How Modern Feminist Theory Fails Everyone
an essay by Daphne
Cisgender, heteronormative, imperialistic, male-dominated hierarchy of Roman Christian lineage has infected the modern world and its institutions with sexism that damages all people.
In a broad sense, this lineage of empire can be understood as a foundational force that carries weight in regard to the following:
It does not respect the intuitive, emotional, and spiritual, overemphasizing the logical and practical.
It leads people toward principles of domination and competition over cooperative inclusion and mutual success.
It is racist, sexist, queerphobic, ageist, ableist, and skewed towards the monopolization of power through hereditary lines of gatekept financial abundance.
It’s about ownership.
Modern feminist theory, and more so its propagating forces of cisgender women, is focused most wholly on female-facing bigotries. The dehumanization and lack of earnest equal opportunity for women seem the coal of its purposes. Yet it creates ideologues who go so far as to never compromise and use socio-cultural gaslighting tactics to demonize ideals that simply call attention to its gray areas, irrational conceptualizations, and culturally harmful reversals of how it views misogyny. Modern feminists even go so far as to create nonquitter shutdowns of conversation based on the proposed laughability of ideals sometimes professed by openly transgressive people towards its conceptualizations, including the very notion of debating with rationally minded people of the right or left who stand misaligned with its ideations.
Men are left out of feminist leadership roles despite their asynchronous relationship to misogyny and the need for male-to-male peer mentorship.
The term “misandry” itself is deemed laughable by many, while misandry is the word that describes contemptuous discrimination against men.
Other terms overused by right-wing agitators have been demonized outright, including “thought policing,” in a social contrivance of greatest lived-in irony. Even the word “females” is seen as bigoted because of the times it was used callously against women.
Much has been included in these ideas which liberal thought circles deem laughable and incongruent to good taste. There is nothing clearer than the way Men’s Rights Activism has been applied with a blanket understanding of that very same laughability based on its most ignorant offenders of overstepping into rote misogyny. Except, perhaps, the young, disaffected men who are labeled as incels for being unable to find romantic partners, being lumped into a class of genuine misogynistic terrorists who self-identify with that term. I beseech you to consider that these young men are women’s younger brothers and sons.
There is no reason they should be taught their lifetime is taking place under the rule of a perpetual reparation under the banner of “female is the future,” and they need to live a life of complete deference to women in social settings because of the horrors of our history. Not when those horrors were not their doing and mirrored an inverted analogue of the suffering of male-bodied people throughout history.
You see, we are all human beings. Modern liberal feminism dehumanizes males, belittles their suffering, and teaches that it is correct.
Modern feminism cannot even define femininity.
Let’s Have a Straw Man Session
Me - What is femininity?
Straw Modern Feminist - I think that is for every woman to define for herself.
Me - What is a woman?
Straw Modern Feminist - The term woman is a self-identified container. It is a social construction of ideas which are all mixed up. We can’t really define it, and people will inform you if they fit within it.
(Note: This is the ideology which uses the term Assigned Female/Male at Birth to explain away all of sex and gender as a construct)
Me - Would you respect a cisgender presenting AMAB who was a body building, belching, outspoken republican, truck driving, beard wearer using Axe Body Spray who chose to self-identify as a woman earnestly—for their own truly believed ideals—and defined femininity as everything they expressed as?
Straw Modern Feminist - That would never happen. That person would not be acting in good faith.
Me - Why is that belief and presentation not possible?
This is where my straw man walks away because I’m just a mean, pedantic, misogynistic republican or something like that. Why? Because their following answer would blatantly contradict their explanation of the non-definable nature of womanhood.
Here is where the keys lie, from my perspective; as a trans woman who respects the idea of Native Two Spirit culture, which defines trans folks as our teachers of gender for walking beyond boundaries. (assuming the trans people in question are respectably well-adjusted)
• Every perspective that is made in good faith matters
• Sex and gender should be separated into born sex and gender expression. Eliminating the whole word salad and cognitive dissonance fuck factory which is the AFAB and AMAB language. AGAB would remain valid. Male and Female: Born Sex; Man and Woman: Gender Identity
• Femininity and masculinity need to be divorced from sex and gender at all, definitionally, and refer specifically to spiritual conceptions of personhood that exist in all people but relate to our gender identity social constructs
• Men’s suffering under Roman rule needs to be taken seriously as an even weight
One More Straw Man Session
Me - Why do you believe misogyny is worse than misandry in how it perpetrates upon women and men respectively?
Straw Modern Feminist - It’s about the history of male patriarchy holding more space for the empowered existence of men, and women being trapped into survivors of its horror no matter how they react, one way or another.
Me - Women and men exist who reject gender roles, feel they are entirely unserved by them, and believe them false expectations which either force them towards compliance or living in spite. What do you think about the men and women who propose themselves to enjoy the roles of our foundational cisgender hierarchy of patriarchal dominance? How do you see those which are purportedly untraumatized by the systems of this foundational hierarchy?
Straw Modern Feminist - Those women have been subjugated. Still, I believe if you spoke with them in safe spaces, you would find them confessing great amounts of trauma survived and wishes for a better way to live free of misogyny.
Me - Do you believe there is any cis man pretending to love this hierarchy which wouldn’t also reveal some powerful level of traumatization from our societies patriarchal leaning and its consequences?
Straw Modern Feminist - I don’t know. Regardless, I think this patriarchal groundwork of society serves men much better than women.
This is where we need to talk.
There isn’t one person who doesn’t suffer mercilessly; if not superficially, then interiorly, at least in silence, for the way things are, and you cannot convince me otherwise.
Modern feminism predisposes women as innate victims and men as the innate victimizers of a culture itself, which notably retains a foundational patriarchal slant in the business, science, and political landscapes.
While there are certainly more rich and successful men than women, and an imbalance of power in that respect, I beg you to consider — what does human success look like beyond the lens of patriarchy?
Is a truly successful lifetime about emotional, intellectual, spiritual, familial, social, and personal facing honor? Or is it about making money and earning privilege in a system built from significantly patriarchal foundations which stain us ever forward?
