Saturday, April 5, 2014

Early Feminism and Modern Misandry

Isn't feminism just another form of collectivist prejudice in the same sense that racism is? Racists make sweeping generalizations about the allegedly malevolent intentions of people of different skin color, but don't the feminists do the same thing?

Collectively, the white people have done a lot of harm to the blacks by colonizing their territories. You could argue that collectively, men have done the same to women over millennia.

Yet in both cases, the harmful actions were not caused by any malevolent intentions. The Europeans were merely pursuing their self-interest by seeking to expand their empires and patriarchs did likewise by seeking to extend their personal power.

In a lot of cases, both groups displayed callousness, myopia and even unimaginable ignorance. However, the vilification is simply unwarranted because a very small percentage of members of those groups were guided by intentions of inflicting harm upon those who suffered as a result of their actions.

I think that this is the fundamental problem with feminism itself: it unduly ascribes sinister motives to actors of history who scarcely even considered the true outcomes of their actions.

The pioneers of feminist thought such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen endeavored to address the structural causes of gender inequity. They focused on institutional, economic, sociocultural and political aspects of the problem. By and large, the severest of problems of patriarchy have been resolved. That is evident in light of the fact that a significant percentage of prestigious professional positions are held by women.

In the absence of the grossest of gender inequality problems, the modern feminists are left with little choice but to engage in crass misandry that is quite similar to the practices of racists. Both groups focus not on the fundamental causes of injustice, but on the imagined nefarious motives of groups that they regard as their adversaries.

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