@dkmich Let me put in, one more time, my .02 about divorce--it's not as simple as you guys think. The comparative poverty with my mother--which was lower-middle-class life, not true poverty--was well worth getting away from a man who endangered both our lives. Even the horrors of actual poverty would have been worth it to me. I quite literally wouldn't be here talking to you without that divorce. And I know that, in a perfect world, that wouldn't constitute "no fault" and the divorce would have been granted anyway, but just let me tell you that proving abuse in the 1980s was a fucking nightmare. Seriously, it's better to allow the legal option.

I don't think there is any equality at all. The pendulum swings both ways.

Two minors engaging in sex, and the male will be the one to bear the consequences. Yes, a woman should be in charge of her body and be able to abort a fetus at will, AND a man should be able to deny responsibility for any fetus he has fathered, doesn't want, and she insists on having. I am also opposed to no-fault divorce unless there are no children. Divorce creates poverty, and we have enough children living in poverty at no fault of their own.

This is a very superficial from the hip response to your post. It is obviously complicated. Being a white male is probably the worst thing anyone can be today. Politically, any issue brought to an extreme is off-putting whether it be feminism, racism, free/prohibitive speech, etc. They're so 70s. Financial and justice equality is where the unity lies.

@asterisk Yes, the wage and benefits gap was very real when I was first employed in local government. I will be 70 years old this year and I was and as a result of that discrimination, am still an economic victim in that my retirement benefits are far lower that they should have been.

I was given a lower starting salary for the same job and was not put on the pension plan because I was not a white male. The thinking back then was any woman might get pregnant and leave, so why should she be allowed to participate in a pension plan. It took a federal law suit to rectify the discrimination that was taking place against blacks and women of all colors. The federally mandated remedies regarding hiring and salaries (quotas) were required only for minorities, even though they recognized that non-minority women had also been discriminated against in hiring and salaries.

The benefits issue involving the pension plan was mandated to be opened to us employees who were not originally allowed on it. We were allowed to do a lump sum buy back of years lost. I was a low wage single female who did not have the money to do the buy back (in my case 8 years), so I lost eight years of pension benefits. Those eight years were on Social Security along with a couple of years on SS from previous employment.

Under Social Security law, because I get a pension from local government now, my normal SS benefits were significantly reduced. I got hammered on both ends, losing eight years on the pension plan because I was a woman and losing SS benefits because I was on a public pension.

The wage gap is real. I have personally experienced it. About the time I realized that the other women and I were making less than the men where we worked, the geniuses on the Supreme Court spit our the Ledbetter decision. I had more education and more experience than men who were being paid more than I was. So did most of my female colleagues. We women were doing essentially the same jobs. If I had filed a complaint with the EEOC I would have been blacklisted professionally. My only practical recourse was to dust off my resume.

I was among the first women to enter my graduate program in a STEM field. The boys did not exactly roll out the red carpet for us. (Decent men like PriceRip are scarce in STEM programs.) The attrition rate for women was 98-99% that year and for more than a dozen of the following years. None of the women in my year flunked out; we just got to the point where the abuse and sabotage was intolerable.

The people who use accusations of sexism to shut down discussion and 'win' arguments about unrelated topics are spitting in the faces of all the women who have faced real gender discrimination. This is one of the most offensive things about TOP. The deliberate accusations of racism, sexism and [you are a worthless piece of dirt]ism make it impossible to have a real, productive discussion like this one.

Divorce and custody issues do need to be reconsidered to try to decrease the pain for everyone involved. Gender definitions all need to be reconsidered in almost all aspects of our lives.

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal this is one of the best descriptions of the subjects we're struggling with that I've seen anywhere. Thank you so much for saying it.

I hope that continues as some people disagree with you, and make their own arguments.

I was up very late last night--too much caffeine and anxiety over the war drums--so I'm not up to discussing each point in your essay, but I'll touch on a few.

Feminism has become of late more like a Joe McCarthy character assassination-fest than anything else, whose positive goal could be phrased as: "Women in the top 10% of the economic ladder should be able to have any careers their husbands and brothers can! That goes especially for Hillary!"

Turning a social movement into constant, unmerited attacks on others is a great way to kill it. And indeed, my first response to this essay was to post footage from the Night of the Living Dead, because I'm not sure feminism is still alive. If it is, it's on life support.

