Not “modern feminism,” not “third wave feminism,” feminism must be totally eradicated.
Feminism teaches:
Women ought to think of themselves as part of a collective with all other women.
Women ought to act towards the interest of women as a whole.
The belief that women were treated unfairly for most of history, and for that reason it’s not very important to be fair to men.
Feminine traits are bad and embarrassing.
Feminism is a demographic special interest movement. Feminism is to women as Nazism is to Germans and Black Nationalism is to black people. You might not think that feminism has done as much damage as Nazism, but the core principle is the same. It is a movement which seeks exclusive rights and privileges for a certain demographic identity group, and while such movements always claim they are pro themselves, not anti-others1, the attitude that your driving purpose is to advance the interests of your own group invariably slides into supremacism. Feminists believe that the alleged history of oppression of women means that they have no obligation to treat men fairly. Ruth Bader Ginsburg put it succinctly. When asked when there would be enough women on the Supreme Court, Ginsburg replied “When there are nine.”
1. Feminists Hate Femininity
1.1 Perception of femininity as low-status
Feminists think that femininity is bad and low-status. This is why feminists think that housework somehow doesn’t count as real work - or at least that housework is less important than office work. This is why there is an enormous effort to get girls into STEM, but no similar effort to launch girls into careers in nursing.
There is a feminist slogan “Chase Dreams, Not Boys” which seems to suggest that finding true love and having a family are not legitimate dreams.
Any person whose “dream” is to work in a corporate C-suite has something wrong with them. The entrepreneurs we should admire, like Henry Ford, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk dreamed of building amazing things, and their high-level corporate positions were a side effect of their efforts to build things. Wanting the corporate position for its own sake is sick and poisonous. The corporate climber cowers before HR and slavishly conforms their opinions to the popular mainstream party line. They lose their unique identity in their quest for status. Furthermore, corporate culture is soulless and bad. Nobody should live in such a way that their LinkedIn profile is a huge part of their life. It is not a good way to live and nobody should aspire to it.
1.2 Feminism in movies
The feminist lead characters in Marvel movies are never authentically womanly. They do not contribute to the story by excelling at female traits, rather they demonstrate their value by their ability to excel at male traits. The implication is that being feminine is lame.
When female characters in movies have any female traits at all, it is always an immature trait more befitting a little girl than an adult. This isn’t just in the movies. When feminist politician Kamala Harris described her reaction to Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, she did not talk about affairs of state or her concerns for the future of the nation. She said that she ate an entire family size bag of Doritos by herself and didn’t share any with her husband. This sort of story is funny to liberals because liberals are generally ambivalent about maturity. Feminist movie characters sometimes have a few female traits, but they are always the vices of a little girl. There seems to be no room in feminism or in popular movies for a mature, adult woman.
1.3 The Campaign of brainwashing
The intense campaign of feminist brainwashing with which every girl is bombarded through school, movies, TV, and news media is not just a campaign for unjust treatment of men and rancorous relations between individual men and individual women. It is also a campaign to wipe all the beautiful and wonderful parts of femininity off the face of the Earth2.
All the wonderful things about girls and women: their ability to build warm communities, their familiarity with the particular rather than the abstract, their sensitivity, their sentimentality towards small things, their conscientiousness, their sense of propriety - are to feminists objects of derision. Feminist parents teach their daughters to suppress their natural feminine instincts; they teach that it is wrong to be emotionally sensitive and that girls ought to be “confident” instead. They teach that crassness, selfishness and immaturity are virtues.
Feminists cultivate an attitude that has sometimes been called “imitating men”, but really imitates only the worst kind of man. Career-obsessed, promiscuous, vulgar, hyperfocused on status and obsequious in the face of Power. Most of men’s worst vices and none of men’s virtues.
1.4 Holding our own side accountable
Unfortunately there’s also a strain of American conservatism that looks down on some feminine hobbies. One sometimes sees the idea that putting a lot of effort into makeup and nails is shallow. I think it has something to do with the Christian and WASP aversion to vanity. Certainly, a focus on your looks can be taken too far, but any hobby can be taken too far. There’s nothing inherently vapid about makeup.
