Dear Abigail,
Most people, even women, having some shame and self-respect also have an instinctive dislike for the histrionic behaviour of women put up by the popular media as 'feminist' examples - Miley Cyrus, Amy Schumer, Garfunkel and Oates, etc. To quash potential collective revolt against the Hollywood menace, ears have to be filled with rhetorical cotton wool. This is where I think your videos come in. They induce women to waste time giving the media the benefit of the doubt as to why it would promote women floundering in self-disrespect - 'maybe
I'm the one who's wrong', etc. When the only language they know is 'feminism', they waste their time trying to explain why Cyrus et al. are 'not real feminists'.
They waste their time, because expecting most people to ever really 'get' feminism is like expecting the Catholic Church to eventually go Gnostic. Because the further away a person is from the socioeconomic, sex, and ethnic nexus at which the word 'feminism' was invented - the 19th century European bourgeoisie - their use of it will regress towards a kind of cross-cultural mean where they're looking for a word for 'being nice to women' but 'chivalry' is dead.
Etymology is an oracle. In many cultures, the concept of the ideal person is conveyed by a term which literally means something like 'man'. 'Mensch' in Yiddish means 'man'; the word 'virtue' derives from Latin for 'like a man'; the Confucian term for a person embodying virtue and wisdom, 'junzi', means 'gentleman'; the morning prayer for Orthodox Jews involves praising God 'who has not made me a woman'; Aristotle described females as 'incomplete' and 'deformed', lacking shame and self-respect; Plato used the term 'female-like' to imply inferiority; Schopenhauer called women 'big children all their lives'; in Buddhist sutras being female is the result of bad karma and whether females can attain Buddhahood is contested; and the esteemed anthropologist Margaret Mead said
"in almost every known society .. the prestige values always attach to the occupations of men." Even Florence Nightingale hated other women.
Reading this, people who don't know me very well might assume I'm some kind of closet trans case, even though I've always liked my female body and would never change it. In the 19th century, too, people accused the Suffragettes of being closet 'inverts', of 'wanting to be men'. , Seems to me that people often
jump to call a head doctor when their wife or daughter stops pissing around in tantric poststructuralist astrology and is inevitably fucked up by what she finds in the big boys' library. Andrea Dworkin and Camille Paglia disagreed on a lot, but what I basically got from them is that human nature is full, as a wood of bear traps, of perverse incentives which militate against the female human spirit: which combine to pathologise, medicalise, subvert, and disorient in female persons what is encouraged, rewarded, and esteemed in males.
Especially insidious within this, humanity's whack-a-mole against the female spirit, is the role played by other female people: the Suffragettes were tortured in British prisons by female nurses; mothers in Medieval China were the ones who mutilated their own daughters' feet; mothers in Africa are the ones mutilating their daughters' genitals; mothers in Morocco forcefeed their daughters unto morbid obesity ('leblouh'); mothers in Thai forest tribes stretched their daughters' necks with brass rings, and mothers among the Papua New Guinean Dani
cut off their daughters' finger joints.
But this is not your role in the neverending horrorstory. Any woman who was smart enough when she was a medieval peasant to deny that the local pederast priest could make God blood from wine is smart enough today to see that your get-up and your doctor's note do not a woman make. The part you play in
the conspiracy against the female human race is the part of a particular kind of man.
You will never be a woman. I also think the only way of ending the heartache of that is to cultivate masculine virtues like every really sensible woman is doing.