I'm 44 now, but as early as around age 18, I've been bewildered at what is called 'feminism' today.
I always had a great admiration for women working to bring 'equality of opportunity' since the suffragette days, and currently. Women have made amazing strides in our culture. I feel that further work needs done, but, this is something that men should be as much involved with as women at this point.
And yet, the modern women claiming that feminist label always seemed irrational, paranoid, hyperbolic, often with a pre-set overwhelming paradigm that everything logical, or traditional, was 'masculine', and everything male was 'bad'. As if that wasn't bad enough, a huge anti-democracy socialism politic always seemed to wend through it.
Particularly in some colleges, there is a clear quasi- religious/political cult indoctrination; an insidious fifth-column style pervasive brainwashing of college youth and a women's-mafia-without-the-guns-style "pressure and leverage" put on anybody else who does not buy their victimization-as-salvation obsession. I've heard about this from others for years but hadn't believed it could be that bad. After reading ths book I'd say apparently in some schools it is.
The 'infiltration' from people for whom this is an entire worldview and evangelistic drive, into positions of administration and authority, creates a fairly massive lock on money (funding) and power to rewrite history, revise education, and repress any view that is not thier party line (and do real damage to any person not just not agreeing, but not actively supporting them). It's pretty successful, enough to make scientology's most uncharming points of infamy look downright wimpy and unaccomplished by comparison.
As a woman with a daughter who will be entering college in a few years, I think I want to find the school rated 'worst for women' by modern feminism standards and make sure she attends that one. That way nobody will be indoctrinating her with socialism and whiney-ism in the name of intro english classes. Nobody will be rationalizing why women 'think differently', or considering traditional subjects like math and science just part of that "logical" way of thinking that is so bad and much of how da-man keeps us women down. That's precisely the anti-female crap that DID keep women down for centuries, doing needlework instead of science for the most part because women weren't supposed to worry their little heads about things like real education.
Modern feminism comes off not like an informed opinion, but a pathology out of control.
It seems to me a relatively small group of women have managed to pass off to the media their own opinion as somehow representative of women. Unless a perspective represents nuns and housewives and catholic moms and retired 50-years-married women, just as much as it represents unmarried mothers and lesbians and businesswomen, it does not represent enough women in our culture to deserve any voice 'on behalf of' anybody.
And why it isn't obvious that making men 'bad' is just as retarded as making women 'bad' is beyond me. The species is designed for these two to survive together, and anything that injustly treats either of them is not healthy. There are several points in our culture in which men are in a position of real injustice too and these things on both sides should be corrected.
Every time I hear or read some feminist speech/writing, I'm seized with the urge to yell, "Would you grow up!" It's like a bunch of little rich kids with a huge sense of entitlement and nothing but griping about how nothing is fair to them and it's always someone else's fault. A woman doesn't give any inspiration to being considered an equal when she acts irrational and manipulative. People like that are poison to any society, from a family to a church group to a whole culture.
It's amazing any man who survives one of the heavily feminist-controlled colleges doesn't come out of it vastly more against women than he could possibly have gone in. If these people had been the representatives of 'women's rights' historically we would still be fighting for the right to vote and own property. Thank goodness the original suffragettes were nothing like the modern day claimants.
Sommers does in this book what needed doing: taking several of the most 'famous statistics' allegedly proving just how horrifying females have it, and makes it clear that they are pretty much the same unfactual hyperbole that most of the so-called 'feminist' movement is infamous for. (Note the tags suggested for this book here on amazon, like 'delusional' and 'hateful'. Nothing that might lead to or relate to facts mind you; just name calling, which is about the mental age level we're dealing with from that side. As if it's perfectly ok for them to relegate half the population (men) to everything-bad imaginable, even without their doing anything at all; but should anyone merely disagree with a woman in that group, they're "hateful.")
The author differentiates between what she calls "Equity Feminism" -- that is apparently what I've always innately been in line with -- and "Gender Feminism" -- which is the man-bashing women-as-whiney-victims socialist and manipulative BS that "stole feminism" as their own label in the media... forever making it something more people sneer at and don't take seriously, than the term of respect the women of prior days earned for it.
She also listed several other women who are "Equity" feminists who I will make a point to learn more about. Ironically I have read a lot more from the 'gender feminist' side and I actually thought this represented feminism, and all my life wanted nothing to do with it as a result. (I don't think these women need more equality, I think they need more therapy.) I'm a bit cheered up to think there may be more women who are not irrational, hysterical and anti-men, but who recognize what's come before for women and what still needs to come and are interested in the subject. I guess I thought the dark side was all there was. I kinda wish I'd been aware of this equity vs. gender difference a long time ago.
I don't know enough about the 'equity' side of this equation (I mean officially) to know how the book rates in that regard, but I found it very interesting and somewhat educational, and leading to doorways of further exploration.
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Top reviews from other countries
Amazon Kunde
Sehr interessantes Buch und eine ungewohnte Perspektive
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Ação Afirmativa ao redor do mundo
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A Not-Quite Timeless Classic Which Is Still Relevant Today
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