2. “Gender Equality” is a horrible thing
Equality means crushing the individuality out of each person. That’s why measures to promote “gender equality” always aim to make women less feminine and men less masculine. The goal of “gender equality” is to turn everyone into gray, unisex, undifferentiated cogs in the machine.
We support equal rights. Every person should have the right to conduct their personal life as they see fit, and to enter into any voluntary arrangement with other people. But equal rights do not produce equal outcomes and they do not even produce equal opportunity. If a close-knit construction crew does not want to hire a woman because they want to have male camaraderie in their workplace, they should only hire men, and they should do so openly and without embarrassment. If a lady’s book club does not want to admit male members, they should say so openly and without embarrassment. We should completely dismantle the idea that people are somehow owed access to other people’s spaces.
3. We are not Men’s Rights Activists
Rights movements are almost always malicious. They are special interest movements which seek to extort resources from the rest of society. If we were to use the term “men's rights activism” that would make it sound like there was such a thing as legitimate women's rights activism.
Some men like to bring up “men’s issues”: like suicide rates, low-status job rates, and other areas in which men do poorly. Feminists sometimes think that men who bring up these issues don’t really care about “men’s issues” and are just pushing back against feminist rhetoric - and they’re right. Men who bring up higher rates of male suicide aren’t actually deeply concerned about suicide, they are pointing out that the feminist narrative is fundamentally bigoted, irrational and untrue. The thing which disturbs them is the bigotry, irrationality and falsehood of the belief system that they feel ever-present around them, not the suicide rates.
We oppose feminism because we stand for fairness.
4. Smash the mythos of feminism - Women were never oppressed
The Suffragettes committed bombings and arson. They bombed the home of David Lloyd George and burned down homes and churches.
The Suffragette and Prohibition activist Carrie Nation traveled around America smashing the windows of saloons and smashing their liquor bottles. She justified her actions by calling herself “a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn't like.” If you swap the language about Jesus for “social justice”, this kind of incident could have happened yesterday. The narcissism, drama queen-ness, thirst for attention and lack of regard for others which characterize modern feminists are not new. They have been the defining features of the feminist movement all along.
The Suffragettes were bad. It’s understandable that people thought it was unfair when men could vote and women couldn’t, but this problem arose only because we made the mistake of having voting in the first place. Democracy is a failed system. Neither men nor women should be allowed to vote.
The historical division of labor in monogamous societies was that the men toiled in the fields while the women attended to the hearth and cared for young children. Of course if the roles were reversed, feminists would still say that women’s roles amounted to slavery. If women had to go out and work in the fields while the men stayed in the home, feminists would point to this as a paradigmatic case of oppression.
5. Reject the Language of “Patriarchy”
Conservative Christians sometimes say they are pro-patriarchy. This is a big mistake. It implicitly grants the feminist ideological frame - that society is run by men and that women are subordinate.
5.1 Contra conservative Christians, rule by men is NOT an inevitable part of human nature
In reality, American society today is run by women. There is state mandated discrimination against men in government hiring and government contracting. In the federal quota system, billions of dollars of federal contracts are set aside for women-owned businesses. Men-owned businesses are explicitly forbidden from applying. California attempted to implement sex quotas for corporate board positions. Disparate impact law de facto requires discrimination against men in private sector hiring.
Every company has a political commissar department called HR (staffed almost entirely by women) which rigidly enforces female-coded social norms. Politicians of both parties routinely promise to advance the interests of women as women. Even ruby-red Republicans recast the transgenderism in sports issue as an issue of women’s rights.
If “patriarchy” means anything at all, it just means men and women doing the things that they naturally like to do. There is nothing wrong with people’s natural preferences. The word “patriarchy” is not even helpful in describing Islamic countries. If you’re trying to communicate that men in some country treat women badly, then say that men in that country treat women badly.
5.2 Freedom of choice
Conservative Christian defenses of patriarchy don’t make it sound very fun for women. The Christians buy into the premise that women actually want to have girlboss office jobs (?) but that men must restrain women’s chaotic feminine nature and push women onto the sensible path of being wives and mothers, which will redound to the benefit of society. This way of framing the issue is unappealing to women, and it also misunderstands human nature. Most women naturally want to have families and participate in a local community. When people are free to choose, they choose natural gender roles, not artificial feminist ones.
