Today’s feminism teaches women to see themselves as victims and men as perverts, bullies and misogynists, says Natasha Devon

An excerpt from this article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/10831043/Modern-feminism-has-got-it-wrong-about-men.html

Today’s feminism teaches women to see themselves as victims and men as perverts, bullies and misogynists, says Natasha Devon

Earlier this year I was asked to present at a feminist society event in one of the UK’s largest and most prestigious universities. I espoused the view that I must be really lucky, because if recent feminist musings in the press and online are to be believed, misogyny is absolutely rife, yet I have very rarely encountered it.

I’ve had the odd blustering huffer-puffer over the years who has clearly thought himself superior, but I’ve always presumed that’s because of my comparative age and slightly avant garde fashion sense, rather than the simple fact of my vagina. (Whilst it isn’t right to form assumptions about someone based on these criteria, it does take the issue out of the realms of feminism.) These instances have, however, been incredibly few and far between. As for the men I regularly spend time with – my male colleagues and friends, boyfriend, dad, my three brothers and numerous uncles and cousins – they’ve never given me any cause to suspect they’re anything but pro-gender equality.

At the end of the session, one of the Society’s senior members said: “It’s great that you don’t think there’s any misogyny in your world, but I think if you talked to these men for long enough you’d find there were some pretty sinister ideas about women buried somewhere beneath the surface.”

In that moment, I suddenly realised why so many aspects of the modern feminist movement in Britain irritate me so much. Don’t misunderstand, I’d consider myself a feminist and I’m all for structural changes which ensure equal treatment of the sexes – the types that are working to ensure we have an equal number of female MPs and laws to prevent female genital mutilation, for example. But cultural “feminist” changes, the types that insist lads mags, Page 3 and wolf-whistling are automatically offensive and should therefore be scrapped from the public consciousness, I have always struggled to comprehend. For, at their crux is the notion that men are either genetically or socially conditioned to be evil. This explains why relatively harmless acts – an admiring glance, a whistle, a propensity for lads mags – are imbued with such weighty significance, often lazily labelled as “rapey”.

If a man looks at me, I infer he’s doing it for the exact same reason a woman would – because he finds me interesting to look at. If a man whistles at me, I take it as the compliment I believe it was intended to be. If I see a man looking at a female glamour model, I suppose nothing more than he is looking at her because a naked woman is pretty much universally aesthetically pleasing. I have always assumed that Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines transpired to be the most downloaded single of all time in the UK because it’s well produced and ridiculously catchy, not because huge swathes of the male population delight in the notion that men “know women want it” and use the lyrics as their life mantra. Call me naive if you must.

I’ve become increasingly bemused by the “Twitter activists” whose “feminist” world view, however much they try to disguise it, necessitates a dim view of mankind. Some, for example, have taken to posting pictures of men looking at Page 3 on the train, with captions branding these individuals “creepy”, “vile” and “disgusting” without any sort of meaningful explanation. These women have made a broad assumption about what their male subjects are thinking – based on we know not what – and despise the product of their own projections.

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Today’s feminism teaches British women to see themselves as victims and victims cannot exist without a villain, in this instance – men. In order for this thesis to have any kind of logic, feminists have made sweeping, inaccurate judgments about an entire demographic, based on nothing more than their gender. Ironically, the exact practice they claim to be fighting.

Gender equality requires co-operation on all sides. As a humanist, I’d like to see today’s feminists give men a bit more credit – they might just be surprised.

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