"That's not real feminism"

I've written about this a long time ago but a recent encounter has motivated me to bring it up again.

Feminism is rather difficult to criticize. If you complain about misandrist trends in feminism, feminists will insist that you are strawmanning and those things never happen. If you point to an example of exactly that happening then the response you are guaranteed to get is "that's not real feminism."

You could dismiss this as a No True Scotsman but I want to dig deeper. The fact is, this is exactly what feminists should be saying when horrible things are said and done in the name of feminism. The only problem is that they are saying it to the wrong people.

You rarely see this allegedly fake feminism called out by other feminists. This is odd. Feminists love calling people out. For many, it's the entirety of their activism. Why are they not calling out misandry from other feminists? It's not because they are afraid to challenge those in their own movement. Intersectional feminists called out "white feminism" and TERFs are consistently called out by other feminists. So they are clearly prepared to, and often enthusiastic about, calling out other feminists for bad feminism. However, when that bad feminism takes the form of misandry the good feminists are silent.

Why is that? Well the obvious reason is that men isn't a group they care about. Racial minorities and trans people are at the right end of their intersectional axes of oppression. They need to be defended. While these "real" feminists might not agree with the "fake" feminists when it comes to men, they simply have more important things to use their time and energy on than calling those fake feminists out.

Except, they are using that time and energy. They are showing up every time we point to these "fake" feminists as examples of what is wrong in feminism. They are telling us what they should be telling the fake feminists, that what they are doing is not real feminism. There's no more time or effort required. They just need to direct it at a different audience.

So why are they telling us this? Because they care about the image of their movement. The extreme misandry damages the image of a movement which is important to them so they need people to believe that this is not actually feminism.

However, this denial rings hollow when we don't see those real feminists calling out the fake ones. If, instead of telling us that the bad feminists aren't real feminists, they publicly denounced the bad feminism when they saw it, they wouldn't need to tell us it wasn't feminism. We could see that for ourselves.

Even if they don't care at all about men and all they care about is the good name of feminism, there would be far more reward for their efforts if they were publicly denouncing the misandrists instead of arguing with us about what is and isn't real feminism. It might even get some of the misandry out of the movement, meaning they have less need to defend it.

Why are feminists not doing this? Why do they keep telling us that this misandry isn't real feminism while not publicly denouncing the misandrists in their movement? All I can suggest is that at the very least misandry doesn't bother them. Maybe they even like it. Maybe they get a kick out of it when they see a feminist with a platform vilifying men. They don't call it out because it doesn't register to them as bad feminism until someone else points it out and it becomes bad for feminism's image.