A Call for Reason

There is a movement that has been sweeping the nation recently, making appearances on college and private high school campuses all across the country. It is by no means a new movement, and the issues it addresses are ancient in and of themselves. However, I find it very hard to address the movement, due to the extreme societal influence it has, especially at Exeter. This movement is feminism, and it is something I have been meaning to write about for a while now but have refrained from doing, as my opinion on the matter is an unpopular one. But I am now ready to come out and say that I am against the Feminist movement.

 To be clear, this is not to say that I am against equal rights for men and women. On the contrary, I believe that a person should be judged based solely on merit as opposed to race, sex, gender, sexuality or appearance. No, the reason I am against feminism is not because I am misogynist, but because the feminist movement, as it stands today, does not promote the equality of genders. My issue is not with equality, but with the movement itself.

 A movement is defined by its loudest activists. No matter how good the intentions of a movement or organization are when it starts, its legacy is created by the people who stand there and boldly proclaim that they are members of this movement or organization, whose voices are heard the loudest. This means that over time, a movement can drastically change. An example of this is the Democratic Party which in 1860 held views that slavery was an acceptable practice. Obviously, this has changed drastically since then. When the feminist movement was first rising to moderate popularity, a large portion of feminists were not actually against the male-female gender roles embedded in society but instead focused on issues such as the right of a woman to control her own body. The movement later shifted to focus on suffrage for women, and later the abolition of traditional gender roles.

 In our modern times, feminism no longer represents the equality of all genders. Instead, the biggest and most prominent feminists of our time are misandrists (female supremacists). These people focus solely on women and advocate for a sort of cultural uprising against their male oppressors. Not only are these ideals incredibly sexist (which reverses the very issue they claim to fight against) but they have a fundamental flaw: one cannot address the issues of gender in society without looking at and addressing the issues of all genders. Even in our supposedly patriarchal society, men are raped in prisons (and outside as well), men often lose custody cases in court (due to their being assumed as inferior parents) and men are constantly pressured not to show emotions (which leads to the high suicide and mental illness rate among men). 

 This is not to say that there are no moderate feminists out there. In fact, I know many people who believe in the equality of all genders and advocate for solving gender problems, regardless of the gender with which they identify. These reasonable moderates, however, are often the quietest. That is why I hope that any reasonable feminists reading this see my article as a call to take your movement back. Write, have conversations, be loud, spread reason where you can. Take to the Internet, go into the cesspools of misandry (such as Tumblr) and spread reason. Make it known that true feminism is equality, not female supremacy. Retake your movement, and make it respectable again. ♥