During the Trump years, there was a great deal of anti-immigrant fervour on the right. A particular prominent right wing figure made a tweet comparing immigrants to a bowl of M&M’s where one of them was poisoned, and asked if you’d take a handful. The implication of course being that, even if a tiny minority of immigrants are criminals, you shouldn’t trust any of them. The left naturally tore this apart, but what no one seemed to be talking about is that this meme began as a feminist one, except instead of “immigrants” it was “men”, implying women should assume men are rapists in the same way the right assumes immigrants are criminals.

This seems to lead to the conclusion that feminism is suspiciously close, ideologically, to bigoted, dangerous far right views. In fact, the above example is even worse: feminism come up with the anti-male arguments, which are then adopted and appropriated by far-right bigots. This is one of the reasons I think that the left needs to speak up against these sorts of bigoted feminist positions: they are sneakily smuggling ammunition to the far right, emboldening them and their positions, and anyone who disrupts this smuggling operation is attacked and ostracised.