Hear ye, hear ye! You're doing feminism wrong.

Why is he only berating HRC and JG for not doing equality right and not Obama, Cameron etc?

Everythingsrunningaway - thank you, that's it in a soundbite. I'm going to use that a lot in the future.

The problem is that he said that after coming in to save women with his man's "tough love".

What an absolute bollocks.

Cross post - Scarlet, it's not that he's wrong about this stuff being important, it's his assumption that feminists are not doing this stuff and need to be told to by a man that's pissing me off.

Glad someone else has started this thread - I read the article and it gave me the rage. Yet another man come to tell women they're doing feminism wrong. But we're supposed to like him better because it's taken him a long time to get to this point and is only doing it reluctantly.

First off, where are his examples of women doing "feminism lite"? The feminists I know do work on/ support campaigns against domestic violence, sexual violence and the like. They campaign for single mothers. (Actually, I am both a feminist and a single mother... funny that possibility seems to have escaped him).

Second, where did he get the idea that feminism is synonymous with pacifism? It may be that there's a case to be made that quite a lot of wars result from patriarchal dick swinging (and it's certainly a prime example of the way patriarchy hurts men as well as women: typically the "canon fodder" in wars is provided by disadvantaged young men from impoverished backgrounds who are fed a line about hypermasculinity as giving them worth when social inequality has systematically stripped them of any other means of feeling self-worth). But to say that a woman can't engage in debates about "just wars" or fight in wars without ceasing to be a feminist is just dumb (and I'd love to see him advance that argument face-to-face to the Kurdish women Peshmurga fighting against ISIS).

Can someone post a "lo, a man come to share his manly insight" meme, please? This plonker really needs it.

I don't see anything wrong with what he's saying here,

"we need to focus on the issues that truly need our help the most urgently: benefits taken away from single mums; sexual violence which affects all women, but especially already vulnerable ones; endemic racism which leads to parents of colour scared to have their child shot by police forces; lack of unionising or legislation which leaves women without working rights worldwide; the right not subject to rape threats and abuse, online and offline; equal pay for equal work."

I love how the "gender equality" people want us to start right now and pretend that everything is "equal" already.

I'll sign up to gender equality the day that women are fairly represented in positions of influence, own half the world's wealth, and are no longer at significant risk of death or harm from male violence.

Until then, I'm a feminist.

He's missed the point that all kinds of women - smug, selfish, good, bad, fat, thin etc etc need to have a fair chance of power as men who are equally smug, selfish etc. So Hillary Clinton is pro war? Well, that simply means in the current political climate, pro war politicians are rising and that one of them is female.

FFS.

And he makes a very valid point. I find even the word "feminist" gives off the wrong messages. It doesn't speak gender equality in any way.
I am very much in favour of total gender equality across the board, but the hypocritical values on both sides of the coin need to be eradicated first

Why the fuck didn't he just write about issues concerning feminism.