The reasons why so many women today seek full time employment are 1) economic hardship and 2) a propaganda machine that would have been the envy of the Soviets and Goebbels. Through TV, movies, popular music, schools and Universities, feminists teach girls that their natural instincts are bad and wrong.
As anti-feminists, we are not trying to control women, rather we want to help women and men break out of the influence of brainwashing and choose to do what they innately and truly want.
When conservative Christians defend “patriarchy” they make it sound like women’s innate nature is bad.
Contra the feminists who despise feminine traits, we should be clear that there is nothing wrong with natural feminine instincts. We should be clear that being a woman is just as good as being a man.
6. Why is it not enough to reject “Third Wave” feminism?
Some people want to say that the historical feminist movement was good, but that equality was achieved in the 1970s and so feminism is no longer necessary. There are three problems with this approach.
6.1 It asserts that we currently have equality, when in fact men today are not treated fairly
The first problem is that it leaves no room to talk about the ways in which men are treated unfairly in modern society. If one adamantly insists that “equality has already been achieved” then one doesn’t have the opportunity to address the issues on which men actually do not have equal rights with women, such as family court and affirmative action.
6.2 It affirms the feminist narrative
The second problem is that if it really were the case that women were oppressed for thousands of years, and only had equal rights for a few decades, then it would make sense to wonder if any holdover effects of the alleged millennia-long oppression are still present today. The self-described feminist Regan-Arntz Gray writes:
I see myself as primarily committed to anti-sexism. But I think it would be dishonest to reject my feminist identity… because women’s equality seems to me precarious. I see a lot of misogyny and a lot of misandry given the spaces I interact in online. But the truth is that the misogynistic content is more threatening.
Misogynists can write about why we need to repeal women’s right to vote as if it’s a live issue because it actually is way closer to being a live issue than the reverse. Women were “granted” the right to vote, and implicit in that “granting” is the threat that it could be taken away. People act like it’s absurd to worry about such things, to worry that women’s rights could be rolled back, as if a few decades of legal equality eclipses millenia of subjugation. But it’s not random that women’s freedom was restricted and not the other way around. Men and women aren’t equally at risk of a future in which they’re liberties are restricted on the basis of sex. And feminists know this just as well as male-supremacists do. (emphasis added)
Regan’s argument would have some merit if direct physical violence were the only form of oppression. But in the modern world oppression is more often conducted by the velvet glove of the state than by direct person to person violence. And a large percentage of women have supported the establishment of laws and norms that are unjust to men.
As mentioned above, the government explicitly discriminates against men. Welfare programs are designed to steal billions of dollars from men and give it to women. Women can and do have women-only spaces, but male-only spaces are generally illegal. Family court is a mockery of justice.
6.3 It’s not true
The third and most fundamental problem is that it’s not true. The Suffragettes were not good people and their cause was not just. Second wave feminists were bigoted female supremacists just like third wave feminists. We should not lie about these past movements just for the sake of building alliances and political expediency. We should stand for the truth.
The Road Forward
Feminist ideology is deeply entrenched. It might seem an impossible task to completely change the attitudes of all of society on such a fundamental issue. But we don’t have to change all of society at once.
We just need one subculture to reject feminism. One subculture is enough for us to live good lives within, and it is a base from which to launch efforts to eradicate feminism from the wider culture. Right now the subculture to target is American Conservatives. The conservative commentariat has gotten way more radical in the last 10 years. The internet is producing a cultural shakeup and people are hungry for something new.
It will be fairly easy to get conservatives to start being anti-feminists. Contrary to popular belief among liberals, conservatives are not already there. It is unheard of in normie conservative circles to condemn the Suffragettes and it’s very rare in normie conservative circles even to state that women should generally be housewives. But liberals are correct when they intuitively perceive that conservatives are not as deeply committed to modern gender relations as liberals are. While normie conservatives sincerely believe that the Suffragettes and women’s entry into out-of-home work were good things, those are shallow beliefs for conservatives. Conservatives will change their minds about modern gender relations when we invoke their deeper beliefs in fairness, equal rights, and the importance of liberty rather than democracy.
