Has feminism gone too far?

Has feminism gone too far?

Many men and women today are rediscovering the joys of masculine dominance and leadership within a romantic relationship; that's what the Taken In Hand website is all about. [2] But men's dominance over women is something that feminism has denounced for several decades. Does that mean that Taken In Hand is incompatible with feminism? I'd say that all depends on what one means by the term “feminism.” [1]It has changed meaning over the decades, so that today's feminism would be almost unrecognizable to the early feminists who fought for votes and career opportunities for women.

One fateful turn, in particular, came with the idea that “the personal is political.” This idea implied that to be truly a feminist, a woman had to practice complete gender equality in her personal relationships—or even take the lead, to make up for the sins of the past. [3] This was basically a logical fallacy, which confused one sort of category (the political equality of men with women, in the public sphere) with a very different category (the equality of one specific man with one specific woman, in the very private and intimate arena of marriage). Feminism, which started out as being all about more choices for women, thus became one more dogma seeking to limit their choices; but now it was being done in the name of political correctness.[4]

Thus, women's “liberation” started to be seen as a matter of “liberating” them from having intimate relationships with men, especially masculine and dominant men. At the far extreme, books by feminist authors started to denounce all sexual intercourse between men and women as “rape,” (especially if the man was on top, gods forbid) and lesbian love became de rigueur if one were to be a truly “liberated” woman. We began to see widespread hysteria about “date rape” and “domestic violence” with over-inflated figures that claimed that most women were victims of male abuse of one sort or another; even though the women interviewed often did not even agree that assessment. And that abuse was blamed on the One Sin That Explains All Sins Against Women: namely, masculinity and male dominance.[5]

Masculinity itself became the enemy to be defeated, and we started to see the “gender deconstructionists” take over the academic world, with their bizarre notions that gender differences are not innate at all, but rather “socially constructed.” (The fact that other mammals exhibit many of the same gender differences that humans do is a fact that they conveniently overlook. [6]A cow is a very different animal from a bull.) The point of all that is to convince us that we have the power to change our perceptions of gender: if Nature didn't give us gender differences, then we can choose how we view gender. But Nature itself does not comply with that vision, and continually offers up proof that gender differences are innate. Therefore not all feminists were convinced; some thought men were just different, period.[7]

This branched off into the two main feminist ways of viewing ...