Why do so many women deny or dismiss the issues with feminism?

Question

When confronted about the harm feminism has done and is doing, many women will dismiss it by saying "that's not real feminism" or "she's not a real feminist", thereby dismissing the problems and relieving feminism if its guilt in the matter. It's a cop out that ensures the real problems will never get addressed and instead just be swept under the rug. Feminism is obviously responsible for those things because feminism is as feminism does. The actions of feminists are the only things that matter, not a dictionary definition that is at odds with the reality of the modern feminist movement.

If women actually cared about equality and the welfare of men and boys, why don't they just acknowledge the actual problems with feminism and try to address them rather than denying them? Why not try to fix feminism so it can actually be a force for good rather than letting it continue to do harm and deteriorate to the point where no one supports it anymore, which helps no one? We are close to that point today since few women even support the movement anymore because most are too embarrassed to call themselves a feminist. It just seems so self defeating to me.

Is it because they are ashamed of those things and don't want to acknowledge that by supporting modern feminism they are also supporting all those bad things the movement has done and continues to do?

Help me understand this.

NamerOfStars · Accepted Answer

It's a predictable outcome of the course of history:
-first, humans are hard-wired to see women as inherently weaker and in need of help; this is why media outlets will run stories saying things like "one out of four homeless people is a woman" as a justification for why homeless people should be helped. It's not coherently thought out sexism, just unthinking adherence to what your lizard brain says.
-second, the society that emerged out of the biological realities we evolved in placed women in a protected position. This is where sentiments like Hillary Clinton's infamous "Women are the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat." Again, it's socially-reinforced biology, not hatred. No less stupid, but still.
-third, as societies become more developed, richer, and safer, it becomes a point of pride and status to have your women do less and less labor, making them safer and safer; a form of conspicuous consumption. Stone age women weren't sitting around salons like 18th-century French noblewomen; they were out gathering plants and weaving nets to trap and catch small game to bludgeon to death. That slowly changed over time.
-fourth, as being protected inherently means being restricted (you don't see breakdancers wearing plate armor, do you?), many women came to long for a more adventurous and exciting life, even if it also meant a more dangerous one. When society became safe enough, few could reasonably deny that more opportunities should be open to them, and the Feminist movement was born.
-fifth, when the World Wars broke out, women, long exempt from battle slavery, had to move in to the factories and mills to make up for the missing men. This had long been the case, of course, but this was on an unprecedented scale. As more and more people, men and women alike, began to see what women were actually capable of, more and more of them came to accept the idea that society should be more egalitarian, and let women have the same chances men did. But...
-sixth, a species-lifetime of evolution and the emergent society that resulted life these women woefully unprepared for the level of competition men deal with starting in childhood, and many failed to make much headway. Some people came to think that was a direct result of bias against women, and demanded concessions to gain an advantage.
-seventh, since, as I've elaborated above, it's more accurate to say it's caused by a bias FOR women, this didn't help; removing obstacles from your path so you don't have to struggle against them makes you *weaker*, not stronger, and that's on top of breeding resentment towards those who had to overcome them.
-eighth, some con artists realized that by hitching their wagons to a self-perpetuating movement that achieves the opposite of its stated purpose would provide them with a life-long meal ticket, and began preaching a social narrative that victimhood was a moral strength.
-ninth, this narrative was propagated by exploiting people's desires to help the unfortunate and make the world a fairer place.
-finally, there has to be bitter, VEHEMENT opposition to anything that challenges the narrative, lest it all fall apart. Thus the denial of men's issues, and the responding to any criticism of the movement with "You're just a misogynist".

Sixgunsound · Accepted Answer

Humans will always seek their own advantage, and so long as society continues to structure itself in such a way that all the advantages go to feminists who capitalize on what other women as well as men allow them to get away with, the behavior will continue. Whatever you subsidize you will get more of, whether that subsidy is in legal power, protection from the corresponding responsibilities and obligations that accompany rights and freedoms, or the ability to command attention simply for existing because it is hardwired from human evolution into both men and women to help a woman who appears to be struggling.

Feminism is essentially the art of transferring unearned resources and privilege from people who earn it to the people who don’t whether that is from men or other women. It is a rare feminist who is actually having difficulty in life, because they would be too busy trying to navigate their difficulties and would not be blessed with sufficient time or resources or leisure to complain for a living.

Legislatively and economically, things have never been better for women in the west in the field of human herstory, but the sheer volume of complaining and desperation to make all their first world problems the fault of men has never been worse. The following are a small set of examples of how this harms young women: they have to deal with stigma as gender hires at work where before quotas became an issue it was understood that a woman working in a job that was unusual for a woman got the job because she was the best candidate, an entire generation of young men going their own way because it’s legally and economically safer to have nothing to do with women anymore, and the pervasive negativity that dominates the every waking moment of the lives of people who don’t get paid if they aren’t continually inventing new issues with men to be offended by.

I feel so bad for my daughters having to grow up in a world made infinitely worse by a political movement which lacks the intellectual honesty or integrity to admit they are sexist bigots looking for low effort government thug enforced handouts and female supremacy. Racial supremacist bigots are rightly condemned, why is the same not true for gender supremacists?

Ez-Bri-Z · Accepted Answer

Literally replace your argument from the word feminist, to just about anything else like a specific religion, a specific race, a gender, a country, whatever. The answer is, you will always have radicals in any grouping of people so the answer "they aren't real feminists" is correct. They are radical misandrists.

Why do so many women deny or dismiss the issues with feminism?

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