As we’ve discussed, the feminist movement and the LGBT movement cannot coincide indefinitely. One claims that women are superior, and the other claims that women do not, in any objective sense, exist. There is simply no way the Left can simultaneously advance both propositions. There is no way it can be a vehicle for feminist ideology and a vehicle for “men can have vaginas” ideology.

Indeed, transgenderism is the most anti-feminist phenomenon in history, even more so than Puritanism or Islam or Larry Flynt. But, until the glorious and inevitable day when the two factions decide to wage a mutually destructive war against each other, it’s necessary that this book address and debunk both competing ideologies, as they both represent a leftist assault on gender.

Now, I will admit that my qualifications as a feminism expert are questionable at best. I haven’t taken any feminist studies courses, nor have I ever used the word gendered in conversation, nor have I seen The Vagina Monologues nor any network drama from Shonda Rhimes, nor have I had any occasion to whip out femi-jargon like phallogocentrism and gynocriticism. Worst of all, I’m a man. Still, I must endeavor to tackle the feminist problem if I want to offer a complete analysis of the Unholy Trinity.

Now, the general belief among most conservatives and anyone else who doesn’t reside firmly on the leftmost end of the ideological spectrum is that “modern feminism” has its problems but that “true feminism” or “original feminism” or whatever qualifier you attach to it was quite useful in its day. Surveys show that most people do not identify themselves as feminists, and a large number have a negative opinion of the movement—shaped by college girls who screech about their safe spaces and accuse men of rape if they cast so much as a sideways glance in their general direction. But most people would likely say that feminism in its truest form is and has been a force for good. The movement was hijacked by ideological pirates at some point in the 1960s, conventional wisdom goes, and now it’s become the monstrosity we all know and loathe today.

They’re correct that the tone of feminism has grown more, shall we say, unpleasant, but I’m not sure that its present pettiness and ugliness is so much a perversion of its original design as a logical outgrowth of it. Perhaps it’s fruitless to relitigate historical feminism, especially when the modern variety is so angry, destructive, and stupid by comparison. But to understand its anger, destructiveness, and stupidity, we must take a look at the ideas and philosophies at the foundation of the ideology.

In fact, before we get to the ideas, it might be said that the first problem with the ideology is that it’s an ideology. Feminists of the first wave—Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, etc.—built a new system of thought around a few worthy goals. The system was the problem, not the goals.

It was good that women won the right to vote and it was good that they achieved the right to participate more fully in society, but we’ve learned that a movement doesn’t go away just because it’s accomplished what it originally set out to do. It keeps lurching along, a cause in search of a reason. Think of it as a train still barreling forward even though the conductor and most of the original passengers have died or jumped overboard. And because the train now represents something popular and victorious, it quickly becomes a bandwagon for many of the sorts of people who were or would have been too afraid to jump on board back when it was still encountering resistance.

Eric Hoffer famously said, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” This is certainly the case with feminism, but it’s worse because feminism is an ideology as well as a movement. Perhaps all movements are, to some extent, but feminism is all the more dangerous because it made gender into its own “ism.”

The word feminism is derived from the French word féminisme, and in the grand scheme of things it’s relatively new. You won’t find the term used in any literature or publication until the early to mid–nineteenth century. The ism-izing (speaking of made-up words) of gender made sex and gender into a political issue, which has proven to be one of the most disastrous developments in human history. The early feminists may not have intended it, but they established something that would lead to over a century of death and division, with no end in sight.

Or maybe they did intend it. The truth is that feminism, from the very beginning, at its earliest stages, had a habit of presenting the family and religion as enemies of female equality. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the godmothers of feminism, said that “the Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women’s emancipation.” This was a woman of the first wave—not the second, not the third. This is Scripture made out to be an obstacle, a “stumbling block,” way down at the very foundation of feminist theory.

From the very beginning, at its earliest stages, feminism was an ideology with underpinnings of competition and exclusion. This oft-cited quote from Susan B. Anthony drives the point home: “There is not the woman born who desires to eat the bread of dependence, no matter whether it be from the hand of father, husband, or brother; for any one who does so eat her bread places herself in the power of the person from whom she takes it.”

Casting “dependence” as the ultimate evil, characterizing the family and marriage as a power struggle—this goes to the very heart of feminist thought. It is the core of feminism, and every repugnant thing about the modern variety is rooted firmly in these ideas. Feminism may have been instrumental in accomplishing some very important goals, but those goals were achieved at the cost of legitimizing an ideology that encourages women to be resentful and suspicious of men.

