So warning - this might not be as Red Pill as you're accustomed to reading around here. But as a male in a very liberal university, I am getting frustrated with feminism and wanted to write to articulate my thoughts.

First of all, as an egalitarian, when feminism was first described to me as the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities, I was happy about the existence of the movement. Seems like noble goal.

I spent some time thinking about it, and trying my best to put myself into the shoes of a woman in todays society. I began to understand the magnitude of complexity that comes along with problems of gender identity and social structures. The shits real. Women notice it by the way they're valued for their physical appearance. We men notice it too in how we're valued for our money/success (ie. what we bring to the table).

Some examples of potentially subtle gender expectations:

  • promiscuous women frowned upon in ways that promiscuous men are not.
  • women are pressured to shave their bodies, wear makeup and manage their appearance in ways that men are not
  • women are expected to work service rather than leadership jobs - and these expectations create pressures that influence behavior
  • men are expected to do any hard/dangerous work when such opportunities arise
  • men are expected to constantly fight for higher salaries. As a benefit, men have higher salaries on avg, but as a downside men face longer hours, longer commutes, and higher levels of stress that lead to earlier deaths
  • men are expected to die for country if called upon

The more you think about it / try to "solve" it, you realize how infinitely complex these issues are, and the question of what it is you're even trying to solve becomes less and less clear. This is just scratching the surface at this point, too. Any of those bullet points could lead to very in depth discussion filled with strong opinions but tons of ambiguity about what the problem is and how to resolve it.

And here's the thing - I even think these discussions could be valuable, could spark social change for the better. For example, if as many females learned to code as men do, software could be improving twice as fast, which (thinking of how fast tech has improved even just in the last ten years) would be a huge benefit to the entire world.

But even if these feminist conversations are potentially valuable, the movement itself, and the people who are a part of it, make me roll my eyes, for these major reasons.

  1. The feminist movement is full of lies.

Have you heard that 1 in 4 college women will be sexually assaulted? That statistic is chalked on every sidewalk where I live. Have you heard that women earn 70 cents on a man's dollar for equal work? It's bunk. And these lies breed a ton of distrust for the movement. There are PLENTY of good feminist stats - for example, 80% of political representatives are men while over half of americans are female. That doesn't seem representative at all, something is obviously imbalanced there. My point is, there are plenty of truths that prove feminist thought/discussions can actually add value to society, but the most popular feminism-isms are fabricated. It's so annoying.

  1. No deep examination of problems (eg. "victim blaming")

In every non-gender related issue, when something goes wrong, you try to figure out why it happened and learn from it. For example, I was pickpocketed my first time as a tourist in New York City. I was by myself, looking lost, with my wallet in my back pocket, carrying way too much cash (travel money). I was a victim, but even my friends were like "that's why I keep my cash separate and my wallet in my backpack". My reaction wasn't "HOW DARE YOU BLAME ME", it was "oh, that's good advice I'll do that in the future".

That's how we solve problems. We look into how they happened to prevent them from happening again. My other friend had tons of cash in his wallet in his back pocket too, but he learned this preventative measure as well. So everyone benefited by us all thinking about what happened.

But when it's a gender issue, the PC thing to do is not look at all past "As a woman, you are victim". This destroys due process. Think of any of the recent high profile rape accusations. The UVA/Rolling Stone accusation and the Mattress Girl incident come to mind. For both of these cases, everyone immediately believed these women, and both turned out to be completely bogus. It can ruin an innocent man's life (the Mattress Girl guy is still expelled after winning his case, plus his name is all over google with "alleged" next to it).

But even when women are not lying, it is still smart to think about what happened and learn from potentially traumatic experience. Like if a girl gets hit by a guy, that's traumatic, but if she hit him first, it seems like there's still something she could learn from the experience. Feminism (the movement) discourages this. What does discouraging this have to do with equal opportunities? How far removed is feminism the movement from feminism the definition of the word?

  1. Misuse of words

The feminist movement seems to use these words with great frequency. They also seem to not know what any of them mean:

  • misogyny
  • oppression
  • patriarchy
  • privilege
  • internalized sexism
  • rape culture
  • judgemental

I could go into each one of these and explain how feminism misuses them, but maybe that'll be it's own post. For now, just look at the above list and tell me with a straight face that you don't understand why many see feminism is angry or bitter.

  1. First World/Whiny

Women is other countries can be legally beaten. Forced into sex slavery. Can be married against their will at the age of 9. And feminists today are concerned about whether Game of Thrones is too violent? Not saying that first world problems shouldn't ever be addressed, it just seems odd to me that movements like Bossy Ban can get tons of funding, a trending twitter hashtag, and lots of star power (Beyonce, anyone?) but sex slavery of minors overseas doesn't get that kind of attention.

  1. Hyper manipulative

If you are not a feminist, to them you are either stupid or evil. They'll talk down at you and define consent for you using a freaky tea analogy because you must be too stupid to understand what that word means. They'll remind you that feminism is simply about good things - helping the disenfranchised and promoting equality - and completely ignore or deny all the associated bullshit/complexity that I've mentioned in this writeup.

This kind of thing is the reason why so many people don't want to associate themselves with feminism.