On The Spearhead, the regulars reject women rejecting feminism

Are women turning against feminism? Over on The Spearhead, WF Price sets forth the proposition that “the younger generation of women [is] rejecting ‘feminism’ in stronger terms than I’ve ever witnessed in my life.”

His proof for this? A Tumblr blog called Women Against Feminism, featuring a couple dozen photos of women holding signs denouncing feminism. Or what they think feminism is, anyway.

Some of these women are fairly articulate about the source of their hostility against feminism: they’re traditionalists who don’t like being judged for their choices:

Others seem to be reacting against stereotypical notions of feminism that bear little relation to the real thing:

Still others have somewhat more, well, idiosyncratic reasons:

For whatever reason, quite a few of the women posting these pictures are from Poland.

At least here in the US, it’s not news that a lot of women reject feminism – or at least the feminist label. There are plenty of  traditionalist women who reject the central tenets of feminism. And there are many others who may share some feminist beliefs but don’t want to call themselves feminists, in part because of the bad rap feminists get in the media and, these days, online. Anyone who’s been a feminist for any length of time has heard women (and some men) announce that “I’m not a feminist, but …” and then follow that statement with a sentiment that is, by any reasonable definition, feminist.

Now some of these “I’m not a feminist, but” types are posting pictures like this, using what is essentially a feminist analysis to criticize what they see as a central shortcoming of feminism:

Naturally, WF Price has a somewhat different explanation for this alleged trend.

What I think is going on here is that younger women need men more than their older, feminist counterparts did in their heyday.

And why is that? Because times are hard. And so even though men today are struggling, women are struggling even more, and so – in WF Price’s imagination, anyway — they’ve come to appreciate what men can do for them.

The less men have – and the less men there are in general – the more women need them. Without men or without men of means, there can be no surplus, no you-go-grrrrl feminism, no fancy restaurants and no nice houses. Everything just goes to crap.

Heck, Price argues, even men without jobs make better roommates for women than other women, because, you know, they can open jars and stuff:

[W]hat use could a man possibly be if he has no money to speak of? Only someone who has never lived with a woman could find that one hard to answer. A healthy young man with no money can drive, carry things, fix things, protect his mate, solve problems, save money, do chores — the list goes on. And when he gets a job, he will pay his way and do all these things, even if he makes less than his girlfriend. It’s a much, much better deal for a woman than a female roommate.

According to Price, feminism had whatever successes it did have in the past because the economy was booming.

What created this “independent woman” myth was the great prosperity of the baby boomer era, which lasted from roughly the mid 60s to the mid 2000s. Men abounded, and they were flush with cash. Businesses could afford to hire superfluous cute girls and give them nice salaries. Family courts could rob men blind and they’d still have enough left over for a reasonable lifestyle and a chance to start over. Men were harvesting the fat of the land, and there was more than enough to go around.

Huh. I lived through that baby boomer era, and I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t one giant materialistic orgy. There were, I vaguely recall, more than a couple of pretty severe recessions. And back in the heyday of second wave feminism in the seventies there was something called “stagflation.”

But let’s not get in the way of WF Price’s little fairy tale. In the baby boomer era, everyone prospered. Now, everyone is poor. Or at least the young people are:

When you’re poor, life is a lot easier if you can share with someone, and nobody shares more with girls than boys. So merely finding a man to share burdens is a considerable relief to young women. Is a feminist going to fix a car, carry a TV upstairs or take her to the hospital to give birth? Will the feminist voluntarily share any of what she earns with the young woman? Yeah, right…

Apparently in Price’s world “the feminist” is essentially a female version of Scrooge McDuck.

Male scarcity in either numbers or resources effectively prevents feminism. Surplus enables it. In a sense, one could say that feminism’s own downfall is built in to the ideology itself, because it contributes to male scarcity.

Wars between the sexes accomplish nothing in the long run, but they do highlight the complementary, interdependent nature of the sexes: when one sex “beats” the other, both lose. Today’s young women seem to understand that a lot better than their foolish mothers ever did.

In the comments, the Spearhead regulars are less forgiving of “foolish” women than Price is. Regular commenter Geographybeefinalisthimself suggests that antifeminist men should be something less than gracious in their (alleged) victory:

Even if women are in fact rejecting feminism (and I treat this with a lot of suspicion), I don’t see why men should not be vindictive since feminists were pretty damn vindictive to men (myself included, though I am well aware that I am not the only one) when male power was a myth.

Since young men got paid back for discrimination that wasn’t their fault, I don’t see why they shouldn’t turn around and do likewise to a subsequent generation of females. If feminism can come to an end now (and I am not convinced that it is dead yet), it also could have come to an end twenty years ago. I always take the attitude that if something can happen now, it could have happened many years ago as well.

Someone calling himself Lastango, meanwhile, indulges himself in some hypothetical Atlas Shrugging:

[T]he tide is going out and it’s increasingly obvious feminism has been swimming naked, keeping its head above water only because it could float on government money. Unfortunately for feminists, this is happening at the very moment men are increasingly aware of having been demonized and exploited during the past 40 years, and Atlas is starting to shrug… he’ll be staying dry, on the beach, instead of swimming out to rescue a drowning political tribe of privileged, entitled women who have been using him for their own gain.

The misogynists of the manosphere are never quite so happy as when they contemplate women being punished.

The women posting pictures to the Women Against Feminism blog might be surprised by how ungentlemanly these fellows really are.

NOTE: I cropped the pics from Women Against Feminism to save space and highlight the signs.