UNORIGINAL IDEAS

Feminism may have brought about some necessary results a long time ago, but it was never necessary itself. The truthful insights of the old feminists—and they did have some truthful insights—were not uniquely feminist insights, but Christian insights. Whatever good existed in feminist philosophy was borrowed from Christian philosophy. No, Christian countries were not always fair to women, but that was due to their own failure to apply Christian principles universally. It was not a failure of the principles themselves.

What truth did feminism reveal that was not already known? That women are equal to men in human dignity and intrinsic value? No, feminism did not reveal this. Christianity revealed it. Christ revealed it. Christian thinkers throughout the ages have affirmed it and taught it, notably Thomas Aquinas, who said that women are meant to rule alongside men. That was over eight hundred years ago. Six hundred years before the term feminist existed, and over 750 years before the birth of modern feminist thought leaders like Amy Schumer and Kim Kardashian.

There’s a pithy little slogan you often find plastered on T-shirts and bumper stickers and internet memes, originally coined by feminist writer Marie Shear, that defines feminism as “the radical notion that women are people.” Most people would consider this to be the “core idea” of feminism, and therefore anyone who affirms the humanity of women must be a feminist, and anyone who disagrees with feminism must not think women are people.

Let’s leave aside the irony that the only people in America who literally deny the personhood of females—so long as the female resides in the womb—are feminists and focus on the absurdity and arrogance of this definition. Are we really supposed to believe that feminists were the first ones to realize that women are human beings? What did society consider them before—furniture? I might as well say that conservatism is the radical idea that oranges are fruit. Anyone who correctly places fruit on the food pyramid is a conservative. There, I just turned Bill Maher and Michael Moore into right-wingers (well, perhaps it’s ambitious to assume that Michael Moore knows anything about fruit).

Jesus stopped the angry mob from stoning the adulterous woman to death two thousand years ago. He showed humanity and mercy to all people, especially women, and commanded His disciples to do the same. The Gospels did not send a message of female subjugation and dehumanization—far from it. Indeed, Christ was born of a woman. He performed His first miracle at the behest of a woman. It was a woman whom Jesus healed in the crowd when she reached out and touched His garment. It was women who first discovered that the tomb was empty. It was a woman He first appeared to after He rose from the dead.

Jesus commanded men to respect and love their wives so deeply that they would not even look at a woman lustfully, much less sleep with another woman. In Ephesians 5, the infamous chapter in which women are instructed to “submit” to their husbands, men are not let off the hook. Paul calls on women to show love and respect. But men he calls to die:

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church—for we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

Christianity liberated women the same as it liberated men. And it granted dignity to women the same as it granted dignity to men. All societies may not have put these commands into practice perfectly, but that does not change the fact that the commands were given. We never needed feminism. We already had the Gospels. After all, feminism merely wants to make women people. Christianity wants to make them saints. Along the same lines, a woman recently told me she’s a feminist because she thinks a female should be able to walk to her car without worrying about getting mugged (I guess men should have to worry about it, or maybe she thinks we never do). I’ve heard this line, or lines like it, countless times and it never gets less disturbing. How is it that these people need “feminism” to tell them that women shouldn’t be robbed in a parking lot? And how is it that they are so ignorant of world history that they think no other ideology or school of thought ever came up with the idea that women shouldn’t be robbed, raped, and brutalized?

It’s simply not true that women were oppressed for the entirety of human civilization until the emergence of the feminist movement. Feminists are often given credit for pioneering the idea that women should be able to do more than cook and clean and so on, but there was never a universal consensus that cooking and cleaning were all women should do in the first place.

LIBERATION BY INDUSTRIALIZATION

Often, we tie female liberation to the Industrial Age, equating the liberty of womanhood with women’s ability and opportunity to work a job and participate in the American democratic system. Lost in this theory is the fact that Christian civilization—before the United States, before industrialization, possibly even before Gloria Steinem—afforded many rights to women. How often do you hear anyone mention that females were members in equal standing to men in the vast majority of the English guilds in the Middle Ages?

Yes, thanks to Christianity, there were women in many occupations and practicing many trades, long before we were all seduced by the siren song of the assembly line. The Industrial Age is much more responsible for dehumanizing people than humanizing them. It’s another mark of the confusion of our era that we think women weren’t truly “human” until they had their very own time card to punch.

In agrarian societies before industrialization, men and women, parents and children, all worked together in their fields and in their homes. It was not a glamorous life, but it was a life in which each member of the family had something to do, and knew that what he or she was doing was important and necessary. Everyone worked. Everyone contributed. Everyone did his or her part. These days, we’re so averse to “roles,” so opposed to letting our sex and our biology play any part in deciding what we do with ourselves, that we all ended up paralyzed. We don’t play the role society tells us to play, nor do we play any other role at all.

