#paula wright

By: Paula Wright

Published: Feb 13, 2022

For those of you who don’t know, “Karen” is a broad term used in memes (visual internet snapshots of popular ideas) to represent a certain kind of entitled woman who is uncritical of her own opinions but highly censorious of others.

Karen, or maybe Karine, cares a lot about abstract things like poor people and animals but also has an intense, negative reaction to actual people who contradict her or don’t show the right amount of enthusiasm for her personal choices. Karen bristles. Your slights are never forgotten or forgiven. They are chalked up. For later. Just - you - wait. I’ve also known women who have ended female friendships because another woman didn’t “like” her Facebook or Instagram posts. The same women whose partner was unfaithful; abused them; worshipped Hitler and wanted to spit in their mouths during sex. It’s odd, but it’s clear that many women find another woman not liking her curtains more egregious than any of the above.

The Karen meme has been around for over 20 years but recently became mainstream and politicised as various sects feminisms did battle for ownership of it. Radical feminists thought it classicist; white intersectional feminists thought it misogynistic; black intersectional feminists objected to white intersectional feminists culturally appropriating their favourite privileged white woman drag.

In truth, no group owns Karen but, in the intersectional scramble created by radical feminist Julie Bindel’s tweet, they all succeeded in embodying her.

Contrary to popular belief, however, Karen is not necessarily a woman.

Jussie Smollett wins my personal prize for being uber Karen of 2019. My odds on favourite for 2020 are any of the #MeToo acolytes who jumped on the #BelieveWomen bandwagon only to bounce when the cart hit a Biden sized bump in the road.

Nor is Karen middle-aged, white, or any other useful stereotype.

Karen is a facet of human nature in all of us, not just white women. She can be a passing mood or an enduring personality trait. Her actions can be benign or malign; can have little impact or catastrophic consequences. But Karen will almost always mistake the triviality of her actions with the weight of their possible consequences, which she usually remains ignorant of.

In the meme, Karen often wants to “speak to the manager” - in the real world, however, Karen often IS the manager.

Here’s a truth we are discovering today about humans. For all the fashionable talk of “empathy”, humans are very able to compartmentalise conflicting emotions to silence cognitive dissonance in order to objectify and ‘other’ others. And not just some, but all humans. Yes, even women and they are perhaps more skilled in this than men.

Right now, during coronavirus lockdown (edit: this was originally published in May 2020. Things have gotten far worse since), law enforcement authorities in supposed liberal democracies have been swamped by neighbours snitching on neighbours for having one jog too many. I’ve seen it myself in community online forums. Communist China must be having a sly smirk to itself.

Orwell was wrong. It’s not big brother we need to be worried about. It’s big sister. And at this point in time, biology has nothing to do with it! You may not be interested in Karen, but Karen is interested in you.

Of course, when calm, Karen would outwardly baulk at the thought that she/he/they objectifies people, but they do.

For instance, she doesn’t call the manager on the single mother who works in Starbucks appreciating the multidimensional, complex individual behind the branded barista uniform and the friendly greeting scripted by the marketing team.

No, she calls the manager on the unskilled oink who has one job to do, but serves her morning cappuccino with too much froth – twice!

Karen has a busy life, performs many roles, including exhausting amounts of unpaid emotional labour, be that childcare or explaining racism to white people, and has a career (not a job).

She is entitled to a decent cup of coffee and service with a smile! And really, what harm does a little outburst here and there matter? Once the tension is released she moves on. No harm done.

So, we have established (via Jessie Smollett) that Karen doesn’t have to be female but I must now proffer one caveat in that she often is. And by female, I explicitly mean the sex with the big gametes, not the small ones. I know things are crazy right now and there are clearly a lot of perks to being female, which is why I totally get the trans thing, but the passive-aggressive element of Karen emerges first and foremost in female adaptive psychology, specifically in the different selection pressures that have shaped the sexes over millions of years.

The profound consequences of a “K” sized ego boost can even be observed in classic literature.

Les Miserables

In Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, in a chapter entitled, “Madame Victurnien Expends Thirty Francs on Morality” the heroine Fantine is beginning to do well in spite of her previous naivety and misfortune. Yet, as most of us know…

BEWARE - SPOILERS!!

