How Feminism is Like an Iceberg

All movements become corrupted over time and western feminism is no exception.

When you run out of real problems to solve you need fake ones to keep the dough rolling in.

Recently I found myself in a heated exchange over feminism with a male college student. My position has been for decades that all ideologies and movements, including feminism, become corrupted over time, so I explained that I was not a fan of it. Being a clever fellow, he then set the trap he had learned from his feminist friends: “Tell me, do you believe in the equality of women and men?” I hate to admit it, but I stepped right into the minefield he had set despite knowing where he was trying to lead me. (Put it down to morbid curiosity.) “Yes, I do believe in it,” I responded. He practically jumped out of his chair, “Then you are a feminist because that’s the dictionary definition! It’s someone who believes in the equality of the sexes!” I then attempted to explain that one can believe in the concept of equality without being a supporter of Western Feminism which has become an utterly toxic ideology.

My position simply did not compute for him as it was a straightforward binary choice in his eyes. Yes = feminist; No = misogynist.

This is my segue into a layman’s look at the problems with modern feminism and how it’s become like an iceberg doing far more social harm than good in the West.

Here’s a bit of relevant context about me before we get into it as I know how some respond to even the slightest criticism of the movement. Feminism first appeared on my radar in the second half of the 1970s after I had completed high school. My first eight years of education had taken place at a small parochial school where the top two or three academic slots every year were taken by girls. Moreover, during those years all of the teachers were nuns or civilian women. My first doctor as an adult was a woman. To sum up my worldview, I had grown up in awe of females. To me, the only difference between the sexes was that one never hit a female.

As already noted, it was in the late 1970s when I first began hearing about the Women’s Liberation Movement as it was called back then. Initially, I was very supportive of its declared intentions to balance out male influence with a female version. This is because I viewed the male paradigm of life as overly-competitive in many cases. However, I was also baffled by its accusations that men didn’t see women as their equals. This one did not compute for me.

My gradual disillusionment with feminism began in the early1980s for the following reasons.

Always the victim:

If a man catches a glimpse of a feminist undressing, she is the victim of a Peeping Tom. If a feminist catches a glimpse of a man undressing, she is the victim of a Flasher.

Feminists Use the Top 10% of Men as Their Benchmark

Since the small minority of men at the top of society are doing comparatively well it must mean that all men are better off than all women, or so goes feminist logic. The fact that many men earn a living doing dirty or dangerous work is ignored by feminists. You will never hear them demanding more female garbage collectors, plumbers, or linesmen.

This is a strong foundation for the women as eternal victims narrative on which feminism rests.

Next time a feminist complains about not having the same rights as a man, ask them to identify just one and then watch for the deer in the headlights expression.

Women Can Have it All

Feminism promised women that they could have it all. They could be a CEO, a mother, and an astronaut. As a male, I had always been told that I could not have it all. Instead, I would have to prioritize and make tough choices. For example, if I wanted a family, I would have to devote myself to being a good breadwinner. A mere mortal had neither the time nor the energy to have it all. This dishonest promise led to great disappointment among both feminists and women.

No Father Needed

Sometime around 1980, feminists began to insist that children did not need fathers. Therefore, a liberated woman could raise a family without one. Indeed she and the kids would all be better off without any man in the picture. Tragically, it took a couple of decades for society to realize that not only boys needed fathers, but girls as well. (Research has shown that fatherless girls tend to hit puberty sooner than normal which leads to other problems as they pursue male approval from strangers.)

You can see the current progression of this lie in the attempts to eliminate occasions such as Father’s Day for the dubious reason that “not all kids have fathers.” Well, not all kids have mothers, so why not remove any mention of them as well and just use the non-binary label “adult caretaker.”

Super Bowl Holocaust

In the early 1980s, feminist groups began pushing the Big Lie that on Super Bowl Sunday men whose teams had lost would take their anger out on their wives. The result was tens of thousands of battered women ending up in the emergency ward. The media gave this story national coverage. The only problem was that it was a malicious lie. It never happened. As a man, I could not even imagine such a thing happening.

After a few years, when feminists realized the holocaust story was losing its newsworthiness, they added that even men whose teams had won would often celebrate by beating up their spouses. Eventually, people started calling the feminists out on this egregious lie, but they just kept at it year after year. Finally, towards the end of the decade doctors, nurses, and EMT staff began explaining that it simply wasn’t true.  They had to do this for four or five years running before the feminists were finally shamed into dropping their misandrist lie.

The current iteration of this big lie is that women live in a “rape culture.” FBI statistics prove this is just more hyperbolic anti-male propaganda.

The victimhood never stops as it’s a powerful recruiting tactic for feminism.

No Mercy

In all my decades of observation of feminism, I have never heard a single feminist express any empathy for men or boys. Here is just one example of many that led me to this conclusion. Back in the 1990s, a 60 Minutes-style news program did a story about a special primary school opened in Chicago by black parents for their sons who weren’t doing well in the public school system. The school was going to employ male teachers who understood that boys learn differently from girls and employ optimal teaching methods. Feminists upon hearing about the school immediately threatened a lawsuit if it didn’t accept girls. The school was quickly shut down because there was no budget for defending against lawfare.

This was a real jaw-dropper.

The Destruction of Trust

Feminism’s war on men has destroyed both side’s trust in the opposite sex. Sadly, non-feminist women are often collateral damage. One day during my first year in college, I met with a philosophy professor of mine in his office. At one point he brought up the fact that in a meeting with a female student, he would have left the door wide open to protect himself against accusations of inappropriate behavior. Other self-defense tactics used by male faculty included only meeting with female students in a public place such as the campus cafeteria or a courtyard.

It was around 2000 that I began hearing, to my shock, from young men who had a personal policy of avoiding all social contact with female co-workers.

