy in a panda suit stands in class and does a minimalist jig, while singing in a voice muffled by a panda costume head, accompanied by what sounds like a middle-school quartet recording of a circus merry-go-round soundtrack.

The immortal lyrics:

“Who lives in the east ‘neath a willow tree? Sexual harassment… panda

Who explains sexual harassment to you and me? Sexual harassment… panda

Don’t say that! Don’t touch there!

Don’t be nasty says the silly bear.

He’s come to tell you what’s right and wrong. Sexual harassment… panda.”

The Finns could have saved themselves 2.5 million euros and had a better product if they’d just dubbed over those lyrics in Finnish. If they wanted to make it a little more relatable to their Finnish audience, they could have used AI to sub-in a native Finnish animal, producing the same video about the “Sexual Harassment… Reindeer.”

Germany has the same problem – an increasing rate of sexual crimes, and a rate of violent crimes committed by foreigners that is 400% higher than that of native Germans – but they’ve reacted even more stupidly than the Finns, if that is possible.

The Germans have created a series of cartoon “Don’t touch me there” educational posters depicting gropers at public swimming pools, an environment that has proved problematic for interactions between Islamic males and scantily clad German women and girls.

It’s sad enough that a country would even have to create a campaign to explain to people that sexual assault is bad. But it’s infuriating that the German posters actually cast the Germans as the villains and the foreign immigrants as the victims!

I’m not making that up. One poster shows two white boys shoving a brown girl into a pool. Another shows a white boy grabbing the butt of a brown girl as they’re both floating in the pool. A third shows a white guy in swim trunks going into a women’s locker room to peep at a brown woman in a towel.

And best of all, a fourth poster shows a large white woman with red hair floating in a pool behind a brown male, who is for some reason missing his lower leg! He’s got a peg leg there, presumably from being blown off in a peaceful suicide bombing or by an IED, I guess?

And the redhead is grabbing his butt with both hands!

So it’s not just male Germans who are vile, groping offenders. Female Europeans also cannot be trusted around Muslim males, who are apparently stereotypically known for being sexually preyed upon by infidel women! (Oh, won’t someone think of the Muslim males?! Where is their “Me Too” campaign?)

Bah! The slow-motion suicide of much of the European West should be a powerful warning to us. Our elite leftists are as reflexively dishonest as the Europeans – they refer to illegal immigrants as “immigrants” or “undocumented migrants;” they call legal arrests “kidnapping” or “disappearing innocent people;” they call men “women,” and gender-denying mutilations “gender-affirming treatment.”

But most Americans see through those lies, and reject them.

Not the Europeans. Throughout much of the EU, members of groups who disproportionately prey on European women are not only not chastised, they are cast as victims. And a public “education” campaign that is supposed to decrease sexual harassment cannot even honestly identify the source of the problem.

One bit of good news: after sustained backlash and public pressure, the idiotic German posters were removed and an apology issued. So maybe there’s hope for Europe yet.

Speaking of how we can often judge books by their covers, I found a picture of the German woman who created the public service posters in Germany, and she looks exactly as you would expect her to:

Large very white lady, wearing a childish black-and-green horizontally striped sweatshirt (and those stripes are NOT slimming). Round, large glasses, unhinged smile. And her dark hair is dyed bright green.

Because of course it is.

Rumors that she is the white lefty lady who would have had carnal knowledge of Charlie Manson and produced California kidnapping victim Professor Jonathan Caravello have not been confirmed.

Hamas delenda est!