…within four short chapters, Fantine is a hairless, toothless prostitute dying of tuberculosis. What went wrong?

Fantine met a Karen, that’s what.

The aforementioned Madame Victurnien took a dislike to her “ways” and spent thirty francs to find out her secret: an illegitimate child.

After discovering this, Madame ‘Caron’ gossips to Fantine’s floor manager, another Karin “a truly respectable person, firm, equitable, upright, full of the charity which consists in giving, but not having in the same degree that charity which consists in understanding and in forgiving”, who “judged, condemned, and executed Fantine.

And executed she was.

These women, two bastions of the community, emboldened by the insular piety of female normative group-think, might as well have sewn rocks into Fantine’s petticoat and kicked her into a canal. Frankly, that would have been more merciful.

There are two chambers of misery Hugo tells us, “the first is dark, the second is black.”

Here, Hugo echoes that other great dramatist of human nature, Shakespeare, who writes in King Lear, “it is an error to imagine that fate can be exhausted and that one has reached the bottom of anything whatever.”

Yet, in spite of Shakespeare and Hugo, and the wisdom of countless other historical texts written by the wisest minds from the oldest literate cultures, this is an error we in the West, in our state of unprecedented ecological release, commit countless times every day.

Makes me wonder, in the absence of selection pressures, do we create our own?

Due to Karen’s meddling, Fantine loses her job and, unable to pay her bills and creditors, falls into more debt. To keep her child alive, she finally sells all that is left to sell; hair, teeth, and virtue. Only then, does she, mercifully, die of tuberculosis – that other epidemic that was consuming France during the plague of progressive revolutions.

A further, and personal favourite, example of the casual caprice of a Karen casually destroying lives is given to us by Thomas Hardy in Tess of the D’Urbervilles. It might be said that Fantine got herself into trouble of her own accord, she wasn’t raped after all. Tess unfortunately is.

The set-up is as follows.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Walking home after some rowdy celebrations, the naive maiden Tess makes the mistake of giggling along with the crowd at a joke made at the expense of a queen bee named “dark Car”.

Now, dark Car can take a joke and is known for her bawdy good humour. This is laughter she can take from her in-group who implicitly know her and their place in the fixed female hierarchy, but who is this new hoity-toity attention whore laughing at her acting like she belongs?

Hell hath no fury like a Karen finding a new girl stepping out of her lane. She must be put in place.

The buxom dark Car lays into the hapless Tess, and the queen bee’s ladies in waiting instantly mobilise into a formidable harpy of Karens against her. (Harpy is my own collective noun for a group of Karens)

Tess is ostracised from the safety of the group, leaving her alone and vulnerable. Enter stage right, the dastardly Alec d’Urberville, dressed in Tarquin’s ravishing strides, ready to ‘save’ her.1

“Ho-ho-ho!” laughed dark Car.

“Hee-hee-hee!” laughed the tippling bride, as she steadied herself on the arm of her fond husband.”

They know exactly what is about to occur and do not intervene because the ultimate female passive-aggressive solution to ousting a rival has presented itself.

“Heu-heu-heu!” laughed dark Car’s mother, stroking her moustache as she explained laconically: “Out of the frying pan into the fire!

Remember, this isn’t Mean Girls. There are no Hollywood Save The Cat beats in these tragedies. As with Fantine, Tess is toast. And Karen is both a passive catalyst and an active executioner.

These examples illustrate a brute evolutionary fact about female relationships: fitting in, having the protection of the group was, until very recently, a matter of life or death. That has left a profound mark on female psychology and female strategies of cooperation and conflict, strategies we see erupting everywhere today and especially in contemporary “cancel culture”.

If it isn’t clear yet, “Karen” is the personification of human hypocrisy, self-deception and self-interest with a specific bias towards adaptive female strategies of conflict.

It’s all fine and dandy lionising supposedly benign female traits, like “empathy” and “equality” but the evidence is right before our eyes that the female of the species can be just as deadly as the male, if by sleight of hand and not recorded in official statistics.

Why is this relevant?

