I've recently read Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics and also am slowly grinding through Invisible Women, another piece of feminist literature.
It could be said that I am on a bit of a feminism binge at the moment. This is largely in reaction to my youtube shorts feed, which unfortunately for a while became full of anti-women propaganda, and toxic-masculinity garbage.
So what have I learned? Firstly, I have learned that I am a feminist, and secondly, I have learned that feminism as a movement is in trouble. Whoa! A straight white male providing a negative opinion on feminism! But before you cancel me forever, first let me explain.
The radical feminism defined by Bell Hooks defines a feminist as something like, "Those that that are opposed to sexism and the patriarchy", and defines patriarchy as, "a society in which the strong rule the weak".
I hold this system of values very strongly. I strongly believe that society should be dominated by democratic decision making, rather than by the private interests of the wealthy and powerful. I wholly wish that I could live in a place that embodied these values. "Feminism is For Everybody" truly panders to those that value equality of opportunity across race, class and gender, and describes a wonderful value system that ought to be easily accessible to both men and women. What is problematic though, is that this definition of feminism isn't really mere feminism.
The problem that feminism has, is that there is a much more popular definition that describes a feminist as somebody that wants equality between men and women, and this definition really has nothing to do with the inequality between women and other women of different classes and races.
This turns feminism into a pissing match, of men-vs-women where there are examples of both men and women that go around putting down the opposite gender, in a kind of fascicle competition to determine which group is superior. This is terrible two-fold:
Firstly, this kind of identity-politics is nonsense. There are so many people that do not fit into the stereotypes of their groups that it makes little sense to evaluate a person on anything other than a case-by-case basis.
Secondly, and more importantly this conflict prevents unity in facing the more important crises in our modern era: The growing wealth and power inequality.
We are living in a generation that is unable to organise itself for it's own benefit, and the conflict that is manufactured around the feminist cause by people praying on members of their own gender for support is, in my opinion, a driving factor behind this.