That said, no, I don't think the fact that I might have to drive through many states for an abortion is a result of the badness of feminism which alienates people of good will who otherwise might support my right to avoid forced birth. That idea suggests that everybody was quite ready to support abortion rights, but then we were mean and they stopped. That's not historically accurate. But more important--much more important--is that you're making the incorrect assumption that policy is made based on what the 99% thinks. Doesn't matter whether you're talking male or female, the 99%--or at least, the bottom 90% of it--has no influence on what the government does. That's been statistically proven. The reason I might have to drive through many states for an abortion is that eradicating abortion is somehow useful to the powerful and privileged.

My guess is, they do it for two practical reasons and one ideological reason. The practical reasons are, 1)abortion is a good thing to keep the population fighting over so that they remain divided and stop paying so much attention to the corruption and destruction coming from above. This is particularly true when it comes to the political parties. Like LGBT rights, feminism, and abortion specifically, are used as cudgels to keep people within the Democratic party, and to give the Dems some shadow of a reason for being. That's one reason feminism is so distorted right now--like a comet that passes too close to a planet, its path has been changed and it's been captured in the gravity of an ugly hidden agenda: the maintenance of a dying political system.

The second practical reason for eradicating abortion, I'd guess, is to keep people economically weighed down. One fact that people don't like talking about, on either side of the issue, is that a large portion of abortions are done, not for health reasons nor out of simple personal desire to be childless, but for economic reasons. Every woman I know who has had an abortion has done so because she felt she couldn't afford to raise the child. Raising children is expensive, and doing so well is near-impossible in this era of economic assaults on time.

The third reason is ideological; the people driving our society are right-wingers, no matter what they call themselves, and it pleases them to stick it to people who in the past were their enemies, trashing whatever they found inspiring, from old-growth forests to Roe v Wade--but trashing old victories of those enemies is particularly pleasing. The right vs left dichotomy is not the most important one going on these days--up vs down is far more important. Yet it's also true that those on the top are, almost without exception these days, right wing, and they haven't forgotten the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and how the Civil Rights movement, the anti-war movement, feminism, and the alternative economics movements of the time cleaned their clocks on a regular basis, because the people of the United States, ultimately, and sometimes after a good deal of kicking and screaming, were convinced by the case the left was making. I understand that that's not the way it felt to left-wingers who were alive then. But if you read internal documents circulated among the right-wing establishment of the time, like the Powell memo, you can see that they were in a panic. They thought they would lose it all. So they decided to deprive the American people of the right to choose--not just the right to choose abortion, but the right to choose how to run their affairs generally. The last 3 or 4 decades have been a takeover spiced with the desire for revenge, because they still resent the fact that we once cleaned their clocks on a regular basis.

You are, IMO, misidentifying some of the sources of feminism's decline. But whether you are or not, I'm actually OK with feminism advocating for "abortion on demand" or talking about the wage gap, which is real, though I'd much rather have a feminism that discussed that gap in the context of all wages being gutted. What the hell is the point of having equal wages with men if we all have shit wages?

10% of nothing is, well...

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal I especially agree with this part of what you said:

1)abortion is a good thing to keep the population fighting over so that they remain divided and stop paying so much attention to the corruption and destruction coming from above.

I believe this so strongly that I think if abortion is made illegal again, the power structure on the right will fund and encourage the fight to make it legal again. It has proved to be, just as you say, a life-defining subject that overtakes everything else in many women's activism, which distracts them from working for peace, education, healthcare and justice.

I hope that continues as some people disagree with you, and make their own arguments.

I was up very late last night--too much caffeine and anxiety over the war drums--so I'm not up to discussing each point in your essay, but I'll touch on a few.

Feminism has become of late more like a Joe McCarthy character assassination-fest than anything else, whose positive goal could be phrased as: "Women in the top 10% of the economic ladder should be able to have any careers their husbands and brothers can! That goes especially for Hillary!"

Turning a social movement into constant, unmerited attacks on others is a great way to kill it. And indeed, my first response to this essay was to post footage from the Night of the Living Dead, because I'm not sure feminism is still alive. If it is, it's on life support.