As more women enter politics and managerial positions; as workplace policies become shaped by the invisible hand of female strategies of competition, whilst at the same time we remain both ignorant and in denial about them – this is why we must talk about Karen.

Paula Wright (American, born Hungary, 1897 - 2001 )

Nature Fantasy

I’m All Right Jack | John Boulting | 1959

By: Paula Wright

Published: Feb 19, 2023

If any man could draw up a comprehensive, infallible guide to navigating this treacherous territory, we would certainly erect a statue to his everlasting memory. There is a Twitter account dedicated to exploring and enumerating precisely the distinctions and differences between the acceptably erotic and the intolerably sexist. It’s called @SexyIsntSexist. It is, of course, under the control of a woman.” Neil Lyndon. Do men really understand what sexism is? The Telegraph 20/5/14

I created Darwinian Gender Studies (DGS) in 2008 as a cross-disciplinary area of study and research which utilises insights across the evolutionary behavioural sciences, including but not limited to, evolutionary psychology, biology, anthropology, ethology, palaeoanthropology and cultural evolution.    It represents the consilience of the natural and social sciences, as envisioned by E. O. Wilson.

Back then, my planned PhD thesis was to be in developing an evolutionary, bio-cultural model of ‘patriarchy’ which challenged the premises of the feminist conception of patriarchy. Even in 2008, the project foresaw that political correctness, social justice and toxic feminism were taking us deep down the postmodern rabbit hole. My goal was to build bridges of understanding between the sexes not walls of fear and mistrust, which is what feminism does today. To learn about humans and humanity; what we are, and what we are not.

Two things we are, which we cannot cease to be and remain human, are a sexually reproducing, moderately sexually dimorphic, pair-bonded species. These are basic facts of our human nature which cannot be erased by social engineering.

Within DGS, I interrogate orthodox feminist concepts, such as patriarchy theory, objectification theory, gender, power, mating strategies, and sex differences and similarities, using humour and evolutionary explanatory models such as natural and sexual selection, parental investment theory, female choice, signalling theory, life history theory, intersexual competition and intrasexual competition.

History has demonstrated many times, that whenever our species attempts to take control of biology and bend it out of shape to ideological goals, human tragedy always follows. It’s a lesson we still don’t seem to have learned, as in spite of overwhelming evidence, many people still hold fast to the idea of an endlessly flexible human nature, and indeed, human nature is flexible, but a blank slate it is not. Neither however is it a crude caricature of immutable deterministic drives and instincts as often painted within the straw man of biological determinism. Human nature is very much mutable, but not infinitely or arbitrarily so, and here lies the nub: Within what may seem like infinite variations of human action and reaction to what life throws at us, our predispositions on an average scale are actually predictable. There are enough constants within this calculus to recognise the existence of an unmistakably human nature. This nature will vary and recalibrate between individuals and ecologies (variation is one of the engines of evolution) but these variations dance around a constant, evolutionary fire.

“Those who journey from political correctness to truth often risk public disapprobation, but it is notable that most never lose their tolerance or humanity. They may question the politics of race, but not that racism is bad; they may question campaigns about women’s pay, but not that women and men deserve equality of treatment.” Browne, A. (2006) The Retreat of Reason: Political correctness and the corruption of political debate in modern Britain. Civitas

I was, and am, standing on the shoulders of many female evolutionary scientists and philosophers who came before me such as Barbara Smuts, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Anne Campbell, Helena Cronin, Griet Vandermassen, Catherine Salmon, Maryanne Fisher, Bobby Low, Helen Fisher, and many more. Over the last 50 years, their scholarship has revealed that, far from feminist fears to the contrary, evolved sex differences do not equate to inferiority.  Via evolution, we in fact see true equality expressed in discrete and fascinating ways.

These women (and many men) have illuminated the role females play as potent agents of evolution via the phenomenon of female choice. This is sadly still an unsung revolution – unsung by feminism, not evolutionists –  as it shattered the male perspective biases that once dominated biology and Darwinism. These women did this, not with rhetorical declarations of war against ‘patriarchy’ but with logic and critical thinking.

