Why I Am Not a Feminist

There are questions we need to ask ourselves. They’re going to make us uncomfortable. The first: Has feminism created a better world? Not just for you personally, but for both women and men in all levels of society. The next: Has feminism created the space for men to take on traditionally feminine traits at the same level it has created the space for women to take on traditionally masculine traits? And lastly: If we say we want a better

Our job, as feminists, should not be recruitment. It should not be conversion. It should be listening to the wants and needs of women that might differ from our own. The condescending attitude of Western feminists toward women in Muslim countries—this idea that these women need to be rescued from their head scarves and their traditions—is a good illustration of that.

And yet if we were able to sit down, without judgment, and ask what we’re not offering these women, we might actually be able to get somewhere. Not along the lines of conversion. We need to stop thinking that way. Instead, we could see the limitations of our own project; that we’re not as smart as we think we are; that maybe the ways these women are unhappy line up with the ways we are unhappy.

It’s feminism’s fault that these are the two options we have available to women. Either you can let a man take care of the financial and outer world side of things while you spend time with your children and shop

energy into breaking down social structures rather than creating new, more empathetic ones.

family can often seem like a method of keeping women docile and tamed. But we’re all so eager to overcorrect. We toss out entire systems because they once hurt us, without taking a moment to reflect on how, so often, they helped us.

The workplace and capitalistic society has become increasingly hostile. Not only to women, but to men, too. By keeping the focus on how women are doing in the marketplace, rather than how human beings exist under this system of competition and precarity, our thinking remains very small. How are women faring in the job market in comparison to men? Does that really matter when due to overwhelming student loan debt, sharply decreased job stability, the gutting of social services and work benefits, rapacious CEOs and boards of directors, and globalization, the world of work and money is hurting everyone?

median feminist is generally going to be a middle-class, educated white woman.

When feminists decided to fight for the right to work, what they meant was the right to become doctors, lawyers, and so on. Women have always scrubbed toilets and floors, have always been paid to touch other people’s bodies as nurses and assistants and sex workers.

To understand that, all we really have to do is take a look at what the feminist revolution has, and has not, offered to women.