Well, if you want one person’s opinion on feminism, here it goes. Most of the theory of feminism is completely sound, definitively necessary, and long overdue. Most of the practice or application of feminism is nonsense.

I am a 55 year old cnservative male who goes to church on Sunday, because I like the opportunity to be prodded into self-analysis and self-reflection — with a working rubric surrounding me. That is truly what I think of church, and what I think is the ‘practical value’ of it. You see, the theory of the Church is opposite the theory of feminism, in that proper practice of the core theories of the Church manifest themselves into fantastic elements of daily life. Unfortunatley, the theory of the Church often gets corrupted by the dogma of the church, and so sane people often have troubling reconciling the hypocrisy and contradiction.

This is a decent but not perfect analogy for what I think of feminism. The notion that women, and other demographic cohorts, get short-shrifted, and that empowerment and validation ought to be high on the agenda, is 100% logical, compelling, and reasonable. The problem comes when the dogma rears its ugly head. {Dogma, by the way, can be inelegantly defined as the inevitable product of philosphical and ethical truths, multiplied by human frailty, and corrupted by organizational heartlessness.}

Dogma prompts some women to refuse to shave legs or armpits not because doing so is an impostion on their autonomy as a human, but because the choice is intended to serve as a rebuke of the sociological forces that put conditions on such behaviors or expectations.

My point is the woman who shaves, or doesn’t shave, says at least as much by going about her business and asking for no one to notice, approve, or care. It is comparable to the quote attributed to Morgan Freeman about racism. What we should do about racism, he says, is “Stop talking about it.” The crux of that point is not to tell people to treat others fairly, and it is certainly not condoning discrimination and disenfranchisement. The point is still to notice, object, and work to emend the unacceptable behaviors and systems.

My wife has put up with me, raised three kids, and run her won business for most of her adult life and our marriage. She is from the Helen Reddy school of feminism, and she despises much of the rhetoric she hears from feminists. In her mind, equal pay is a no brainer. Equal opportunity falls right in there as well. Yet the message always seems to her to be to trun women into victims of one sort or another, and she doesn’t feel like a victim. To her, accepting that appellation is losing.

That is, I hope, a start to a good answer.