When it comes to the principles of natural selection – the struggle to survive – men and women differ very little. Rather, it is in the principles of sexual selection – the struggle not just to survive but thrive enough to have offspring and allow them to thrive also – that the main differences start to become manifest. It is a categorical fact that none of these differences equates to any moral inferiority. No genuine evolutionary scholar would ever make such a claim.

Feminists have long claimed that logic is an exclusively male trait. So much so that to counter the “male” scientific method they felt the need to create “female” method – social constructionism - which ironically invokes every negative female stereotype they claim to want to refute. They did this not because social constructivism was a better tool – it is untested – but because it was the binary opposite of the scientific method.

Women, in fact, have nothing to fear from logic. Yet feminists do fear it, as philosopher Janet Radciffe Richards notes in her book The Sceptical Feminist, 

“…in spite of girls doing better at school than boys, feminists are still woeful at rationality…feminism has some tendency to get stuck in the quagmire of unreason from time to time [but] it cannot be denied that adopting an anti-rational stance has its uses; it can be turned into an all-purpose escape route from tricky corners”  

They also fear it because it falsifies the very premises feminism rests on – especially female inferiority.

This is a description of all feminisms today: radical, intersectional and all other tribes battling for dominance in the victim narrative – including ideological men’s rights, MGTOW and “red pill” groups. All feminisms eschew logic and reason for dogma and ideology and all are in thrall to the flying patriarchal spaghetti monster in the sky. Ask a question about female oppression, you already know the answer: it’s the patriarchy, stupid. And ideological men’s groups have their own version of patriarchy, known as gynocentrism. Both concepts are intellectually myopic.

I created DGS all those years ago because I wanted the opportunity to have a role, however small, in helping us better understand ourselves as a species.

It is true that as a woman I am perhaps more interested in the unique selection pressures women face due directly to their sex. As an evolutionist and a realist, however, this bias does not make me blind to the fact that men face their own unique selection pressures due explicitly to their sex.

The truth is, one sex cannot be understood except in the light of the other. Men and women have co-evolved, each shaping the other both physically and psychologically via sexual selection. Men desire power and resources because women desire men who have power and resources. And female conflict, well that doesn’t look like male conflict, and so often goes unseen, especially by feminists.

From an evolutionary perspective, feminism can be categorised as the study of the conflict between the sexes – intersexual conflict – aka the “battle of the sexes” with a particular interest in proximate, conscious mechanisms of how men can oppress women and how this oppression can be countered. But this is only half the story. Evolutionists posit that to really understand intersexual conflict one must also analyse intrasexual conflict. We do this because we observe across species that competition within a sex is always far more intense than between the sexes. An evolutionary lens also broadens the enquiry to include an analysis of ultimate, unconscious mechanisms of not just how, but why, men pursue the goal of power and resource control. What do men want to do with power? To create strong alliances, subdue rivals, protect against enemies and attract mates.  

Much is known about male intrasexual competition. We have had 2000 years to work it out – its role in shaping cultures and empires – for better or worse. Far less is known about conflict - and conflict resolution - between women; female intrasexual competition (FIC). It is the pink elephant in the feminist room. Do we have the same amount of time to understand female intrasexual competition? For better or worse? I don’t think we do. The epidemic of female-on-female bullying in nursing has long been acknowledged in academia, yet nothing is done about it. In the UK it costs the NHS billions of pounds in workplace attrition, sick leave and low efficiency. It can also cost lives, as a “culture of bullying” was highlighted in the official reports on two scandals in UK maternity wards where both infants and mothers lost their lives.

In another example observe the rise of intragender conflict in the West. Third-gender people exist in many cultures, but only in the West are males who identify with the female gender trying to use it as leverage to get access to sex-based rights and privileges. Then we have feminism itself a battleground fraught with female intrasexual competition, which is often mistakenly called “internalised misogyny”.  Women too, it seems, want to create alliances, subdue rivals and attract the best mates.

Using FIC as a lens to look anew at hot feminist topics such as the beauty industry, cosmetic surgery, anorexia, and the endless wars of attrition between the many tribes of feminisms brings fascinating new insights, as all these phenomena seem to be expressions of female competition not male oppression.

