Here's my perspective:

Women have been getting the shitty end of the stick for millennia, entirely unfairly.

Since the late-19th or so, a movement to raise awareness, garner support and drive real social change has been growing - in recent times, this movement has been called 'feminism'.

Slowly, slowly this has taken root in our culture, and with great and deliberate effort, traditional notions of gender roles have been eroded, with concepts of women as capable, powerful, and respected people carefully installed in their stead.

So far, so dandy.

However, populations as a whole are fucking stupid, being a vast collection of weakest links, as it were - and this is where problems creep in.

Back at the start of things, women were disadvantaged everywhere. You couldn't throw a rock without hitting blatant sexual discrimination or cultural bias in favour of men.

As such, the heuristic for increased equality was a damn simple one: always push for change towards female advantage. You really couldn't go wrong with this, a bit like pushing a shopping cart with a stuck wheel: you just lean hard to the left the whole time, and you stand the best chance of going forwards.

A no-brainer like this, a one-decision roadmap to being in the right, was candy for the culture as a whole. People - especially aggregate ones - just love easy black-and-white answers, and this approach was adopted almost axiomatically. Two-X good, indeed. (Please tell me you've read Orwell)

Hell, the very word 'feminism' denotes pro-female bias, and yet is branded as a pro-equality movement. Think about that message: equality equals advocacy of female advantage, across the board. (no, I know there's all kinds of actual ideologies out there, but we're talking broad perceptions, here)

Trouble is, this was actually making progress and driving change. Which is a good thing, but the culture did not adapt - the axiom was never updated to a more nuanced position. The wheel was gradually coming unstuck in places, but everyone knows you just lean hard to the left.

And of course, this whole process was exacerbated by the traditional-roles mouthbreathers, who strongly resented change, and were (are) constantly being shown up as both stupid and evil.

Again, a very good thing in itself, but it only serves to cement the perception: two-X good, one-X bad. If you oppose pro-female advocacy anywhere, you're a dumb redneck chauvinist bastard.

Don't get me wrong - a lot of the time, that's still entirely true. There are a whole lot of dumb redneck chauvinist bastards out there, and they need to be discouraged from their views with something sharp and heavy.

But on a handful of issues these days, parity has been reached or exceeded - and a neutral or pro-male position is actually the ethical path to take.

However, anyone proposing this on any given issue is branded a dumb redneck chauvinist bastard who opposes progress and equality, further polarizing people's positions.

Tell anyone you're a member of /r/mensrights, and see how you get treated, after all.

It's a lot like the whole Zionism thing - if you find Israel to be in the wrong on anything, you must be an antisemitic racist nazi asshole, so we should further increase our support for them, and kill more Palestinians.

It leaves a lot of liberal, egalitarian people extremely jaded and cynical - and that's without even taking the loud extremist crazies (every movement has them) into account.

I am absolutely for an equal society, the abolition of prescriptive gender roles and the advancement of women's power and status in the large number of places where it still severely lags behind.

But no, I will not call myself a feminist, and lend my support to the public perception that advocacy of female interests is always right, and that advocacy of male interests is always wrong. I will not lend weight to the public perception that women are almost by definition disadvantaged victims, and that men are by definition privileged oppressors in every conceivable case. I will not lend weight to the siege mentality that is so common, nor the self-hatred so common to male feminists.

I will push for gender-political change, but in an adaptive, context-sensitive way that takes the side of the actually disadvantaged party on any given issue.

I call myself a militant egalitarian.

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskMen/comments/xkzpq/what_is_your_opinion_of_feminism/c5ndx1s

Edit: and thank you to srs for highlighting this for me.