Notes for a talk at ICMI with the following title: Feminism: Not “progressive”. Not “egalitarian”. Not “liberal”. Not “left-wing”.
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Feminism is not “progressive”: It’s regressive; it is based on misandry, sexist discrimination, hate & bias; it suppresses science (esp. on domestic violence, on female violence and on criminology in general); it is conspiracist; it asserts the existence of a non-existent entity “Patriarchy”; it is ultra-conservative, in its treating women as helpless infants. Infantilism about women is conservative, not progressive.
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Feminism is not “egalitarian”: It demands, and achieves, preferential treatment for a privileged group (women). By definition, this is anti-egalitarian.
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Feminism is not “liberal”: To the contrary, it is socially conservative—women are infants, without agency; it is illiberal & authoritarian; it demands increasing state power; it uses the police and institutional power as a tool of social control; it is moralistic & Puritan. More or less by definition, these are central principle of state-enforced illiberalism, social illiberalism and social conservatism.
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Feminism is not “left-wing”: It has no interest in economic fairness (esp. those at the bottom of society); it is openly anti-working-class. Marxism and socialism are, by definition, left-wing because their primary concern is with economic exploitation, wage slavery, alienation of the worker, co-erced theft of their labour, and so on. Feminism is, in no way, “left-wing”. Feminism is a form of Identity Politics. This, in general, is an anti-left-wing position. Furthermore, it is a form of Identity Politics closely aligned with the State, policing, punishment and incarceration (so-called carceral feminism). Again, these are not “left-wing”. They have been traditionally right-wing positions for centuries.
The ICMI20 talk is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZQf1JDa28Y&list=PLOXfnai0-o0I8BtOpmjbn_3FGYBHiV64S
Alright, I’ll give this another go because I’m pretty disappointed in my previous response.
You’re addressing four points here. Three of them have to do with what Feminism is or does.
The video makes some pretty strong claims about this, but the presentation of the video is so boring I can’t force myself to watch it again, so I don’t remember how solid the evidence to back it up was.
I take the stance that Feminism is quite a large movement, and no one person or organization can objectively claim specifically what it is and what it stands for. Not the guy in the video, and not you either.
So generally speaking, I consider debating what Feminism is or isn’t to be a waste of time. That’s why I didn’t address any of these points in my other reply.
However, I do currently hold the belief that misandry is very widespread among self-identified feminist (regardless of whether you or anyone else would acknowledge them as feminist).
There are also a plethora of concepts, ideas or ideological structures promoted by self identified feminist individuals and feminist organizations that create misandrist outcomes such as government programs that discriminate against men, institutional endeavors that discriminate against men, law enforcement practices that discriminate against men, laws that discriminate against men, etc…
One of these ideological structures that help promote discrimination against men is found in your point that discusses patriarchy. It’s just textbook “Apex fallacy”. You point to the people at the top and it can then be used to make sweeping generalizations about everyone else. You look at the couple thousand people at the top and say “Look! it’s mostly men”, but then you look at the hundreds of thousands of people who are at the bottom and it’s also mostly men, but you don’t notice them. And when policies and laws are enacted to “balance the gender scales”, the men at the top stay and the top and the men at the bottom are the ones who pay the price. E.g. Legislation that creates domestic violence shelters for women, shelters that also defacto serve as homeless shelter. These are homeless shelters for women only, when the vast majority of people who need homeless shelters are men.