We need to make feminism anathema. In the subculture which we will foster, feminism will not be seen as a valid political position with which we happen to disagree, it needs to be unacceptable. We need to teach the awful history of the feminist movement, including Carrie Nation and the bombing of Lloyd George’s house. We need to explicitly talk about the narcissism and immaturity which motivated the leading feminist figures. Every child needs to learn about the stomach-churning injustice of family court. We will know that we have won when we have a place of our own where being a feminist is as taboo as being a Ku Klux Klansman.
Feminism is a demographic special interest movement. “Men’s Rights Activism” is a sad parody of feminism which also seeks to be a demographic special interest movement.
Anti-feminism stands for fairness, justice and the truth.
Even the Nazis claimed they weren’t anti-other-race, they were pro-German-race.
“National Socialist racialism was not against other races, it was for its own race. It aimed at defending and improving its own race, and wished that all other races would do the same for themselves.” – Leon Degrelle
The substacker Defending Feminism has argued that artificial wombs could be used to replace pregnancy and that biotech could be used to eliminate biological strength differences between men and women. It seems like this line of reasoning would also condone using embryo selection or genetic engineering to eradicate feminine mental traits.
"It’s understandable that people thought it was unfair when men could vote and women couldn’t, but this problem arose only because we made the mistake of having voting in the first place. Democracy is a failed system. Neither men nor women should be allowed to vote."
Haha. I have to admit, I didn't see that last line coming. Dream on, my friend. I'm sure the anti-democracy advocacy will catch on any day now.
Going a bit contrarian here, but I was involved in a feminist scene for a while (more so out of an interest in women's literature than anything) and I actually agree with a lot of what is written here. I do think feminism was a reaction to some very real issues -- though perhaps not the ones claimed by many feminists. And that some good things were achieved by the movement (e.g. support services for abused women, greater independence allowing women to leave bad marriages). I wish that the branch of "maternal feminism" that once existed had been the one to take off. That it the "girl-boss" version did instead I think is indicative of the toxicity and narcissism that was always inherent in the movement. While I agree the movement now does more harm than good to women and men, I think the biggest victims are children -- to paraphrase Erica Komisar, the whole women's rights thing threw children's rights under the bus.
I have a daughter and a second to be born any day now. When I was pregnant with my first child, many other women asked me if I was going to raise her in a "gender-neutral" way, i.e. push her toward masculine interests. I found this disturbing and said I'd let her like what she naturally likes. (Turns out she likes pretty dresses, the colour pink, singing, dancing, and animals. She really only plays with stuff like trucks etc when she's hanging out with one of her male friends). I also heard stories of women who were devastated that their daughters were feminine, which is tragic for the kids. As you write, there's nothing wrong with (healthy) femininity.
When I found out I was pregnant, one of the first things I said to my husband was that I wanted to be a STAH mom. He has a good job and is a good man and has been extremely supportive (while also being supportive of my writing, continued freelancing, and Substack). I was pushed toward masculine careers like engineering as a kid because I was good at math ... but I was still a girl, and I pursued female-typical interests instead. I sincerely like being barefoot and cooking, tweaking recipes to perfect them. It's insane to me that I was fed propaganda trying to convince me that this life is somehow a waste of my mind (what about my heart?). With a good man, being a housewife is the furthest thing from being "oppressed." In so many ways, it's a privilege and a gift, especially with modern technology making household chores so much easier. The majority of young mothers I know either stay at home, wish to stay at home, or go down to part time work (but many cannot for, as you note, financial reasons). When I say things like "feminism lied to us", far more women agree with me than don't.
I found it interesting that you note that many of the "feminine" traits that ARE treated as socially acceptable / romanticized in Hollywood are actually childish traits ... I recently published an essay which discusses this as well -- the essay argues (among a lot of other things, it's a long read) that hyper-literate feminism is a "left-brained" movement, with a dysfunction right hemisphere (one could also think of it as an "autistic" or "schizophrenic" movement ... I touch on the neuroscience), and that it tilts toward androgyny, misandry, and misogyny -- and seems to romanticize neoteny. The latter point is something I still need to do a lot more research on, admittedly, but I do hope to return to the topic and am keen for feedback. If you're interested, the link is below. Cheers.
https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/the-androgynous-mind