Nonetheless, there is still a comfortable consensus among all feminists that the beauty ‘ideal’ is a tyranny perpetrated upon women by the patriarchy. “Feminists down the ages have argued that the oppression of women is played out on their bodies, their clothes, their style of adornment. To politicise dress has been one of the enduring projects of the women’s movement.” (Walter, N. 1999) Naomi Wolf tackled this concept in her seminal book The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. It suggested that this patriarchal strategy is one of ‘divide and rule’ as it “creates a climate of competitiveness among women that divides them from each other.”

Competitiveness is the keyword here. Perhaps the idea of sanctioning the idea, nay the fact, of female intrasexual competition seems frightening for feminists because on the surface of it, it threatens the very notion of a ‘sisterhood’. Yet we know that men are murderously competitive with one another, as homicide rates attest, and this does not seem to threaten their notion of ‘the patriarchy’.

The evidence actually shows that the beauty myth may not be a tyranny perpetuated on women by men, but on one other - if it is a tyranny at all! And it reveals a much more complex and fascinating picture of female agency which goes far to liberate women from the doctrine of passive femininity.

The fact is, women are fiercely competitive with one another, but as the existence of feminism attests, this does not stop women at least trying to cooperate to face challenges, though, as feminism also shows, its own willful ignorance of human nature means feminists cannot agree on anything for long. This explains the many tribes within feminism, and the fiercely defended hierarchies that exist within feminism itself.

I do not deny that these revelations are tricky for feminists to negotiate, but that is no reason for not taking them on. That female intrasexual competition exists is not in doubt. The degree of it however will vary from culture to culture. We know dominance hierarchies exist in many species and all apes. Humans add to the mix competence hierarchies which allow for the utilisation of innate talents and the division of labour which has allowed our species to become far more than the sum of its biologically determined parts.

We also know females have a large role in the construction and maintenance of such hierarchies, for better and worse. Women are individuals and as such are often not united in their interests. An individual’s environment is crucial to how they calibrate their own needs. Yet, ironically, the collective structure of feminism, suppresses the evolutionary mechanism of individual female choice. The epithet “choice feminism” is regarded with contempt by most feminists today.

 “If we do not know what we are capable of…then we do not know what to watch out for, which human propensities to encourage, and which to guard against.” Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.

Further reading: Griet Vandermassen Sexual Selection: A Tale of Male Bias and Feminist Denial ; Griet Vandermassen: Who’s Afraid of Charles Darwin: Debating Feminism and Evolutionary Theory; Anne Campbell: A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women ; Sarah Blaffer Hrdy: Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding ; Sarah Blaffer Hrdy: Mothernature ; Susan Pinker: The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women and the Real Gender Gap ; Christina Hoff Sommers: Who Stole Feminism? ; Cindy Metson & David Buss: Why Women Have Sex; Women reveal the truth about their sex lives, from adventure to revenge (and everything in between) ; E.O. Wilson: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge ; Jerome H.Barklow (ed): Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for Social Scientists

==

We recognize that the evolution of peafowl, bees, seahorses, angler fishes and marsupial mice has resulted in males and females whose physiology and behavior development has influenced and responded to each other. Yet somehow, that female and male humans behave as they do as a result of the other is somehow unreasonable or even "sexist." Like creationist Xians, this is a denial of evolution and of humans as members of the animal kingdom.

It seems like the "god did it" dragon of "tHe PaTrIaRcHy," then, was conjured to fill the gap in the combination of denial of biological sex-based differences (directly responsible for the formulation of gender ideology; and itself a denial of evolution), and denial of intrasexual competition between women ("On Twitter, women are more misogynistic than men") in order to obscure female agency.

"Social engineering which rubs against the grain of human nature always visits more horror on us than what existed before - think Mao. Trying to control and bend human nature out of shape is exactly what social construtionism is about and why it is so pernicious."

Just finished reading Paula Wright’s awesome profile of the Wind River Range in the new Alpinist. A great climbing history lesson and look at the way the range’s relative obscurity has lead to it’s climbing ethic. I was especially excited to learn of Joe Kelsey’s planned book on his travels in the range. If you’re planning a trip to the winds, I highly recommend this as required reading before hand! 

