we have different life experiences
Indeed we do, and thus there is no way I would seek to invalidate or dismiss how you come to solve your life’s equations. The way you explain yourself makes a lot of sense here.
One of the big differences I see here, is that for decades now my exposure to feminist women has been predominantly of women who never had a father at all, and whose ideas about male power or privilege come from the cliche parade of Mom’s Boyfriends. But also such women seem tormented with a state of permanent civil war within themselves and toward their mothers, all at once seeking both to rationalize (and too often, repeat) how their mothers had been actively involved in their fatherlessness, but also using one man after another as a sort of prop in a melodrama aimed at their mothers to prove that the daughter can do the Managing Men thing better than her mom ever could.
This leads to such a conflicted and embittered approach to coexisting with a man, that few men are capable of enduring it very long, and thence comes the parade, the ongoing exercises in serial monogamy that see children raised in households with as many as dozens of men in and out of them through their childhoods, not a one of them their dad.
And no, I don’t blame everything on feminism. Of everything you said above, this is the one assertion I find as lazy and even a cheap shot and not at all reflective of the bulk of the ideas I have communicated with you. I have said again and again, and surely you have read some of it, that a widespread matriarchalism, utterly bereft of any feminist theory or politics, is far more powerful and far more destructive to men, women, children, families and communities, than feminism could ever be blamed for. That would give feminism way too much credit, which I find feminism straining to claim too much of anyway, for things it had little to do with.
Home appliances, safe highways, automatic transmissions, consumer credit, college educations, all these factors have affected the relations between men and women both negatively and positively, and changed the roles of each beyond any prior recognition and in a very short span of three or four generations. And I don’t see how feminism has played much a part in any of it, or not nearly as much as have the blue-collar men who make it all possible, men who mostly have wives and children and call their spouse The Boss and mean it, no thanks whatsoever going to any feminist movement.
Women are powerful, capable, awe-inspiring, natural leaders, and men are more than willing to be led by them. This I have seen all my life; only women who make themselves into men’s enemies by naming, shaming and blaming us for everything that goes wrong for women, which is largely how I read feminist theory and practice both, make themselves also into women not worth following, or even having any time for at all.
Maybe this doesn’t apply to you and in all due respect I concede that point, but show me a woman calling herself feminist, and see me crossing the street to avoid whatever harm and venom she is bringing my way, a woman who has so little self-respect or recognition for her own innate and immeasurable capacities, that she thinks she needs a cheap pop-culture label to augment them for her. She can point that wherever she likes, but not at me. I have more than enough experience with how that projectile explodes on impact, and don’t care to be struck by them any more.