It wasn’t until men were removed from the home for work, and children for school, that women began to feel understandably marginalized and forgotten. Feminism’s answer was to send women from the home as well, where they could supposedly rediscover their worth and dignity as numbers on someone’s payroll sheet. Now nobody is at home, and that happiness and serenity humanity chased when it left the home still eludes us.

Maybe this is all academic, but it’s necessary to establish that feminism wasn’t a modern solution to an ancient problem—it was a modern solution to a modern problem. And a very flawed solution because it managed to perpetuate the very issues it set out to address.

THE MODERN VARIETY

It’s clear that feminism was, from the start, a doomed vessel, even for its good ideas, because it politicized gender, preached an ideology of division and competition, and convinced women to seek their worth and dignity outside of the home. It would have been better to advocate that Christian principles be applied more completely and perfectly—much as the abolitionists did—rather than devising an ideology to compete with Christianity. The abolitionists may have spoken of “abolitionism,” but it wasn’t an ideology that lived past the death of slavery, as feminism has lived long past the battle for suffrage.

But now I think we should skip ahead and deal with what feminism is today. Because where feminism of old was a flawed ideology struggling to bring about some good and worthwhile changes, the feminism of our modern age is just a flawed ideology. The fight for women’s rights is over in this country, so now feminists have embarked on a campaign to invent and claim new rights, which they call “women’s rights.”

“Women’s rights” is, for certain, a meaningless phrase in modern American society, used by feminists to reinforce a fantasy of patriarchal oppression and systematic man-on-woman victimization. The Left relies heavily, almost exclusively, on false narratives, and the contemporary “fight for women’s rights” is perhaps the greatest and falsest of all (although the competition for that title is quite stiff).

The Left talks about “women’s rights” as a thing yet to be fully achieved; women in America are “second-class citizens,” they breathlessly insist. Therefore, they say, the struggle for “women’s rights” is not only a political issue but one of the biggest political issues we face, which is a bit like saying that smallpox is one of the biggest health issues we face.

It’s worth noting that women aren’t the only ones locked in an imaginary battle to secure legal protections they already have. The same could be said of gays and racial minorities and, to a certain extent, anyone who isn’t a straight, white, Christian male.

These days, everyone has their own brand of rights (except for the unborn), and those rights are always under siege by some villainous phantom force, usually composed of Republicans, talk-radio hosts, and white men who vote for Republicans and listen to talk radio. Liberals conjure up trendy new categories of rights about once a week, with recent additions like “transgender rights,” “obese rights,” “vegan rights,” “air traveler rights,” and “demisexual genderqueer transspecies Wiccan rights.” Everyone’s engaged in a campaign for mythological rights in modern America—again, with the exception of the ones who can be legally decapitated and sold for parts. They don’t count, remember.

But of all these categories, none result in more screaming, screeching, complaining, and hashtagging than “women’s rights” (well, second only to “gay rights”). This is particularly ironic, considering women—the born ones, anyway—not only fare perfectly well in our society but in many cases do quite a bit better than anyone else. While feminists prattle on about their alleged inequality in America, women continue to benefit from profound legal privileges like affirmative action and Title IX, and routinely receive lighter sentences than men—for the same crimes—in federal court.

FORGOTTEN MEN

Feminism takes issues that afflict all human beings—struggles and tribulations that are inherent to life on Earth for all people—and twists them into a fantastical drama of man versus woman. And when feminists concentrate solely and exclusively on the real and imagined plight of women, the obvious insinuation is that men have it easier. This, again, is why gender should not be made into its own ideology. There’s nothing wrong with striving to help women get a leg up, but being a feminist almost always means ignoring, for instance, the fact that boys face a school system that is 70 percent more likely to suspend them and a medical establishment that’s twice as likely to diagnose them with learning disabilities.

They can call a man’s challenges less severe, but they never explain why guys kill themselves at a rate four times higher, and face a much higher probability of developing substance-abuse disorders. And they talk about violence against women but they don’t mention that men are 76 percent more likely to be the victims of murder. These are not all matters of “rights,” obviously, but they prove that our society is not lavishing advantages on men.

As far as rights go, women have more than almost anyone else. Notably, women are the sole authorities empowered to be judge, jury, and executioner of children. That’s certainly not an entitlement I envy or desire, but it is an unprecedented legal power not granted to men. At no point in America’s allegedly sexist past have things gotten so sexist that any man could go around murdering babies without facing legal repercussions.

