I decided to write this today, because I've had the subject of feminism brought to my attention, and I felt there was a lot about the subject that people just didn't understand, but which deserved to be looked at.
A lot of people today wave feminism as though it were a flag of inherent virtue. It's a widely-held philosophy today. However, the truth is that feminism has some pretty nasty problems, and it probably won't take long to explain what they are.
-----
1. Feminism, as a philosophy, does not focus on how to do the right thing.
This is a big one. The sad truth is that many of today's most popular philosophies are purely negative in nature. They will eagerly point out where people went wrong, but not how people should go right again.
In the case of feminism, this is -very- pronounced, since nothing seems to unite all feminists except opposition to "oppression of women," which is just an expression of what some people have done wrong if taken literally.
In practical terms, what this means is that feminism cannot inspire unity in its adherents, because there's nothing to unite around. Some claim that men are inferior, some don't. Some claim that women should be allowed to dress however they want, and some don't. Some are political activists, and some aren't. Some claim that abortion is a woman's right, and others, correctly, think this view is absurd and immoral.
The whole point of even -having- a philosophy is to learn the truth. What kind of truth can you learn when your philosophy divides people so much? This is problem number 1.
-----
2. Feminist philosophy recognizes no difference between "equality" and "sameness."
Another big one. If pressed, certain feminists will answer the first problem by saying "we believe in equality between women and men," even though many don't believe this. The problem is that being "equal" to men is not the same thing as being "the same" as men.
Roman Catholicism recognizes the fundamental equality between women and men; that each is a child of God, and therefore, each has equal value and equal human rights. Therefore, those who say they're feminists because they believe that women are people too should consider switching to a Roman Catholic view of philosophy.
However, what Catholicism does -not- teach is that women and men are the same. They are -not- the same. In fact, no person is the same as any other person, and therefore, while certain basic rights should be extended to women, as to men, it is ludicrous to suggest that each person should have the same opportunities. We simply don't, and that's how the world goes.
Professor Stephen Hawking will never have the opportunity to be a bodybuilder. My neice will never have the opportunity to lift a thousand pounds. I will never have the opportunity to walk on the moon. My grandfather will never have the opportunity to be young again (at least in this life.) Yet, these are opportunities which -others- have, no matter how badly we might wish we had them. We're not all the same. Life's tough.
Yet, feminism recognizes no difference between being of -equal worth,- and being -the same in terms of the opportunities that one is afforded by society.- These things -are not- the same, and therefore, feminist philosophy has a large problem here. If you blame every difference in society between women and men on inequality, you simply have a wrong understanding of what it means to be equal.
-----
3. Many feminists and feminist leaders give feminism a bad name.
This comes, really, in two flavors. First is the fact that many; perhaps most leaders in the feminist movement are radicals with little or no respect for men. Many have even been quoted as saying that men are inferior, worthless or pathetic by comparison to women, and -most- support some kind of intrinsic evil, such as the scourges of abortion and/or contraception, or the absurdity of women priests.
The second flavor is that many feminists are kind of ignorant with regards to how governments are supposed to work. By this I mean that they often expect -the government- to provide the missing opportunities discussed at the end of problem 2, and this is not the job of the government. The government receives its funding from the people as a whole; the -commonwealth,- and is supposed to use it to promote -the common good.- Not the interests of pushy lobbying groups representing minorities.
"But women aren't a minority!" You might say. Yes, that's certainly true, but self-professed feminists are. Make of that what you will. In either case, many feminists and feminist leaders give the movement a bad name.
-----
4. Feminism has a tunnel-vision understanding of women's history.
Though feminists will claim to support "women's history month," they will almost always use it to discuss poor, downtrodden women who were oppressed by rich, white guys sometime within the last hundred years, and rebelled. Almost never will you hear about Cleopatra, or Joan of Arc, or Eleanor of Aquitaine. There's a reason for this, which I'll explain in a moment.
The true history of women in the world is that in most nations up to the time of Jesus, women generally were given very little respect. Barbaric nations bought and sold women like cattle, and this was especially obvious in societies that claimed to respect law, such as ancient Rome, where the wife of the governer wasn't permitted to even voice an opinion on matters of state, and Jerusalem, where the testimony of women was considered inadequate in court. Pretty much the only way that a woman could attain power was by being born royalty in the absence of a brother.
Suddenly, along comes Christianity, and for the first time, people are told that all men and women have equal worth in the eyes of God, and that they should strive to treat each other as equals. Everything changed after that.
Some people still chose to treat women as inferiors, but all of a sudden, it wasn't the status quo anymore. You could treat your wife with respect and honor, and single women could work for money without being looked down upon for it. There were still certain jobs that women were badly-suited for, thanks to their weaker upper bodies, but by no means was it normal to see them as inferior and useless.
