Feminism Is Misogynist

I know those who identify as feminist won’t like what I have to say in this post. Let me say upfront, I do not have any one person in mind, and I am not trying to stir up needless controversy.

Rather, I’ve thought for some time that feminism is more harmful to women than is often recognized. Sure, there have also been any number of changes that seem desirable. I’m glad I can vote, for example. I’m glad I worked as a sports reporter. I’m glad I had the opportunity to coach.

Nevertheless, the way feminism has taken shape, I think it is currently doing harm to women.

As a reminder, when I say “feminism” I am using the Oxford American Dictionary definition of the term: “the advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men.” What could possibly be wrong or “reflecting a hatred of women” in such a definition?

I object to the “equality to men,” aspect of feminism that actually blurs the distinction between genders. Generally, then, according to feminist thought, a woman is only properly valuable if she is equal to a man. She has no intrinsic societal, political, or economic worth simply because she is a woman.

Rather, she is valuable if she cracks the glass ceiling, if she plays baseball instead of softball, if she’s the first referee in a professional male sport, if she “gets” to join the combat unit of the military.

In other words, woman are no longer valued if they are “just” stay-at-home moms. Or if they take a “typically female” role in the workforce such as secretary or nurse or primary school teacher. People’s lives are on the line, deals can be made or broken, and the future of the next generation is in the hands of those in these professions, but they are not valued as “equal to men” in the same way that being the CEO of the company is, or running the hospital or becoming a candidate for President.

At the same time, feminists often support women who are part of the “adult film industry,” or, to put it bluntly, engage in sex on camera as part of the porn industry. According to this feminist line of reasoning, women who are marginalized as good for one thing only are exercising their right to choose how they use their own body. They aren’t being exploited and don’t need protection from pimps and abusers.

I think that thinking is hateful. Women who sell their body, through prostitution or pornography, are being used. They are not considered as whole persons. What happens when the wrinkles come? Who cares for them then?

When a woman becomes nothing but a sex object, she is not being valued as a woman. She is being taken advantage of because she’s a woman. A movement that supposedly has the interests of women at heart, should step up and advocate for them. But no. Feminism doesn’t view women as worthy of protection.

Oddly enough, though womanhood is disdained by feminism, the transgender advocates prove that there is something in women that sets us apart, makes us unique. Why else would a man like Bruce Jenner say he’s actually a woman inside? He had to feel as if there was something about women that was different from men.

While the feminists embrace Jenner and feel the transgender issue is in their wheel house, the existence of gender confused people (and that’s not hate speech—it’s a fact: someone who has the body of one gender but the emotional identification with the opposite gender is dealing with confusion) actually shows that the inner workings of men and women, in addition to their physical differences, actually exist. To deny that women are inherently valuable because we are women, because we think like women and relate like women and love like women and work like women and argue like women and care like women, to suggest that we are only valuable when we can do life the same way men do, is a form of hatred.

It devalues who we are apart from a societal make-over that makes us “equal to men.”

Maybe we should be considered equal to men because we are equal to men in value, though our roles are not the same. Maybe we should be considered equal to men because that’s how God sees us, and He, after all, made us and loves us and died for us. The same way He did for men.

I really don’t think men devalue women, apart from the sex-object thing, as much as feminists do. Feminism seems unhappy that women aren’t men. From where I sit, that seems like a form of hatred, of misogyny.