Oh, I’m so very sorry that you have to do a tiny bit more work and find out specifically what someone stands for before you can coherently argue against them instead of slapping the feminist label on it and being done with it.
First, I would suggest that when you attack feminism in the abstract, you attack views that are actually currently and widely held by feminists. It’s a diverse movement, but there are actual mainstream views. Frequently even that will not be very helpful, so you will have to find out specifically which group of people you are addressing with your criticism.
If feminists can and do frequently criticise feminist views then so can you.
In that regard feminism is kind of like, say, conservatism or liberalism or socialism or nationalism.
Now, I myself do not have a problem with chucking even big and complex concepts like that on the trash heap of history if they actually do have a consistently disastrous history. You won’t find me putting much work into arguing against fascism or royalism or racism or antisemitism. I’m willing to dismiss those wholesale.
Feminism, whatever its faults may be in your view, is about a million miles away from clearing that, however. It’s absurd to even think it could approach that same standard of wholesale dismissal. It has no history of harm at all.
It’s an extremely narrow, extremely small ideology with little diversity. It doesn’t have much history or historical importance and the specific views I’ve encountered were firstly nearly always the same or similar and secondly not very convincing or just blatant untruths. As such to me many proponents of MRM views often felt like a tight knit group with a very specific worldview without much subtlety in their argument.
I.e. if feminism were the concept of atheism, the MRM would be the Westboro Baptist Church and not Christianity or belief in some deity as a whole. (That’s a slightly shitty metaphor since the frequent conflict MRM activists dream up between them and feminism is pretty absurd. Men getting harsher prison sentences? Men being disadvantaged during divorces? That’s often based on strict and old-fashioned gender roles, something many feminists abhor.)
First, I would suggest that when you attack feminism in the abstract, you attack views that are actually currently and widely held by feminists. It’s a diverse movement, but there are actual mainstream views. Frequently even that will not be very helpful, so you will have to find out specifically which group of people you are addressing with your criticism.
If feminists can and do frequently criticise feminist views then so can you.
In that regard feminism is kind of like, say, conservatism or liberalism or socialism or nationalism.
Now, I myself do not have a problem with chucking even big and complex concepts like that on the trash heap of history if they actually do have a consistently disastrous history. You won’t find me putting much work into arguing against fascism or royalism or racism or antisemitism. I’m willing to dismiss those wholesale.
Feminism, whatever its faults may be in your view, is about a million miles away from clearing that, however. It’s absurd to even think it could approach that same standard of wholesale dismissal. It has no history of harm at all.