This continued until rather recently. European (and thus American) upper classes began to have less worries about what Rome would think after the dawn of protestantism, and therefore, less fear of imposing their will on the lower classes. They developed stuffy standards of etiquette by which certain types of activities and work just "weren't womanly," and this same reasoning was applied to industrialized work and voting over the course of the last century; the use of a popular custom to try to justify excluding women from things for which some of them were perfeclty-qualified, just because they were women.
Whether you agree that women should work in industrial manufacturing, or whether you agree that they should vote, the fact was that there was tremendous opposition to these things in the popular mindset, until about the dawn of the second world war.
At that time, men were going off to war, and women were needed to comprise the manufacturing workforce. Rosie the Riveter was created to encourage women to do hard, industrial work, manufacturing supplies and ammunition for the troops, yet, there was no real controversy about it. Men were doing something, and women were doing something. Everyone was working to help their nation as best they could, and when the war ended, so did that.
Women were laid off or had their pay docked by the thousands after the ending of the war, and while some women agreed to take the lower-paying jobs, or to return home and find other work, many realized that this was a serious problem, which needed a serious solution. This is where feminism began.
The feminist movement, as it exists today, started out as an attempt to correct this discrimination against women in the workforce, and soon, women were working in office jobs and doing industrial work again. It was a success. It had worked. However, the leaders in the feminist movement, for whatever reason, decided not to take advantage of this success, and instead keep doing what they'd been doing for a while; telling people that women were being oppressed, and that they were needed to correct it.
While there are still cases of women being oppressed, the story told by modern feminists is very different from the one you would have heard in the late 50s. The modern feminist remembers the ancient societies, which treated women like dirt, and the American 1950s, in which women were universally expected to be homemakers and nothing else, then just skips over the rest of human history. They skip over all of Christianity, and the progress that it brought to the relationship between men and women in those times among the poor, since after all, the poor didn't write it down. They skip over the more recent successes in women's suffrage and office jobs, because that would mean that the feminist lobbyist should be laid off, and you know they're not going to do that to themselves.
This is done for a reason. By concealing the role of Catholicism in improving the rights of women throughout the last two millenia, the feminist makes feminism look like the only bright spot in thousands of years of misogyny; the only ones who ever let women do any work in all of human history. However, that's a rather transparent lie. They're not the only bright spot, and they -certainly- are not the only ones who ever let women work. Women have always worked; especially poor women, who are always in the majority. They just didn't do the same work as men (plowing, smithing, masonry,) because it was too strenuous or backbreaking. This only became a matter of discrimination during the industrial revolution, when work of that sort became less common, and all of this is a -very- recent development.
Feminism simply doesn't speak the truth about history, and this is a big problem with it.
-----
5. Modern feminism, as a cause, is mere sex-based factiousness.
I hesitate to say this, because I don't like to make broad, sweeping statements, but if you take a look at any major feminist institution, and then at what they support, you will find that they will support anything that seems like a cause for "helping women," and oppose anything that seems like it might increase the rights of men. They also oppose things which really -do- help women, like forbidding them to have abortions.
The reason I use the qualifier "as a cause," is that many people who consider themselves feminists are not associated with or involved in any of these organisations, nor have they even heard of many of them. Still, these groups do exist, and they have a lot of support from feminists. There's simply no excuse for that. In just a few decades, these groups have turned a legitimate request for fair jobs and a greater role in society, into a gaggle of lobbying groups, united by radical sexism.
I can appreciate the need of feminists to support the rights of women. In fact, I agree with it. However, you can't support rights by encouraging evil.
-----
6. Feminists base their understanding of morality on what they believe the world owes women.
This is the last big problem, but in my view, the biggest one. Our understanding of morality needs to be based on the value of the human person, and their human rights. Those rights are life, bodily integrity, certain social and cultural liberties, personal respect, freedom to seek truth, freedom of moral speech, choice in terms of what one does for a living (within ethical guidelines,) truthful information, gaining an education from our society, opportunity for some form of great responsibility for the gifted, correct worship of God, free discussion of religion, choice between raising a family or remaining celibate, the right to educate one's own children, to work on our own initiative, in the kinds of work we're suited for, in exchange for a just wage, the right to private property, to meet with each other, form groups, set non-immoral goals for those groups, and criteria under which people can join, the right to live in our own country, or move to another, and finally, to participate in the wellbeing of our society. Those are -all- the rights that human beings have, and they are the same for women as they are for men.
Feminism in the modern age, however, doesn't accept any concrete list of rights as valid, because that would involve setting a goal which, when it was reached, would necessitate the dissolving of the feminist movement. Instead, they make up new "rights" out of wholecloth whenever a woman wants something, with the most bitter examples being abortion and women clergy. No woman has any right to kill another human being because she feels like it, or to tell God what role he should let her play in his plan.
As long as feminism fails to grasp a proper basis for its moral claims, it will be, and become, increasingly immoral, and that's the problem with feminism.