Note that I’m talking here about Western society in North America and Europe. I’m aware that women in other parts of the world—Muslim countries, mostly—are still very often deprived of dignity and liberty. But, because I’m sort of a stickler for logic, I have to point out that even Saudi Arabia doesn’t have a “women’s rights” issue, per se. It has a human rights issue. It’s reductive to look at the transgressions of Arab dictators or terrorist groups and accuse them of infringing simply on “women’s rights.” They dehumanize women, clearly, but the problem stretches far beyond that.

Wherever women are subjugated in the Middle East, so too are Christians of both sexes, Muslims of the wrong variety, people of lower social classes, and basically any other group that isn’t favored by those in power. I daresay ISIS treats Muslim women (of the right branch) comparatively better than they treat Christian men. And I say that because any treatment is better than being marched out into the desert and shot to death.

So we could break it down and categorize each type of right desecrated by Muslim barbarians—non-Muslim women’s rights, Christian rights, gay rights, ethnic minority rights, etc.—or we could just say that ISIS has a problem with human rights, period. They may infringe on these rights differently depending on who you are (women are raped, men are cooked alive), but the only ones granted “rights” at all are those who fit into the narrow category prescribed by whoever happens to be holding the gun at any particular moment.

In any case, when the Left talks about fighting for women’s rights, they usually aren’t referring to the Middle East anyway. Even though I think the very term women’s rights is philosophically problematic, I would have no qualms at all if feminists went to Muslim lands to concentrate all their efforts there. In fact, if any feminist gender-studies professor or Cosmopolitan editor wants to travel to Iran to continue her mission of female liberation, I will happily pay for the plane ticket. But they do no such thing, which makes the “feminist movement” all the more pointless and intellectually dishonest.

Politicians tout their devotion to “women’s rights” on their campaign websites, but rarely do they make any specific mention of the women being sexually brutalized and murdered by Islamists overseas. Instead, they vow to fight for women’s “equal rights” and “equal opportunity” here in America, despite the rather relevant detail that women already have equal rights and equal opportunity here in America. These politicians might as well start organizing rallies to repeal nationwide alcohol prohibition and the Fugitive Slave Act while they’re at it.

IMAGINARY PERSECUTIONS

Of course, liberals will claim that women are still deprived of rights because of the “wage gap” and “rape culture” and alleged conservative assaults on “reproductive health,” but even if these were legitimate issues, they wouldn’t have anything at all to do with equal rights. Yes, women are victims of violence in this country, but none of the violence is legal. When a woman is raped, her legal rights have not been violated by the State but by a person. So even if there were a veritable “rape epidemic” in our society, it wouldn’t be at all an issue of women possessing unequal legal rights or protections.

As it happens, though, while rape is obviously a real and terrible phenomenon, the so-called American “rape epidemic” is a dangerous fable concocted by the Left. In fact, rape is another area in which women possess more legal rights than men. Many colleges have rape tribunals set up that allow women to make anonymous rape accusations against men, who will then face severe penalties even if no evidence was ever presented against them. Worse still, if two drunk people have sex on a college campus, the man can be accused of rape the next day on the basis that a consenting drunk person cannot give consent.

By that logic, women should frequently find themselves expelled or in prison for drunk hookups as well, but that never happens. Men are the only ones who can be accused of rape simply because the woman regrets what she did the next day. If “rape culture” creates unequal legal protections for anyone, it’s men.

Likewise, the “wage gap” is a faulty basis from which to prove that women still lack equal rights in this country. This “gap” is not something instituted by the government, or by anyone, actually, because it’s a work of fiction. Not only does the wage gap not exist, but there’s already been a law passed to alleviate the nonexistent problem. It’s a fake problem that’s been fake-solved by bad laws and dumb regulations.

Do women make “seventy-seven cents for every dollar men earn”? Sure, according to some figures. But that statistic is about as meaningful as saying, “Women give birth to one hundred percent of the babies” or “Women spend a billion dollars more each year at the gynecologist.” All of these things are probably true, but to cite them in an effort to prove discrimination is ridiculous.

The “seventy-seven cents” figure lies by omission. Purposefully left out of the equation are relevant details like: tenure, job title, hours worked, region, experience, skill level, industry, occupation, safety risks, education level, and difficulty. The figure simply compares all women and all men who work—however poorly or however competently—for over thirty-five hours in any job, in any part of the country, for any period of time, at any experience level.

A receptionist working thirty-eight hours a week at your local dentist’s office is evenly stacked up against a stockbroker or a coal miner. The salary of a male neurosurgeon is compared to that of a female manicurist. A male electrician is contrasted with a Denny’s waitress.

In all cases, the disparity is shoved under the “wage gap” blanket, and used to paint a picture of sexism and paternalistic oppression.

