When it comes to other peoples' worldviews, I tend not understand why people hold the ideas that they do, even after they do well explaining it to me. Maybe I'm just too polite to ask certain questions. I think the reason I have trouble understanding others' mindsets is because they have more of an emotional investment, perhaps excessively, in whatever beliefs and values they hold than I do. Take feminism for instance. For me, modern day feminism in the first world is just about redundant. I see first world feminists as dogmatic, flagrantly emotional, and self-righteous. My question to feminists is why feminism over another philosophy? There are other philosophies that incorporate feminism, such as secular humanism. It would be redundant to say you're a secular humanist and a feminist. Secular humanism is about universal equality and addressing all human afflictions, whereas feminism is only about addressing women's issues. Why so limiting? Either A. You want to specialize, or B. you make your decisions about helping people or not based on their genitals. Everyone has advantages and disadvantages. Some people have more disadvantages. By choosing to concentrate your efforts on people with select disadvantages for efficiency is fine, however, modern first world feminists have a particular self imposed and fictional narrative that they fight against with fervor and urgency. They believe that there is a thing called the patriarchy: This is some sort of conspiracy theory that the world is run by sexist men who want to oppress women. This isn't well substantiated by feminists, who can reason all they want, but their arguments for the intentions of this patriarchy are based on conjecture. Please demonstrate how you know the intended goal of this system is the oppression of women. The system discernibly has no singular committed conscious. The last 100 years of progress for women is evidence enough that if there is such a patriarchy, it's dying. Yes, this world has a lot of men in power, therefore by definition it is a patriarchy, but it's not the machine of commitment to the oppression of women.
Here's the other problem with this patriarchy conspiracy. Progress is slow and their is a delay between the implementation of an idea and when we can perceive it's effects . Imagine a setting where barbaric, superstitious, barely out of the caves, prehistoric people live. They barely have communication and survive by hunting and gathering. Guess what, they're probably simpletons and have no complex moral ideas yet. They probably govern themselves based on who's the biggest and who can bring home the most meat, protect the most children and etc. The stone age and the bronze age; Not very elegant civilizations. This is the way primitive humans likely behaved. Compound that with some god-given ideal that men are superior to women and that women are unclean once a month and what do you get? The dark ages. Then comes the Renaissance where ideas like freedom and self determination are radical. For reasons that probably extend well past religion and into a part of human nature, equality for women still hasn't become popular. Skip ahead to the 20th century, there is strife and sacrifice by women for women. In 1920, women get the right to vote in the United States. Do you expect people to magically, immediately and fully embrace women's rights or do you expect them to still carry as baggage the ideas they new and grew up with? I have long since figured this out and am currently waiting out the older generations for this changing of the guard where the newer, slightly more progressive generation gets a turn. The internet generation is the least racist, least sexist, least discriminating, and least violent generation of Americans yet. Look forward to it, but beware, this generation has a weakness. It is entitled and it does not value reason and intellect. There's a bit of a silver lining though: As far as trends go, the intelligentsia are becoming more welcome in popculture.
There seems little for feminists to fight for in the first world, at least from my perspective. Your cause has as much momentum as it needs over here. Success is inevitable. Try visiting your efforts onto the second and third worlds if you want to be feminists. In the meantime, identifying as feminist is what seems particularly important to feminists. It's a title, a status, and an identity. You can still fight all the women's issues of the world while calling yourself a humanist or a secular humanist just fine. You gain nothing by calling yourself either or except in your mind and in the minds of those who value the label. You could call yourself a plain philanthropist and make all of your efforts for woman's issues and have just as many notches in your belt as you would calling yourself a feminist. Instead, it has become particularly special to people to identify as this particular label, and that's it.