The goal of my blog isn’t to give other anti-feminist a daily post that proves they are right in their beliefs, but to convince feminists they are wrong in their beliefs as to what feminism is and what it actually accomplishes. I have so far failed abysmally. However, yesterday my best friend, who is a male who supports feminism, emailed me and said, “I was wrong. I’m not a feminist. I’m an egalitarian.”

He then linked me the article that changed his mind more effectively than I ever did. I am posting the article in full hoping it achieves similar results with others. If you like what you’re reading, I highly encourage you to go to the actual website, read about the author, and enjoy the links I did not include.

When Is a Feminist Not a Feminist?

Paula Wright

“Feminism: The advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of the equality of the sexes."

“Egalitarianism: The doctrine that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities.”

The two quotes above are sourced from the Oxford Dictionary. On the face of it, feminism and egalitarianism appear to converge. Indeed, it is not unusual to hear feminists appeal to this dictionary definition whenever they are challenged. I will call this the “reasonable person” defence, e.g., What reasonable person could possibly disagree? The point being, they can't. Not if they want to remain reasonable in the eyes of others,

But similarly, what reasonable person could disagree with egalitarianism? Both premises are highly reasonable.  But as numerous studies and surveys have demonstrated, a majority of people support egalitarian values but do not identify as feminists.[1] [2] [3] [4] What's going on? Are these people confused, ignorant, or both?!

Neither.

It seems the non-feminist (not anti-feminist) egalitarian majority either know or intuitively suspect a crucial difference between the goals of egalitarianism and feminism. Unfortunately, looking to dictionary definitions does not help us articulate what these differences are.

A visit to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives us a more detailed description of both concepts. The opening preamble to the egalitarian chapter[5] dovetails nicely with the dictionary definition above. The feminist chapter, however, quickly diverges from the dictionary definition, running off into various strands where the key theme is internal disagreement within feminism about what feminism is.  It takes just over 3,000 words before the term patriarchy first appears but when it does, it is neither problematic nor contested.

“Feminism, as liberation struggle, must exist apart from and as a part of the larger struggle to eradicate domination in all its forms. We must understand that patriarchal domination shares an ideological foundation with racism and other forms of group oppression, and that there is no hope that it can be eradicated while these systems remain intact. This knowledge should consistently inform the direction of feminist theory and practice. (hooks 1989, 22)”[6]

Here is the first hint of what differentiates feminism from egalitarianism. You will note there is no mention of equality by hooks; the goal is “liberation” from “patriarchal domination.”

Ask a feminist what feminism means and you are likely to get one of two responses. The "reasonable person" defence is one, while the other, is what I will call the "atomistic dodge." This entails the feminist stating that feminism is not a monolithic movement, its aims being too complex to pin down[7]. This position personifies intersectional feminism. Note how the descriptions contradict one another. It is easy to get lost in this equivocal maze.

So, rather than trying to discern the differences between feminist factions, I asked what they had in common. The results help us see the difference between egalitarianism and feminism.

In 1963, the liberal feminist Betty Friedan published a book about a “problem with no name.” Seven years later, radical feminists named it “patriarchy." Patriarchy was conceived of as the underlying structure which facilitated men's oppression of women; “a system characterized by power, dominance, hierarchy and competition, a system that [could not] be reformed but only ripped out root and branch.”[8]

This moment marked a fundamental change in strategy as feminists shifted from a liberal policy of achieving equality through reform, to a radical strategy of trying to dismantle patriarchy. Around this time, Friedan was unceremoniously kicked out of the organisation she had founded because she wasn't radical enough[9].  Since this time, patriarchy has remained central to all subsequent waves of feminism. While it is true that the different factions of feminisms have slightly different conceptions of patriarchy, they all agree on the following:

Patriarchy is a socially constructed phenomenon which enforces notions of sex and gender that equate to male supremacy and female inferiority[10] [11]. Patriarchy is the mechanism by which all men institutionally oppress all women[12]. All feminisms are united in the fight against patriarchy (if little else)[13].

But what is patriarchy? Does it even exist? There is a dearth of research on feminist premises which values critical thinking over critical theory, though this is starting to change.[14] Both the existence and origin of patriarchy are assumed by feminists rather than explored, yet the flawed, circular logic of the three premises above represent the ideological bedrock of all feminisms—from radical to intersectional—and social 'justice' activism today.

