(To clarify the title, I want to highlight that this is NOT a post against female participation in male spaces. I, unlike many feminists, can distinguish between criticism of the feminism ideology and criticism of a gender.)

Ever since 2015, I have been convinced there was a concerted attack on presumed “male dominated” geek culture. Examples of this include Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Doctor Who and others. Here, I will dissect exactly what flawed motives and assumptions went into this attack, and how this attack highlights the flaws of feminism as a whole.

The first attacks on geek-culture came from feminists such as Anita Sarkeesian. They would argue that all of geek culture basically exists solely to prop up men; as a kind of “power fantasy” for male audiences, where male characters would be portrayed as these super powerful, stoic “stud” characters and women as meek, subservient and sexualised.

Now, the argument against this is that it’s simply gibberish: looking at the male protagonists of LOTR, the hobbits are about as far from “stoic studs” as you can possibly get. In Star Wars, Luke is no power fantasy: his final duel ends with him being completely defeated and screaming for help. And the female characters such as Eowyn are nothing like what’s described by the feminists, and the Doctor solves most of his problems without violence and needs to be rescued by his female companions . These arguments, however, fell on deaf ears, as we will soon see.

Around 2015, feminists seem to have been given the keys to the big corporations that handle these stories. Star Wars, ghostbusters, Doctor Who…all of these suddenly turned from male-protagonist stories to female protagonist stories. But the interesting this is, the feminist who took over still seemed to be operating under the assumption that these were just “male power fantasies” which portrayed women as useless. So they took this false and flawed assumption, and reversed it: the male characters are the useless ones and the female ones have the power fantasy.

Further evidence of this comes from the feminist reaction to audience members who noted this sudden shift from nuanced, thematic storytelling to childish feminist power fantasy nonsense. The reaction was always the same: “Oh, you have a problem with Rey being a power fantasy, but no problem with Luke being a power fantasy? Sexist!” “You have a problem with the female Doctor Who never needing help, but no problem with a male Doctor never needing help? Sexist!”

I hope you see what I’m getting at here. Feminists had this very superficial, ill-conceived and frankly paranoid view of Geek Culture of deifying men and objectifying women. When they took over, they simply took this false, paranoid view and flipped it on its head, then screamed “hypocrisy!” When people tried to point it out. This is why their series have ended up in disaster: the Sequels Trilogy is seen as a joke, the female Doctor got the second-lowest viewed episode in t. History of the show. The feminists had no clue what the hell they were doing, and made a complete farce out of themselves.

Thankfully, I believe lessons have been learned from this. For instance, Doctor Who had been accused of “pandering to the older Fans” because they brought back the original writer of the new series (Russel T Davies), and one of the most beloved actors to play The Doctor back in 2007 (David Tennant). This is, I think, a positive move, and I believe the whole fiasco is a great case study in the fundmental failures of feminism and movements such as this.