F This (A Followup Post)

We are still talking about the concept of Feminism, and now onto the stage enters this phenomenon known as Anti-Feminism. It is A Thing That Requires Discussion.

This is the text of a recent FB comment I left on an article that references Tina Fey's recounting of Amy Poehler asserting herself in an SNL writer's meeting in her book Bossypants. My comment dealt with navigating to a related article and my resulting emotional despair:

I read the article and then followed one of the "related" links oh so helpfully provided by Facebook to something posted to HuffPo about an "anti-Feminism" Facebook group. I then, in a fit of masochism I can't begin to explain even to myself, read a bunch of posts by primarily very young white women who seem to think that Feminism is about *being forced* to work outside the home and not shaving your armpits. And who really like being objectified, according to many of their posts. I think the problem that is causing the disconnect is that many young women have stopped seeing how their positions of privilege can be applied to those who don't possess the same - it has become "this ideology doesn't apply directly to my life at present, so it is obviously obscure and irrelevant to *everyone else* (or, why should I even care about other people?)."

The "Anti-Feminism" movement isn't new. It has always lingered in the periphery of the Feminist movement, and those that even predate Feminism as a modern, defined thing with a label attached, attempting to subvert and undermine it, stripping it of its legitimacy by coloring it as a fringe movement rife with militant man-haters. But at its heart, the thing that is calling itself Anti-Feminism is really the ideology that negatively impacts men. Look at it this way. Anti-Feminism doesn't give men much credit in the areas of self control when it talks about how women dress and behave, and the repercussions of a culture that reinforces the idea that women are responsible for guarding themselves by hiding themselves. It also reduces women to caricatures of antiquated tropes of the "feminine ideal" based on rose-colored-glasses levels of nostalgia. It serves no purpose other than to reinforce an unequal power structure that some women oddly seem to believe actually empowers and benefits them through this process of dilution and minimization. That they really are delicate, precious beings who need a man's protection or support and that this is in their own best interests. In that way, men have to become the primary caregivers for these helpless women. It gives men authority over women, but that authority is a shackle as well. If men and women are bound to each other in a self-perpetuating cycle of need, a type of co-dependence, neither is truly fully liberated.

Now can someone seriously explain this resurgence in prurient modesty as a feminine virtue and the creation of hope chests? What's next, the dowry system as incentive for future husbands to take our worthless girl children as wives? Great...I'm worth a couple chickens and a broken down old goat. Such a bargain!

Maybe I really should've gone to college, and gotten my MRS degree, huh?