The feminist concept of patriarchy is embellished from the anthropological observation that in many cultures men appear to hold more social, economic and political 'power' compared to females.  Feminists assume men grasp for power and resources to dominate women because they hate them (misogyny). My research suggests patriarchy is vastly more complex than feminists have ever imagined and that women have just as much influence in its structure and maintenance as men.  As Mary Wollstonecraft noted:

“Ladies are not afraid to drive in their own carriages to the doors of cunning men."[15]

Patriarchy is a system which can both oppress and liberate, both male and female. It is the human fitness landscape.

Paula Wright And here lies the rub for feminisms today. Heterosexual men and women are attracted to one another precisely because of their stereotypical sexual traits. In fact, they are not stereotypical, they are archetypical. Humans are a sexually reproducing species. Men and women have shaped one another physically and psychologically over millions of years via the process of sexual selection. In turn, we create culture as our fitness landscape. There is a simple dynamic to this: Men want power and resources because women want men who have power and resources.

This isn't because women are selfish gold diggers or men shallow aesthetes. Sexual dimorphism and the sexual division of labour are not patriarchically imposed tyrannies. They are an elegant and pragmatic solution for a species who have uniquely helpless infants with unprecedentedly long childhoods. This dynamic between the sexes, of team work and strong pair bonds, is one of the foundations of our success as a species. The survival of offspring is at the centre of this—whether we choose to have children or not. The sexes simply cannot be understood except in light of one another and the reason we evolved to cooperate; offspring. It will continue to be so for as long as we remain human.

The feminist legacy of social constructionism and patriarchy theory has taken the capricious, delightful and, yes, sometimes cruel battle of the sexes and turned it into a war of attrition. The circular logic also has feminism devouring itself from within.

This past year, one of the the most iconic women of the 20th century, the radical feminist and intellectual, Germaine Greer, was denied a platform to speak at a UK university.[16] Her crime? Greer does not reject biology wholesale and, while she respects the egalitarian rights of men who want to transition and live and love as a woman, she insists this doesn't actually make them biologically women; they remain trans-women. For this she was stripped of the right to speak, verbally abused and labelled a bigot. The middle class, socialist feminist Laurie Penny went so far as to cast Greer in the same light as people who want to murder homosexuals.

Why should women mind? In 2014 a trans-woman in the US was awarded “working mother of the year” despite neither giving birth or being primary carer to her children.[17]  This year, in 2016, Caitlyn Jenner, who has been living as a woman for a few months, will be awarded “woman of the year” ahead of countless women of substance who have made extraordinary accomplishments while facing actual selection pressures unique to their biological sex. Trans-activists are lobbying for a change of language by midwives to refer to people giving birth as “pregnant persons” not women.[18] At a time when people debate whether a woman drinking the odd glass of wine in pregnancy is child abuse, a trans-women took powerful (not socially constructed) hormones to stimulate lactation[19]. A discussion of the nutritional value of the milk extends to the trans-mother reporting the milk is thick and creamy, which seems to identify it as something other than human breast milk, which is highly dilute and low in fat.

Feminists frequently claim that we live in a rape culture, even though rape and all violent crime in the West is in steady decline and rape prosecution statistics are on a par with other crimes at over 50%.[20] [21] In the US there is a feminist movement on college campuses to lower the threshold of proof in rape prosecution trials. It is staggering to think these educated people have forgotten terrible lessons within living memory; the bitter crop of strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

To balk at this is not hatred or phobia but healthy scepticism. We are all equal before the law under egalitarianism. This is not the case with feminism. It places ideology before people.  Individual rights and choices are “problematic”.[22] Women like myself who point out the logical inconsistencies and totalitarian mission creep of feminism are labelled anti-feminist and anti-woman; as if “feminist” and “woman” were synonyms. They aren't. Feminists are identified by their politics, not their sex or gender. They do not speak for women or the majority of egalitarians in society; they speak only for themselves. The dictionary definition of feminism is in serious need of a rewrite.

The egalitarian quest for equality is tangential to feminism. So...which are you?