Very neatly expressed.

Over a decade ago, one of my gurus theorized that the reason feminism was such a big hit with young women from the 60's on, was that it allowed them to rebel against their own mothers.

The traditional mother, who had held families and communities together in former days and didn't have much fun in her own younger days now faced the prospect of having her middle-aged husband stolen by a younger 'liberated' woman. The traditionals said it would all end in tears - and it has.

Society has forced people into an reaction-based lifestyle instead of making there own choices about how they live their life. If a man doesn't try to become an integrated part of society, then he has the option of choosing. However, most are pushed from a young age to integrate. This is what women are good at, but not men, which causes an extreme imbalance of the natural structure of society. Once that happens, the individual and family power is destroyed, allowing for the few at the top to control the masses. Those in power try to hide the options from those who have the ability to over throw the power - hide it from those with the real power to change things.

You make a very good point about integrating, or what I would call assimilation. Women can be very chameleonlike in their work lives, and it is small wonder that the most bureaucratic and top-heavy fields like banking and education have been so completely overtaken by women in recent years. Maybe men have changed or I have just never been around men who could handle it, but being buried in paperwork and reports and layers and layers of hierarchies never seemed like a manly way to make a living for me. After high school all I wanted was to get out of buildings and artificial lighting and filtered air and just live. Women seem to have an endless capacity to endure infinite bullshit and redundancy and makework and pointless endeavor in making a living, and men seem to be backing away from professions where our dignity is sacrificed on the altar of obedience for its own sake.

My dream world is one where no one ever signs anything and documents do not exist. If someone wants to know something about me they ask me, and not goddamn google me. If someone wants me to do something they give me some reason why I should and tell me what it is worth, and people forgive and accept and cooperate, and nobody ever counts anything except how many people need to eat when dinner is served. But that's just me.

If that sounds naive, the way the world works now, and the way women are more than happy to fill up all the offices and desks doing god knows what, and the way people will exercise blind, unaccountable power over each other because they can, seems outright vicious, and I want less and less to do with it as years pass. (Of course 100-plus temperatures don't help these days...)

Quote from Yan Yan

The traditionals said it would all end in tears - and it has.

Some of them deserved it.

Thank God I'm not in charge of what folks deserve. If I were there would be life imprisonment for parental abduction, everyone making over fifty grand a year (dollars not pounds) would have it confiscated and placed in a fund to restore children to their fathers, and every corporate executive, bureaucrat and elected official would be placed in hard labor, just as a beginning.

But I'm just an old hippie carpenter with a lot of hifalutin opinions, one of which is that feminism is a product of the advertising industry and has been targeted at upwardly-mobile young people for generations as a new form of hip even though it's far from new any more. It is a by-product of the phenomena of guilty liberal conscience and cause addiction, as it gives people with no real grievance something to be attached to or feel solidarity with.

Frankly I think the quickest cure for feminism would be to take every self-professed feminist and lock them up together in a convention center for thirty days.

The survivors would come out begging men to help them, and that would be that.

But that won't happen either. So I just try to understand what goes on for my kids' sake, so that maybe they can see the opposite sex in a friendly and positive light and live free of the outwardly-imposed intellectual falsehood gender struggle really is. It's not like being stuck sharing a planet with each other is something new...

Quote from dinohip51

You make a very good point about integrating, or what I would call assimilation. Women can be very chameleon-like in their work lives, and it is small wonder that the most bureaucratic and top-heavy fields like banking and education have been so completely overtaken by women in recent years. Maybe men have changed or I have just never been around men who could handle it, but being buried in paperwork and reports and layers and layers of hierarchies never seemed like a manly way to make a living for me. After high school all I wanted was to get out of buildings and artificial lighting and filtered air and just live. Women seem to have an endless capacity to endure infinite bullshit and redundancy and make work and pointless endeavor in making a living, and men seem to be backing away from professions where our dignity is sacrificed on the altar of obedience for its own sake.

Yep, I agree. I like doing things that can be finished. Cleaning and paperwork just don't "fit the bill". A house, program and even research can be completed. There's no way I can become part of a machine that thrives on mindless repetition.

Quote from dinohip51

Feminism as we know it is an upper-middle-class, intellectual construct, a form of self-entertainment promoted by privileged women, and by the men who want something from them (guess what?)

Hmmm. where did you get this information from? Feminism is based on the lower to middle class women. Feminists would love the upper middle class and upper class involved.

Women who have real need or lack or hardship in their lives know full well that a world without strong and capable men is not a fit place to live,

LOL, about the men. Seems you are the big ape, lol.,
Who taught you this? Feminism was based on the women at the bottom. Feminism stopped women using slaves, feminism stopped the women from having housemaids, servants, and made child carers a career. Besides, they wanted women to have equal wages to men.

