Yahoo News Today’s feminists just to want to strip women of their rights
I’m sure no sane woman needs to be told this. They’ll know it all too well from their own experience. But just in case, here’s an essential rule for life.
Never trust a man who tells you he’s a feminist.
All right, so it’s theoretically possible that he’s being sincere. More likely, though, he’s saying it to preen and show off: verbally pinning a medal to his own chest. Or, even more likely, he’s using it as a kind of chat-up line.
“Hey, baby. Aren’t men dreadful? I’ve noticed, because I’m different. More sensitive. Better. Say, why don’t you come back to my place, so we can enjoy some intercourse. By which I, of course, mean sitting down to read the seminal feminist treatise of that title, written in 1987 by Andrea Dworkin.”
Still, there is one place where you’re unlikely to encounter men of this kind. Spain. Spanish men don’t pretend that they’re feminists – because, it seems, they’re openly hostile to feminism. According to a new survey by the national Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, published this week, almost half the men in Spain say that feminism “has gone too far”. And they aren’t alone. Because almost a third of Spanish women agree.
It’s a striking result. Here in Britain, however, I think the picture is slightly different. It’s not that feminism has gone too far. It’s that it’s lost the plot altogether. And for us men, at any rate, it’s become utterly impossible to understand what it wants.
It didn’t used to be this way. Twenty years ago, when I was starting out in journalism, I worked for a lads’ mag, called Zoo. And, without exception, feminists absolutely loathed it. They endlessly denounced it as a vile, tawdry rag that promoted the sexual objectification of women – and because of this, they wanted it banned. Or, if not banned, sold inside a brown paper bag, so that no one could see the scantily clad women on the cover.
Naturally enough, we at the lads’ mag didn’t support their proposal. But we at least understood where they were coming from. Of course they objected to a magazine full of semi-naked women, rude jokes and tips on “pulling birds”. They were feminists. By definition, they were bound to hate it. We always knew what feminists stood for, whether or not we agreed with them.
These days, though, we haven’t a clue what they’re on about. Because many of today’s young feminists no longer seem to be campaigning for women’s rights. They’re campaigning against them.
They’re opposed to female-only sports. They’re opposed to female-only prisons. They’re opposed to female-only public lavatories and changing rooms. And any woman who dares to disagree, and politely suggests that women should be allowed to retain their right to female-only spaces, is branded a hateful old transphobic bigot. Feminists used to argue that women are discriminated against on the basis of their biological sex. Now, however, they seem to be arguing that biological sex doesn’t matter at all, or even that it doesn’t exist.
Meanwhile, they actively support prostitution, tweeting “Sex work is work”, as if it were a perfectly acceptable or even admirable career choice. On top of that, they run campaigns such as “Free the nipple” – a demand for women to be given the right to post topless photos of themselves on Instagram. It’s extraordinary. For years, old-school feminists fought for Page 3 to be abolished. Next thing you know, today’s young feminists will be fighting to bring it back.
Come to think of it, perhaps this is the real reason why some men like to claim that they’re feminists. They’ve noticed that this new type of feminism suits them very well indeed.
