Women’s equality and empowerment are two of the goals that feminism claims to stands for. It’s a great sentiment, but toxic feminism continues to persist.
Let’s start off with increasing resentment towards men. Toxic feminism has taught us to hate and belittle men, suggesting that they have it easy.
Norah Vincent, a feminist, columnist for the LA Times and author of “Self-Made Man,” believed men lived on “easy mode” and tried to prove so by disguising herself as a man. She spent a year and a half living under the name Ned and exploring what men are like when women are not around.
“Men are suffering, they have different problems than woman have, but they don’t have it better,” Vincent said. ‘They need our sympathy, our love and then need each other more than anyone else.”
In her book, Vincent talks about her journey and life as Ned. Being Ned started to drain Vincent, especially after an Iron John retreat, a therapeutic masculinity workshop. After the retreat Vincent checked herself into a hospital for depression.
“She was suffering, she wrote, for the same reason that many of the men she met were suffering,” Penelope Green, writer for The New York Times, said. “Their assigned gender roles, she found, were suffocating them and alienating them from themselves.”
Everyone suffers, but why are we not taking a closer look at the suffering men go through? We should not be calling them the b-word like Michelle Wolf, a comedian, said on The Daily Show in response to men becoming infertile, depressed and suicidal from a male birth control study.
In this study, the organizers gave 320 men shots that knocked down their sperm counts resulting in preventing pregnancies in the man’s partner. The initial results looked to be 96% effective, but the second stage was stopped due to too many side effects.
She’s a comedian, so it’s a joke, right? But we need to understand that the studies for women birth control has been going on since the 1950s and that’s just the pill. For men it’s been since the 1970s. Of course no birth control is perfect.
The side effects the men experienced are the same things that happen with women on hormonal birth control.
This brings me to intersectional feminism, where the belief is that both men and women, regardless of their sex or race, should be equal. It’s supposed to advocate for gender equality.
SoIf that were the case, what’s with the way we treat our men and women? Women, why do we have to keep calling men our wallets? Men, why do some of you guys have to call us dishwashers?
Men are not disposable, and it is counteractive of some feminists to say that they are because, ideally, everyone should be able to coexist without doing or saying something that will cause a bigger divide. This goes back to calling men “wallets.”
In a on TikTok where people go up to women and ask, “if the woman is the prize, what does that make the man?” To which the women reply, “the wallet.”
Women have been fighting for their rights for a, long time, and it goes back to the French Revolution when the idea of feminism really came about. Proven so by the fact that the French Revolution was when the idea of feminism really came about. Back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it made sense why women were fighting for basic human rights, as they had no freedom to express themselves, in America at least.
Equality is great. That’s what we all want. I believe that women are equal to men, politically and economically, whatever circumstance they are in. I would argue that men and women are not equal socially. I would say we are more socially equal than 20 years ago, but we’re not quite there yet.
If 100% is total equality, then I would say we are at a solid 85% as an American society.
The thing is, there is a problem with feminism’s notion of equality. There is a conflation between equality and sameness.
Sameness is the state of being identical or the same. Equality, well it’s the state of being equal.
Men and women will never be the same, and it all boils down to biology.
“Efforts to achieve equality through equal treatment are doomed to fail because men and women are not starting at the same place,” Alicia M. Rodriguez said. “We are inherently different.”
Modern feminism is one of the many things that’s causing a greater divide in our nation. This bickering needs to end. More listening and less ignoring.
This story was written by Trinity Burgess. She can be reached at [email protected].
