All good points, D. It does call to mind a discussion you & I had several years ago in which you urged against my usage of the term “equality” and a good case made for your avoidance of it.

I bring this up not to invite a semantic bugbear in as third party between you and I, but to illustrate that such ongoing connotative uses of more and more terms, as ideological codes rather than as meaning what they, you know, mean, has made dialogue even between friends, spouses, coworkers and those with common cause nearly impossible to conduct, without sooner or later having one of these definitional disputes become the essence of the conversation.

On its face, to continue the prior point raised, the contention that “feminism is about equality” is absurd and indefensible on its face. Nowhere in the fashion trend that claiming feminism to oneself has become can it be shown that such an ideology will ever have its demands met with anything like real equality. If this were a valid premise there would not be dozens of laws naming women for special status and none doing the same for men; there would not be entire professions dominated quite to everyone’s seeming satisfaction by one sex or the other, while simultaneously we are reminded daily that high-paying, safe, indoor professions must by any means necessary achieve this “gender parity” that is apparently civilization’s only hope for unarticulated reasons.

Et cetera, and the list of examples, again, is too long to include here just now.

So your quest for what you name as “true” equality is, I know full well, motivated by your own sense of genuine (as opposed to “social”) justice. But it had been you who pointed out to me long ago, that even the utterance of the word will auto-deploy ideological memetics having no relation to anything like equality, among those who hear or see you using it.

And here we are once again, explaining and clarifying ourselves, trying not to place one another on the defensive, merely because entire swathes of language have been hijacked, making ordinary conversation into a minefield of mistaken meanings and unintended pronouncements.