That said, no, I don't think the fact that I might have to drive through many states for an abortion is a result of the badness of feminism which alienates people of good will who otherwise might support my right to avoid forced birth. That idea suggests that everybody was quite ready to support abortion rights, but then we were mean and they stopped. That's not historically accurate. But more important--much more important--is that you're making the incorrect assumption that policy is made based on what the 99% thinks. Doesn't matter whether you're talking male or female, the 99%--or at least, the bottom 90% of it--has no influence on what the government does. That's been statistically proven. The reason I might have to drive through many states for an abortion is that eradicating abortion is somehow useful to the powerful and privileged.

My guess is, they do it for two practical reasons and one ideological reason. The practical reasons are, 1)abortion is a good thing to keep the population fighting over so that they remain divided and stop paying so much attention to the corruption and destruction coming from above. This is particularly true when it comes to the political parties. Like LGBT rights, feminism, and abortion specifically, are used as cudgels to keep people within the Democratic party, and to give the Dems some shadow of a reason for being. That's one reason feminism is so distorted right now--like a comet that passes too close to a planet, its path has been changed and it's been captured in the gravity of an ugly hidden agenda: the maintenance of a dying political system.

The second practical reason for eradicating abortion, I'd guess, is to keep people economically weighed down. One fact that people don't like talking about, on either side of the issue, is that a large portion of abortions are done, not for health reasons nor out of simple personal desire to be childless, but for economic reasons. Every woman I know who has had an abortion has done so because she felt she couldn't afford to raise the child. Raising children is expensive, and doing so well is near-impossible in this era of economic assaults on time.

The third reason is ideological; the people driving our society are right-wingers, no matter what they call themselves, and it pleases them to stick it to people who in the past were their enemies, trashing whatever they found inspiring, from old-growth forests to Roe v Wade--but trashing old victories of those enemies is particularly pleasing. The right vs left dichotomy is not the most important one going on these days--up vs down is far more important. Yet it's also true that those on the top are, almost without exception these days, right wing, and they haven't forgotten the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and how the Civil Rights movement, the anti-war movement, feminism, and the alternative economics movements of the time cleaned their clocks on a regular basis, because the people of the United States, ultimately, and sometimes after a good deal of kicking and screaming, were convinced by the case the left was making. I understand that that's not the way it felt to left-wingers who were alive then. But if you read internal documents circulated among the right-wing establishment of the time, like the Powell memo, you can see that they were in a panic. They thought they would lose it all. So they decided to deprive the American people of the right to choose--not just the right to choose abortion, but the right to choose how to run their affairs generally. The last 3 or 4 decades have been a takeover spiced with the desire for revenge, because they still resent the fact that we once cleaned their clocks on a regular basis.

You are, IMO, misidentifying some of the sources of feminism's decline. But whether you are or not, I'm actually OK with feminism advocating for "abortion on demand" or talking about the wage gap, which is real, though I'd much rather have a feminism that discussed that gap in the context of all wages being gutted. What the hell is the point of having equal wages with men if we all have shit wages?

10% of nothing is, well...

@lizzyh7 It clearly is driven by personal indignation and also probably personal pain. I, for one, DON'T agree that we need to toss the movements out. I do think that both the movements you mention have been more or less taken over...feminism more taken over, anti-racism less so. Feminism is for the most part a puppet movement right now, and the second-wave feminist leaders who did such great work in the 60s and 70s now seem to be basically OK with being a prop trotted out on stage when some part of the power structure, usually the Democrats, need it. I guess it's because of Hillary, just as a lot of Black leadership were willing to compromise their movement in any way the establishment desired once they got Obama in office.

I wouldn't mind us selling ourselves if we didn't do it so cheaply.

same arguments for racism as well. Both divide and conquer, both have been taken to sometimes outlandish extremes, but at the end of the day, both were too important to too many people's actual LIVES to just be ignored. Is there some over kill in some positions? I'm sure there is and I think we've all seen it, but does that mean we throw the whole thing in the garbage and go back to "the way things were?" Or do we simply pretend these things don't really exist at all?

What "case" is it you're trying to make here? That we should all revile feminism because men have paid a price for it? Should we disavow that then and make the male the one with all the power? Along with power comes responsibility, so by advocating that aren't you almost saying that men SHOULD be responsible for all of it then? Is it also the fault of men that so many get divorced just for shits and grins? Or is that one reserved just for women who get divorced?

And yup, I'm probably taking this too personally, but then again, much of your essay seems to be personal indignation to me.