One of the cardinal sins is to disagree with the feminist doctrine that gender is entirely a social construction. Anyone the least bit familiar with evolutionary biology and the nature/nurture debate can see that it is not an either/or, and neuroscience has found subtle but interesting differences in the brains of men and women. [See this piece from Olga titled “Male and Female Brains Really Are Built Differently” — C.B.] But for some reason, ideas from the humanities (mostly critical theory) have been pitted against empiricism, and since the former must be correct, the latter can be dismissed.

It’s a shame, since it is due to progress in science (and not to Foucault) that society no longer believes that women have smaller, inferior brains and other such nonsense. But just as with religious extremists, feminists are fearful of what science might do to their perfect tapestry of beliefs, and what it might lead to in society, even if this doesn’t make any sense. It saddens me that friends I grew up with who were negatively affected by this mindset in the context of religion have traded that in for a different version.

What many feminists don’t understand when they complain about people refusing the “feminist” label is that it’s not about the ideas or the history. Most people don’t know much about feminist theory. It is everything to do with the feminists themselves. There is in feminism a tone of relentless grievance and antagonism. (Many feminists would tell me I’m a misogynist—a term bandied about so casually it has become self-parodic—despite the fact that I’d likely agree with them 75 percent of the time.) It is such an insular and dogmatic movement that, as with any similar milieu, people inside it can’t sense what is immediately apparent to others.

Look at the furor that erupted over Women against Feminism [see above for an example via Twitter — C.B.] There were some especially nasty responses to it, but most were the familiar spiel that if only these women knew what feminism actually meant, they wouldn’t say they were against it. What feminists didn’t see were the consistent patterns in what those women were saying.

Common reasons for being against feminism were they had been treated poorly by feminists and did not share the negativity towards men that they felt feminists were full of. They often qualified that their responses were to “modern” feminism, so as to differentiate it from earlier versions. These young women actually knew far more about feminist ideas than the average person, either from college or the internet, and they for various reasons disagreed with it. But the problem must be that they’re ignorant, because if people understood everything about feminism, they couldn’t possibly disagree with it.