A few years ago a well-intentioned woman on Linkedin published a post asking why the supply of male mentors for females had dried up. She was horrified to hear what the men had to say. They all gave her the same basic explanation: a fear of being falsely accused of inappropriate behavior. I felt bad for her since she had the integrity to eventually agree that it was a legitimate concern for men.

Biology as a Social Construct

Another feminist fantasy from the 1980s was that the differences in size, speed, and strength between men and women were all purely social constructs. They rejected biology and boasted that by the 1990s women would be playing against men in the NFL, NHL, MLB, and NBA.

Oddly enough, by the 1990s when most sane people had rejected this ludicrous claim, the push to put women into combat positions started.

Take a moment to let that one sink in. All sports are segregated by criteria such as sex, age, skill level, weight class, and so on so as to minimize injury and make the playing fields as level as possible for all competitors. All sports are segregated by sex.

The older feminists behind this push apparently did not understand that in war there are no rules other than kill or be killed. Or perhaps they chose to ignore it for the sake of pushing their agenda?

A few years ago, the USMC conducted a months-long performance test where three teams competed: an all-male team, a 50/50 mixed team, and an all-female one. You can guess which one outperformed the others by a wide margin and which one came in dead last.

During the 1980s and 90s, we witnessed the same battles over women joining firefighting departments. As with the military, physical standards had to be gradually and grudgingly lowered for females to qualify and safety took a back seat to equality yet again.

Now there is talk of the U.S. Army further reducing physical standards for women. It’s just one more step in shifting the military’s focus from defense of the nation to being a self-esteem building program for people who really aren’t suited for combat.

Descent Into Parody

At the turn of the century, feminism began a steep dive into self-parody and absurdity. That’s when demands by college kids began for safe spaces, crying rooms, trigger warnings on course materials, and of course, Cancel Culture became the chief defense against the horror of hearing opposing viewpoints. Add to that the phony outrage over male transgressions such as mansplaining and manspreading.

Now that women have all the same rights as men, feminism resorts to fabricating trivial complaints about oppression. When these complaints can’t be tied to anything concrete, the focus is shifted to the world of fantasy: the patriarchy, male privilege, systemic sexism, glass ceilings, microaggressions, and the completely absurd obsession with pronouns. None of these can be detected by any measuring instruments known to science.

Feminists teach women that they spend their lives in an ether of sexism. Stop and ask yourself what a mindset like this will do to a person’s ability to survive.

Nothing is Ever Enough

Now that women have achieved equality of opportunity, feminists have switched their demands to equality of outcome. This new goal proves that they are oblivious to the fact that those men and women who make it to the top of corporations, institutions, and various competitive fields such as sports, are a tiny minority of humanity. Most of us simply lack the smarts, talent, self-discipline, ambition, confidence, and long-term willingness to make sacrifices necessary to reach the very top.

There was a research paper published recently that showed that feminists who demand to be treated as equals feel verbally abused if a man speaks to them in the exact same manner he would with another male. The takeaway was that men need to soften their tone when communicating with women. How’s that for feminist equality?

A few years ago the dean of computing science at Waterloo University (Ottawa) announced his goal to achieve a 50/50 gender split in his student body. The fact that women comprised only about 30% of computing science applicants didn’t phase him a bit. Or perhaps he was willing to accept the inevitable drop in student quality in exchange for appearing woke?

The Destruction of Male Spaces

One of the most blatant demonstrations of feminist animus has been its war on male spaces. At some point, most likely in the early 1980s, someone at the top made the decision that all male spaces had to be either taken over by women or destroyed. One of the first attacks was on the NFL. Somehow, it became imperative that women reporters be allowed into team locker rooms post-game where naked men walk around. If anyone had dared suggest a quid pro quo that female leagues allow male reporters in changing rooms, they would have been treated as an imbecile.

In 2004, the president of the National Organization of Women (“NOW) announced her big goal. It was to be a massive PR assault on arguably the most exclusive men’s golf club in the nation, if not the world. This club attracted the top 1% of the top 1% of men. Initially, there was some resistance from management but feminism won the battle as it always does. Nothing trumps the victim narrative.

If readers can name one remaining institution or organization that serves men exclusively, please name it in the comments. (In 2024 we even lost the Boy Scouts of America. )

The Feminist Iceberg

Most if not all male vs female issues could be smoothed out if feminists and men were able to engage in good-faith dialogue. Sadly, we are well past that point thanks to feminism’s dishonest conflation of its ideology with all women.

If a divorced man holds some resentment towards his ex-wife, he’s automatically a hater of all women. If a man is critical of a specific female politician he is automatically a hater of all women. If a man fails to be an enthusiastic and unquestioning supporter of all-things feminist, he is automatically a hater of all women.

While Feminists purport to teach women how to be equals to men in reality the real message is that they are always the victims.

To sum up, Western feminism has long passed its “best before date,” but it still manages to recruit new members with a combination of unrealistic expectations of having it all and gaslighting them into believing they are the universe’s perpetual victims.

"Men's greatest weakness is their façade of strength, and women's greatest strength is their façade of weakness." ― Warren Farrell

In my experience, feminist empowerment creates a brittle strength that shatters at the first sign of opposition or even just polite disagreement. It is indeed like an iceberg in that the visible 5% is mostly empty sloganeering while the submerged 95% consists of an endless cycle of three phases: a fragile sense of superiority (over men), which leads to a sense of entitlement, and finally a sense victimhood when the world doesn’t deliver what feminism promised.

It’s too bad the young male feminist mentioned above will most likely never read this. If he did, he would understand that women and the feminist ideology are two very different things. I support women, not Western feminism. Sadly, I know many feminists who do the reverse.

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My Preferred Adjectives for Today Are

Fabulous, wise, frank, and mischievous