The comedian Aziz Ansari is a Male Feminist because he is male and he has said that he is a feminist. No other qualification is required in the age of labels, but then it is important not to get caught.

A recent news story, in which a young woman gives an account of her date with him, reveals him as a man who is, apart from being “a feminist”, dependent on hydraulics more than romance to achieve an erection. He rushed her through a dinner, took her to his flat, and did a set of things that made her feel she was assaulted.

These days the male claim to feminism is a virtue that has the same halo as disgust for Aadhaar, capitalism and fascism. But can men ever be feminists? Forget the charlatan empathy uncles, the fake good boys and earnest simpletons, can honest, intelligent men, including Barack Obama, ever be feminists?

At the heart of all the contested meanings of feminism is the indisputable idea that feminism is a response to a world designed by men for men. Without the experience of being a woman, can men comprehend the response and why the response is the way it is? Are empathy and conjecture, which are good enough for men to achieve great novels about women, a match for experience? Absolutely not. Experience is everything.

The experience of a wounded state also creates rage and bias, which are better conductors of ideas than objectivity.

The publication of the Aziz Ansari story, I am certain, was greatly encouraged by the stupendous success of a short fiction called ‘Cat Person’ in the New Yorker magazine. It is a story about a young woman on a date experiencing very bad sex. Thousands of women saw in the story their own experiences. Some called the bad sex “rape”. Men were confused by the hysteria. In fact, from a male point of view the man in the story was just a regular guy, even nice until the last sentence. The Male Feminists too were baffled, but they kept silent as they normally do when confused.

To call men feminists is like calling every Brahmin who wishes Dalits well a Dalit. Men can be allies of women, but that does not make them feminists because they are, including good men, a major part of the problem. They are the creators and beneficiaries of what feminism wishes to overthrow. They will sabotage the resistance knowingly, through criminal acts or even giving poor ratings to films that celebrate women, and unknowingly in more principled ways, like using the ruse of equality to co-opt women into professions where they will spend a lifetime imitating men, professions where men hold all the cards but graciously let women have panel discussions on how men hold all the cards.

“Equality feminism,” the writer Germaine Greer said last year repeating one of her most important thoughts, is exactly what capitalism and governments use to expand their army of exploiters. “If equality means entitlement to an equal share of the profits of economic tyranny, it is irreconcilable with liberation,” she wrote over a decade ago.

The very idea of athletic excellence, for instance, which is the first foreboding of little girls that they are innately at a disadvantage in at least one important sphere of life, is an honorable insult. In fact, until 2016, the definition of a female athlete was a person who was deficient in a hormone that is extremely useful in athletes — testosterone. Now there is total confusion as to who exactly is a female athlete.

Most men who claim they are feminists say that they are so because they believe men and women “have equal rights”. At first glance this is virtuous but then it is convenient for men to promote this view. The idea of equality as a moral goal of feminism makes women from elite backgrounds sound hollow. How can Indian women who have had more opportunities than almost all Indian men lament inequality? Is Indian feminism then a grouse of the top 2% against the top one percent? So equality cannot be the central goal of feminism as men make it out to be.

The tussle between men and women is often a zero-sum game. One wins at the expense of the other. For instance, India’s reformative rape law has meaningful powers because it is at the expense of the fundamental human rights of men. If Ansari were in India and his date imagined she was actually raped he would be in a stinky prison cell right now. The anarchist activist Julian Assange once described the paradise for women, Sweden, as “the Saudi Arabia of feminism”.

Any act of feminism that does not make men uncomfortable is probably something useless to women. But these days women are under pressure to make feminism palatable to men, and the ubiquity of festive Male Feminists is evidence that women are succumbing.