Leaving aside for a second the difficulty of pinning down exactly what "feminism"
So it's not just the equality of women, right? Well, there is the issue. You can't defend it as the sole barrier of the equality of women while saying you can't even define it. Because you can just straw man a defense up about anything with that. If tomorrow I say female circumcision
is feminist, and that idea somehow catches on within feminist ideologues, and someone from outside feminism comes in and says "
that doesn't sound very feminist"--if that argument can be pushed back with the equality of women argument then you've just poisoned the equality of women with the baggage of being stuck in this cancerous ideology. This is WHY we codify ideologies we practice, because the
divine right of kings sucks. This thought that its "too hard to define" is how you wind up with Feminism defending the Burka, or Feminism applying to men who say they are women, it's how high activity ideologues (IE SJWs) hijack a base principle like "equality of women" and use it to defend radicalism.
is when it doesn't have any codified tenets that are actually written down, you seem to be saying that if we took modern feminism, excised all the extreme leftist elements, and then just let what's left advocate for the same things they're advocating for now, women would be in just as good of shape. But this is not the case, if the extreme leftist elements are excised, then the current status quo becomes extreme leftist simply because everything to the left of it has been excised. It is now the "unrealistic, detached from reality" SJW insanity that most people ignore, and the new status quo is something far to the right of what it currently is.
Not exactly what I'm saying, I'm more speaking about the above, the coherence of an ideology. When an ideology which rails against white males on Liberal campuses as misgonistic and oppressive but then can also be used to defend a codified system where marital rape in encouraged and men can beat their wives (Sharia), it's a god damn mess. The liberation of women should NOT be anywhere around defending Islam, the fact that it is shows that "feminism" from the modern Left is pretty much being used as a whore, because that Messianic quality--this belief that
it is the savior of women and if its attacked all of its goodness will be eradicated! (IE again, tying a core principle of modern morality to an ideology that can be used for anything.)
However, that all said....Do you think its a bad thing if the current Left shifts some to the right? That's what's happening now ANYWAY. It's just happening with an arms race that is quickly turning sending normal Liberal people running to the hills of conservatism re-thinking a bunch of issues Leftist thought they had in their pocket...Which leads to you...well, you know what it leads to (Below).
By the same token, you can't have Trump as President without Richard Spencer existing. This doesn't mean that Trump is a product of Richard Spencer's ideology, but if Richard Spencer's ideology didn't exist and wasn't at least tolerated on a free speech basis, (IE he's allowed to speak, even if few agree with him) then Trump's platform would BE the extreme right platform simply by virtue of everything to the right of it not existing anymore, and he could never win because the political center would be far to the left of where it currently is.
You're right. Do you think this is a good thing? I don't. Trump is setting fire to something that's gone
horribly fucking wrong, he's
not a solution I, or anyone else wanted in NORMAL circumstances. But he's a symbol that people will BURN this mother fucker down before some asshole tells us Sharia is Feminist. This is
BAD, Trump as president is BAD in a normal,
sane world. He's only good in an insane world where the cultists which have infested this ideology are in charge. He's chemotherapy for a cancer, no one WANTS chemo, but its better than dying.
Richard Spencer and David Duke both got interviews with fucking CNN, and they both did the conservative talk radio circuit. Duke has been largely disowned by the alt right because he just refused to stop claiming he had Trump's support, but conservative media couldn't get enough of him in 2016.
This is not what I meant and you know it. Two of the feminist I mentioned WROTE and did commentary (IE were pundits on) major networks (Dworkin did articles but she died a long time ago). They were not called on to poke fun at them or feed the circus of "look at how horrible this dude is". If you count that then fucking PiV is rape feminists regularly appear on Fox news because Tucker Carlson makes fun of them. I'm talking about people brought on to do commentary or analysis or allowed to write their own editorials. Grear, for example, is pretty much on CNN, ABC, NBC and whatever whenever there is an issue with women that is political.
When a black dude gets shot and there is a March, do they call up Spencer and Duke and ask them to be play by plays or get an "in depth racial analysis" of the situation from an 'expert'? LOL...And yes that's exactly what they do from these feminists which often make statements about stripping rights and harming people that someone like Spencer would NEVER make (And actively opposes).
I grew up in a town where several groups of parents tried to have me thrown out of the (public) school when they discovered I was agnostic, and when that failed they tried to obtain an actual restraining order forbidding us from communicating with their kids in any way. I won't deny being prejudiced against this type of environment but somehow I don't think places like this have progressed enough to not look down on women working in the past 15 years.
You'd be dead wrong. (Look at the gains on this chart. Want to know why its growing so quickly? Because the WW2 generation is dying. They died as much in the last five years as they did throughout this chart. Now they are nearly totally gone. A huge power base of the kind of beliefs you think are enforced literally died in the last 20 years.)
And this is a big part of the issue. Liberals do not understand how thoroughly they won the culture war, how they've utterly shamed even marginal conservative values to the point where the public view on what's acceptable has shifted exponentially as people who were old enough to resist it (The elders, WW2) have died. Rather than giving their opponents time to adjust (IE the middle of the road people who tepidly accepted it because they still work and network with younger folks), they decided to piss on their grave, and do a dance and start cutting children's balls off so they can have a more equal world, and they do it all using the EXACT same tactics (IE Feminism is one) that worked during the death of the moral majority.
Except now it seems like all the fears of those moral majority who got BTFO were PRECISELY true, and its making your average Liberal
recoil. This is a demographic time bomb for the Left, and Feminism is a primary example of shit that needs to be cleaned up.
This is how you get Trump. Don't clean up, and continue to use violence to enforce crazy beliefs because the Left has tied women's equality to the fucking burka, and it's also eventually how you get Hitler.