The reality is this: Men are more likely to work dangerous, physically demanding, high-stress jobs. They’re more likely to work weekends and holidays. They’re more likely to be willing to relocate. They’re more likely to pursue jobs in higher-paying fields.

Loggers and steelworkers are paid well, but the job requires the sort of brute force that most women don’t possess. A job on an offshore oil rig will pay handsomely because of the risks, the physical nature of the work, and the demands it places on your time. You will find more men taking these positions than women, but are we ready to chalk that up to “discrimination”? Will the average feminist college grad actually travel to North Dakota to find a job drilling for oil, thereby helping to alleviate the nefarious wage gap, or will she stay at home and look for something easier to do, but then spend her spare time complaining that no women are out there drilling for oil in North Dakota?

Women business owners earn 50 percent less than men business owners. Does this mean that women business owners are discriminating against themselves? Does it mean that the State is conspiring to stop women from opening businesses? The State does make it enormously difficult for anyone to become an entrepreneur, but does anyone actually believe—and can they provide evidence to prove—that the government makes it even more cumbersome for women?

Probably not.

So seventy-seven cents on the dollar? OK, and…? What does that prove?

This is the kind of math done only by politicians and propagandists. If you need workable and realistic numbers—statistics that tell you something important or relevant or even slightly functional—you would, obviously, control for factors that threaten to wildly skew your data, that disproportionately impact the equation, and that fog your ultimate conclusion.

Yet, because the “women’s rights” narrative must be supported, we still hear about this crisis that a three-minute Google search will reveal as bogus. Liberals are never satisfied, even when they get exactly what they want to address an issue they fabricated out of thin air.

The Left’s crusade for “women’s rights” is an obnoxious, insidious farce, a lie designed to drive a wedge between the sexes and sow seeds of division and suspicion. Liberal feminists will say they don’t hate men, but in truth, their “women’s rights” narrative is fueled only by hatred. They envy men, resent children, and detest themselves.

A feminist will say that women are not “equal” in America, and she’ll try to prove her point by making up these various systematic anti-woman tyrannies, but really, when it comes down to it, she means that women are not equal to men simply because they are not men. That’s her real beef. She does not want women to have equal protection under the law—as we’ve seen, she wants, and has, greater protection. What she really desires is sameness.

The feminist loathes her own nature. She wants to be as men are, and wants men to stop being as they are and become as she is. Feminism presents masculinity as the ideal while also tearing it down. It hates men because they’re men, and women because they aren’t. It is, in short, an insane and delusional philosophy. But because it cannot be brought to actual fruition, the feminist demands we all cooperate with—and submit to—the delusion.

REAL PERSECUTIONS

With all of this said, there are a few areas where, admittedly, our culture particularly degrades women. These are not “women’s rights” issues, but human issues that seem to especially impact the fairer sex. First is the evil, repugnant pornography industry that primarily trades in the debasement and objectification of women and children. And we’ve already talked about the other two areas where women are degraded and demeaned: transgenderism and abortion.

Pornography, transgenderism, abortion. These are the real enemies of women in our culture. They defile everything that makes a woman unique, beautiful, and true. But you’ll notice that feminists, with rare exception, are not referring to these areas when they talk about “women’s rights.” On the contrary, they claim that these are avenues of female empowerment.

The feminist discussion of “women’s rights” is not meant to help women. At best, it’s intended only to justify the continued existence of feminism, and at worst, it denigrates men, oppresses children, and provides cover to those who harm women.

Women have equal rights and then some in this country, but they still face their own struggles. Those struggles need to be met head-on, but feminism isn’t up to the task. It’s too busy fighting battles it already won last century and claiming sole ownership of ideas that existed hundreds of years before its proponents started lecturing about “male privilege” at our universities.

If you believe that women should not be systematically oppressed by the government—good. I agree with you. Almost everybody agrees with you. That belief just makes you a constitutionalist.

If you believe that women possess an inherent worth and dignity equal to that of men—great. I agree with you. That belief makes you Christian, or at least brings you closer to becoming one.

All of the ground is covered; there is no need for feminism. Whatever good could have been found is now covered in piles of death and hatred, and no matter what anyone wants to believe, the roots of “bad feminism” can be traced back to “good feminism.” It’s all connected. Saying that you need to cling to feminism just because you believe in equal protection under the law is like saying that you have to join an anarchist cell just to be a proponent of smaller government.

So there is no need for feminism, unless you wish to tinker with the definitions of “equal protection” and “inherent worth and dignity,” so as to justify things like abortion-on-demand and taxpayer-subsidized birth control.

For that, you do need feminism, and that’s why society would be better off without it.