Valentine’s Day, we are told by a feminist blogger, is “a consumerist holiday, personified by patriarchal and heteronormative traditions which reinforces sexist stereotypes.” The anonymous 25-year-old assures her readers that she is “a strong, independent woman who doesn’t need a man.” This is fortunate because, apparently, no man needs her. She is alone and unloved, eating chocolate and watching Netflix while scrolling through profiles on the Tinder dating app — and this is what feminist “success” looks like.

An entire vocabulary of jargon phrases has been created by feminists to express their contempt for all things male and/or heterosexual. It is “sexist” to believe that women enjoy romance — cards and gifts, flowers and candy, etc. — and it is “heteronormative” to think that any woman might actually desire male companionship. Because the feminist is a “strong, independent woman,” she must regard males as utterly useless, insofar as she does not actively hate males as evil oppressors. “We identify the agents of our oppression as men,” Shulamith Firestone and her comrades in the feminist Redstockings collective declared in 1969: “All men receive economic, sexual, and psychological benefits from male supremacy. All men have oppressed women.”

Heterosexual romance is harmful to women, according to feminist theory: “In terms of the oppression of women, heterosexuality is the ideology of male supremacy.” Feminism has produced a thesaurus of phrases — “misogyny,” “objectification,” “harassment,” “rape culture,” etc. — which are more or less interchangeable as pejorative synonyms for normal male attitudes and behaviors. “Hegemonic masculinity,” for example, was coined by an Australian professor, Robert Connell, in his 1987 book, Gender and Power, in which he confessed he had “been uneasy with conventional masculinity almost as long as I can remember.” Connell was married to a feminist organizer, but he subsequently got a sex-change operation and became known as “Raewyn” Connell. “Hegemonic masculinity,” we are informed by Wikipedia, is “the culturally idealized form of manhood… socially and hierarchically exclusive.”

Robert “Raewyn” Connell’s 1995 book, Masculinities, is the founding text of an academic discipline called “masculinity studies” which is part of the feminist project of abolishing male/female differences. Young men must be taught that masculinity is wrong, because traditional manhood is “toxic,” according to proponents of feminist gender theory. More than a decade ago, Lawrence Summers was purged from the presidency of Harvard University after he had the temerity to suggest there are “innate differences” between men and women. Feminists consider all differences between men and women to be socially constructed by the gender binary of the heterosexual matrix, as Professor Judith Butler has declared. Feminism’s goal is to achieve equality through androgyny, eradicating masculinity and femininity so that men and women become exactly identical and, in such an egalitarian post-patriarchal utopia, what basis could there be for romantic love?

None whatsoever, as feminist Carrie Jenkins explains in her new book, What Love Is: And What It Could Be. Professor Jenkins, who teaches philosophy at the University of British Columbia, is an advocate and practitioner of polyamory. Her book has been praised by her fellow feminists as an argument against “traditional, heteronormative, monogamous, pair-bonded, procreative, romantic love.” It is wrong even to imagine that kind of love, Professor Jenkins recently told an interviewer: “This idea that it’s very romantic to be swept off your feet by a Prince Charming figure and rescued from a life of poverty or whatever by a wealthy man, is feeding into these gendered stereotypes. This is built into our ideas of who we find attractive, what it is to have a romantic story attached to your love life.”

You are promoting “gendered stereotypes” if you think a woman might enjoy being swept off her feet by a wealthy man. It is sexist to think that women find “a Prince Charming figure” attractive. Feminists now condemn every old-fashioned idea of “heteronormative, monogamous” love as imposed on women by patriarchal oppression. Three or four decades ago, such rhetoric was considered extreme. In the late 1970s, a lesbian collective in England called the Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group declared “serious feminists have no choice but to abandon heterosexuality,” explaining tersely: “Men are the enemy. Heterosexual women are collaborators with the enemy.” That manifesto generated widespread opposition at the time, but today no feminist would dare say a word in defense of men or heterosexuality, because it is “homophobia” to disagree with lesbians. The radical anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideology of Queer Feminism is now taught to tens of thousands of students in Women’s Studies programs at some 700 U.S. colleges and universities. One popular introductory Women’s Studies textbook proclaims: “Heterosexism is maintained by the illusion that heterosexuality is the norm.”

Academic feminists have devoted their institutional prestige to such radicalism, thus making formerly fringe views “mainstream” within feminism. The feminist site Bustle recently wished to its readers to consider the question, “Is Valentine’s Day feminist?” The writer chosen to provide the answer was lesbian feminist Lea Rose Emery: “As someone in a lesbian relationship, it’s difficult to see how my girlfriend and I could celebrate Valentine’s Day in a way that was anti-feminist or bad for woman.” At the feminist site Refinery 29, queer feminist Suzannah Weiss condemned Valentine’s Day ads as “notoriously heteronormative,” but at Teen Vogue, Brittany McNamara praised new Hallmark ads featuring gay couples as “making the typically heteronormative holiday way more inclusive.”

Of course, even if a young woman today did want Prince Charming to sweep her off her feet, he might be afraid to attempt it. If he admired Cinderella’s beauty, feminists would condemn Prince Charming for objectifying her with the “male gaze.” If a man talks to a woman, whatever he says is denounced by feminists as “mansplaining.” Any man who attempts to initiate a romantic relationship with a woman is guilty of “harassment,” according to feminism, and any expectation that a woman might enjoy sexual activity with a man is “rape culture.”

Feminists enjoy humiliating men, and gloat about inflicting pain on them: “I Bathe in Male Tears,” as Jessica Valenti proudly boasts. These feminist fantasies of sadistic revenge are “empowered” by federal Title IX law which the Obama administration turned into a weapon against male college students. A lawsuit against Rolling Stone for its discredited 2014 story about a rape hoax at the University of Virginia uncovered emails from a member of a White House Task Force discussing plans to “get punitive action against the fraternity” that was falsely accused. Rolling Stone, which has already been hit with a $3 million lawsuit verdict in that case, now faces another lawsuit from members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. More than 100 other male students have sued their universities over what they say were false rape accusations. Considering how the Obama administration deprived young men of their due-process rights on campus, and how loudly feminists voice their loathing of men (e.g., Ashley Judd’s deranged “Nasty Woman” protest rant last month), no one should be surprised that the feminist blogger finds herself alone and unloved on Valentine’s Day.

Are there any feminists who actually love men? Well, feminist LaChrista Greco explained that she will “always” love her abusive ex-boyfriend, a drug addict who infected her with herpes. This disease seems to be a common “gift” for feminists. Feminist “sexuality educator” Ashley Manta, for example, declared on Twitter: “I also have the herpes talk on the first date. It saves time.” Ms. Manta’s Valentine’s Day plans include a threesome with her boyfriend and another man. If threesomes with diseased women aren’t your thing, a bisexual Wiccan feminist from Portland delivered this Valentine’s Day message: “Enjoy being exploited by capitalism on a holiday created by companies that feed on women’s insecurities.” However, the same people who sponsored the Women’s March on Washington to protest President Trump’s inauguration are sponsoring a Valentine’s Day rally in New York against Trump. Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood is urging women to contact Congress to express their love for taxpayer-funded abortion this Valentine’s Day.

Because “the personal is political” for feminists, everything becomes political, and how can love survive such a regime? Feminists have embraced the anti-Trump slogan “Love Trumps Hate,” but feminism is itself a hate movement. They hate men, they hate marriage and motherhood, and they even hate love.