There is an intersection of philosophy, politics, and psychology. It has infiltrated academia, creating a generation of youth more concerned with victim status, rather than facts, principles, or outcomes. They have decided that masculinity is toxic, capitalism is evil, and victim hood reigns supreme. This is the intersection postmodernism, feminism, and what I would call the cult of female emotion.
To begin, I will define two terms: postmodernism and feminism. Post-modernism postulates that there is no objective reality. Since there is no objective reality, everything is defined by the subjective perception of the perceiver. It is subjective perception that defines the objective. In my classes, this has taken the form of a schizophrenic hallucination being just as real as objective reality. Not real to the individual, but real in reality. In less extreme examples, yet just as corrosive, scientific evidence is only ever the result of bias. A post-positivist perspective would state that there is an objective truth, but that we have bias that limits our ability to truly see it objectively. Post-modernists argue that there just simply is no objective truth.
Feminism has many definitions, and those who advocate for it will pick and choose the one that suits them best in the moment. However, modern feminism, being fourth-wave, seeks equity over liberty. Feminism used to advocate equality of opportunity. Now, it advocates equality of outcome. In this worldview, any discrepancy in anthropological statistics has to be due to injustice. Are women making less on average? The only explanation is injustice. Do wealthier people do better on a multitude of outcome measures? The only explanation is injustice. This can be taken to some preposterous examples, that people actually believe. Such as the idea that women are worse at sports only because they are discouraged from playing them as much.
Fourth-wave feminism is the politicization of post-modernist philosophy. If nothing is objective and everything is due to bias, then there are no objective differences that result in how people are separated across variables. I have already established, and hopefully you have already observed, that this is always explained by some oppressor-victim dynamic. However, I came across a new monster recently, which is how the intersection expresses itself in interpersonal interactions.
As a future psychologist, I was talking to another future psychologist. We were discussing a fight that two people had. Person x did something slightly wrong to person y. Person y then did something awful to person x. I said person y was in the wrong. The woman I was talking to started to explain to me that there is no right or wrong. There are no good guys and bad guys. Everything is subjective. Therefore, the only thing that matters is what people felt. Person y felt deeply offended, so her reaction was justified. There is no right or wrong, just what she felt to be true.
Take this with a grain of salt because this individual has not taken her statistics classes yet, so I will see what she thinks after she does. However, it is important because it is an epidemic in our society. A generation of poorly educated bitter teachers taught a generation of youth that the only thing that matters is how you feel, what is “nice,” and who has power. This has created a generation of ideologues. This ideology is not empirically based. It is ideology: words enticingly well-strewn together in order to cause individuals to forgo reason and fact.
A world in which there is no objective right or wrong, and the only thing that matters is subjective experience, the highly emotional reign supreme. Whoever is more upset wins. Who wins that game? It’s not heterosexual cis-men. If you are a rational male, you are gaslighted left, right, and center by accusations of bothering the emotions of others. One of the biggest attacks lobbed by people on the left is, “You offended me,” or “I feel unsafe.” It is all emotionally based. You might think, “What did I do to offend you?” or “Are you even right to be offended?” You are looking for a reason. They are not, and to them a reason is not required. The very fact that they feel this way is more than enough, because to them there is no truth that exists beyond this feeling.
This concept can be applied to the war over gender. Gender is not longer defined in positivist or post-positivist terms. The contemporary concept of gender is purely post-modernist: if I feel it then it must be true. If I think I was a girl yesterday and a boy today, then I was literally a girl yesterday and a boy today. If Matt Walsh’s documentary was not convincing enough, then just simply take a look at Harvard’s page of studies to determine that there is no empirical basis for the contemporary perspective on gender (they are trying to argue in favor of it). It is pure ideologically and emotionally based. Not only are the basic premises of these individuals considered sacred constructs, but their emotions are the holy grail. The first ever attempt to create compelled speech in an English common law nation was because leftists wanted to protect the feelings on transgender individuals.
I know this forum likes information that relates to sexual dynamics, so here is how this intersection applies to that. Any women you are with is going to have a host of friends who will just simply validate how she feels. If she does something wrong, they will justify it because she was upset. Do not expect her confidants to tell her that what she did was wrong. Right or wrong does not matter to them. It is only how they feel that is important. Make them feel good and you will be happy. If you make them feel bad, it will not matter if you were right.