A high school student speaks out on feminism

Today’s feminism has lost its way.  In the late 1800s, “first wave” feminism rightfully started out as a movement to establish, first and foremost, suffrage for women (i.e., the right for women to vote). From there, it then quickly evolved into a movement that focussed on gaining women equal opportunity in the workplace and equality in the eyes of the law.  Through the 1960s, “second wave” feminism sought an end to sexual harassment and fought against discrimination.

All of these were worthy goals and, to a large extent, have successfully been accomplished.  However, feminism today—“third wave” feminism—has morphed into a shrill, self-righteous crusade that, in what seems like a desperate bid to remain relevant, has not just vilified men but has turned on children, families and even women themselves.

Modern feminism has set out to infiltrate family life, destroying it with poisonous lies through the cultivation of a “culture of grievance” in which women are always to be seen as victims. It has done this by promoting the ideological falsehood that men and women are not natural allies, but that their relationship is adversarial in nature. Feminism strives to pit women against men at every opportunity.  

Because of this, men are not allowed to speak on any issue concerning women, from the supposed “pay gap” to abortion to even the difficulties men face simply being men.  The new anti-men hashtags coined by modern feminists—#killallmen or  #menstears to name a couple—show how feminism has allowed itself to become synonymous with misandry. Delivering generalizations on the back of slogans is, as Chairman Mao proved, a powerful way of thought control. It allows the idea to form that all men are inherently bad while overlooking the fact that there are also bad women.

The fact is, over all, men and women work well together and I can attest to this personally. My father raised five girls with my mother. When my mother gets complimented on having been a good mother to so many children, she always responds that she couldn’t have been half the mother she is without the extraordinary support of her husband. It is important to note now far this goes against the modern-day feminist creed. From today’s feminist standpoint, my father is an oppressor who kept my mother locked away at home to raise the children and cook the meals when, instead, she could have had a fulfilling role slaving for a big corporation as a top executive.

In the eyes of today’s feminist, my mother sacrificed her education to the “drudgery” of motherhood and therefore failed to reach her full potential. My mother is, in essence, a “traitor to the sisterhood.” This is not how my sisters and I see it, nor how my father sees it and certainly not how my mother sees it.

Furthermore, because feminism promotes the idea that women should have a “fulfilling” career, the majority of today’s children are now left in daycare centres to be raised by the state. This is another Maoist idea that Western feminism, in the name of female empowerment, has embraced: collective, state-sponsored childcare. We can already see the results of what happens when the state raises the children instead of the parents; today we have a generation of children in which mental illnesses, suicides, and drug use are all out of control.

How did this happen? Feminism thrives on the lie that the centre of woman’s life is her career. But if my father is anything to go by, in the end, a career is not even the centre of a man’s life. Most people lying on their deathbeds do not lament the career they must now relinquish. Instead, the dying lament the loved ones they must now leave, most especially their children.

Secondly, feminism has turned from meaningful, worthy goals into a dogmatic, indoctrinating agenda. With its poisonous slogans, the new age feminism is just repeating history from totalitarian regimes with their propaganda. There is no clearer example of this than the fight over the rights to abortion. Feminists use slogans such as “Shout Your Abortion” as they wave placards and mindlessly chant through megaphones. But in actual fact, it can be argued that none of us own our bodies; in short, we are all little more than mere tenants of our bodies and we are forced to vacate when we die.

However, more worrying than the slogans and propaganda is that, in its rabid promotion of abortion, feminism has actually turned against itself in a grotesque twist of irony; abortion has paved the way for the erasure of future women through sex-selection abortion. Little girls are aborted for being little girls because little boys are more valued in some cultures. In a nutshell, feminists claim for themselves an almost untouchable virtue even in the face of something as fundamentally and obviously discriminatory as sex-selective abortion.

Lastly, feminism has managed to hoodwink an entire society into believing that a woman deserves a job or a promotion just because she’s a woman. No one demonstrated this bizarre, modern-day fraud better than our very own Prime Minister—the buffoon with a bouffant—Justin Trudeau. When he created his cabinet, he mandated that it was to consist of 50% women. However, he did so from a caucus that was made up of only 22% women. The unpleasant message for women is that they don’t have to be particularly good to assume a job, they just have to be female. How infantilizing. When I finally start my career, I hope I’m chosen because I’m competent, able, and skilled. NOT because I’m female.

Feminism has become its own worst enemy. Far from promoting the rights of women as it once did, it now strives to away from women any sense of responsibility by promoting a culture of victimhood. With its faux outrage over “mansplaining,” “manspreading,” and eggplant emojis to obsessions over trivial matters such as “slutwalks,” armpit hair and bra burning, feminism is rendering itself ridiculous and petty. Its silence over real issues of concern for women, such as female genital mutilation, forced marriages, and honour killings has made it difficult to take it seriously anymore.

Helene Hennig 17-year-old student high school in Vancouver.