True Equality

A lot of people in the men's movement refers to feminists, all feminists, as "feminazis". Where does this term come from and what does it mean?

The word feminazi was first used by Rush Limbaugh who is an American conservative radio talk show host. [1]

What does it mean? Well it is a denigratory term to refer to some or all feminists. You could say that it applies only to radical feminists, but it is not a mainstream term so you can use it as you wish. A particularly hateful masculist who I banned uses it to refer to all feminists, even someone like Wendy McElroy who is a person who agrees with most men's and fathers issues.

Now, why don't I like the term? Well first of all it's lame.

For some reason the Nazis has become the catch-all insult on the internet to call people you don't like.. You smoke cigarettes - you're a Nazi. You don't like the Beatles - you're a Nazi. It's childish and lame, it is simply an insulting term to belittle a movement you don't like, there's no meaning behind it.

But why the association with the Nazis? Because the Nazis are the archetypal representation of evil in our society. There are still people today who directly suffered from the war and holocaust. So by calling feminists feminazis the aim is to associate them with evil.

And this is the reason I don't like the term. When religious nuts say that Hitler did the things he did because he was possessed by evil then we close off our minds to understanding why Hitler could do the things he did. I try not to use the term "evil" because it is essentially a cop out - we say that there is that concept that encapsulates the bad behaviour. We are humans and we have the capacity for good and bad, and we need to understand the way that Hitler committed the atrocities he did, we need to understand how our minds work and can do things like the holocaust.

If we refer to feminists as "feminazis" then we are doing the exact same thing. We are simply dismissing the beliefs of feminists as just being "evil" and not spending the requisite amount of time understanding why they believe what they believe. An activist of any stripe is not evil, because they believe in something and are willing to act for their beliefs. I don't think feminists are bad people, but they adhere to bad ideas and a bad belief system, and incredibly bad things can come from this, such as the things I criticise in my other videos. But these bad things don't come from feminists being bad, but rather from their ideas being bad. And it's the ideas that we need to attack, not the person.