I'm sorry to seem a fighter against you. That is not my intention for I know men matter... it's just that you really can't be every man, you really as one man can;t speak up for all men, and you as one man will have to give his life to fight for a cause which I doubt you will do.

I want to explore the relationship between feminist ideology and class alienation.

Get your OWN website and build it from the start.....

Hard to follow your logic but it's good to see a dissenting voice instead of just hearing from the preached-to choir.

I agree that someone helped institute all the changes you claim for feminism, but historically most of these came before the term itself or the anti-male ideology of feminism as we know it now was ever in use. Many here on this site express openly a willingness to help things be more fair for men and women both, but it seems the whole reason sites like this exist is because a great many men and women believe that feminism has transformed into a form of supremism claiming to represent all women as an interest group that is both victim and superior form of life. Much of the dialogue here is about the recurring themes in media showing men as dunderheaded ne'er-do-wells and women as the put-upon problem solvers, or the vast phenomenon in policymaking of singling out women solely on the basis of gender for special status and exclusive benefits.

Like unionism or socialism, feminism as a movement claims to represent the least fortunate members of society, but the voices one hears making these claims are coming from the university-educated, suburban-raised, greek-letter sector that uses the vogue status of feminism as a key through the door to privilege and position. Feminism is in, it's hip, it's the cutting edge of the idle intellectual mindset, and without the correct application of the latest claims about women as victims and men as oppressors, no one gets very far at least in the circles of academia, entertainment or liberal politics.

I certainly do not refute assertions made about oppression or injustice. But directing the cry for change at one gender at the expense of the other has led more to alienation between the sexes than it has brought about any actual betterment for civilization as a whole. We are told as men and fathers that mothers are the natural caregivers and that fathers are unreliable and unavailable, that men close ranks against women and mutually see to it that they cannot better themselves, that men possess all the opportunity and receive all the rewards while women have to take what they can scrounge for of what is left, that men are inherently brutal and violent while women are by nature peaceful and compassionate. All these cliches only ring true to people who know no better because they accept as truth what is told them by the most compelling and motivated voices, and just now those voices are fashionably calling for a world run by and for women.

The real changes that need to happen are not about gender justice but economic sanity, but feminism cannot resist the use of elitist and self-rewarding rhetoric to hypnotize women into believing that they are both superior to men and held back by us, and that it is they who deserve to be the elite and not us. This is an oxymoronic clash of sensibilities that cannot possibly lead to a more fair distribution of resources and opportunities because it takes the easy way out of claiming one constituency for itself and leading it on with the notion that anyone who is not "us" (women in this particular case) is the enemy, and that the only interest that must be served by change is the interest of that one group. This is not so unlike other movements building support by disseminating hate and ridicule against an impossibly evil enemy, such as Jews or capitalists or white folks, so far gone and so flawed in their original existence that only their ultimate destruction will meet the need described.

What men are wondering is, when you get your way and finally have a world run on feminist principles, what will you do with us? Will boys stop being born at all because they are all gender-selected and aborted before birth? Will those that remain be rounded up and placed in breeding camps? Will the practices of castration and eunuch slavery be renewed, given the recurring claim that our reproductive systems are the cause of all the evil in the world? Will fatherhood as an active and endorsed form of child-raising become an obsolete and prohibited taboo? Will women abusing men and children be given a pass under the claim "girls just want to have fun"?

I have ruffled more than a few feathers right here by continuing to say that movements are basically dangerous and irresponsible forms of herd behavior, and I can easily envision a successful men's movement being as vicious and bigoted as feminism has become, just as all well-meaning groups seeking change can be hijacked and transformed into repressive juggernauts. I eschew the MRM just as vocally as feminism because I believe in honor and decency and kindness, and movement rhetoric, strategy and conduct turn anyone showing compassion or understanding for the named "enemy" into an enemy of the new order. For every Karl Marx there is a Josef Stalin, because raw power is apparently an irresistible prize held out by movements who seek only to destroy and not to build. From a man's point of view, feminism is seeking to destroy male life in whatever form it can be identified as such, but I hear very little about what will take the place of strong-willed, proud, capable manhood once it is successfully abolished, and if the "leaders" of today's feminism ever had true power in their grasp, their rhetoric and actions suggest strongly a world with all the horrors for male human beings described above, and worse.

I have more to say, but it's your turn if you care to continue. Real debate is a refreshing change.

(BTW laugh out loud all you want but my daughter's father is no ape. I'll try to resist such suppurating pronouncements and ask that you do the same.