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Why feminism is so psychologically attractive and why the way out requires rebuilding marriage, including making divorce harder.When I say feminism here, I don’t mean the proposition that women should be allowed to vote, I mean the mentality. A grievance-centred worldview in which relations between the sexes are interpreted through female victimhood, male culpability and a presumption of female moral innocence. Once that framework is in place, any unequal outcome becomes evidence of discrimination, and any unhappiness a woman experiences invites a search for the man or institution responsible. This way of thinking is psychologically appealing because it gives a woman two things at once. She can understand herself as having less power over what happens to her, while gaining more moral power over how other people must respond. Being angry at unfairness is more appealing than to ask: What did I choose? What did I contribute? At the same time, being the injured party gives her a claim on sympathy and accommodation. That is a powerful bargain.So, when we hear that “feminism lied to women,” we should also ask why so many women found the story attractive. Any attempt to undo the feminist mentality has to deal with that appeal and replace the psychological rewards, not just argue that some facts were wrong. The Premature Acquisition of PurposeWe talk constantly about purposeless young men, and with some justification. The developmental problem facing young women is different. They are offered a sense of ideological purpose extraordinarily early. A girl of fifteen or seventeen can already learn that being a woman means belonging to a historically wronged group. Taking up the mantle of being a woman offers her a chance to recognise injustice, identify oppression and take part in causes through which her anger becomes evidence of moral seriousness. She doesn’t have to have been responsible for anybody’s wellbeing. Adolescence already comes with a complete moral mission.This is psychologically attractive because it answers questions that young people badly need answered. Who am I? Who are my people? What am I for? What makes me good? Who needs me?
The appeal of feminism is that the identity of simply being a woman answers all those at once. You are good because you are a woman. Your achievements are extraordinary because you managed despite the oppression and discrimination of being a woman.
For adult purpose and identity to be healthy, it needs to be about developing into someone others can rely on.When the Identity Arrives Before Adult LifeThis helps explain why simply telling someone to “stop being a feminist” is usually useless.
First of all, many won’t consciously identify with feminism, but will have adopted the mentality and identity of historically oppressed woman, nonetheless. You are not asking her to change her opinion about an employment statistic or an abortion law. You are asking her to give up the answer to who she is, who her people are, what makes her morally good and what her life is for. Something has to replace it. That is the transition that is supposed to happen; from woman to mother. From woman to wife. And that is the stunted maturity we sadly see with many women now, because the prematurely adopted identity of “woman” prevents that transition. Family, children, husband, extended kin, religious community, friendship, caregiving, mentoring and useful local service can all provide that alternative because they combine belonging with actual responsibility.
How Belief Systems Finally BreakPeople rarely leave a totalizing worldview because somebody produces one devastating fact. Research on subtyping helps explain why. Counterexamples are often isolated as exceptions instead of being allowed to challenge the rule. People have usually encountered contrary evidence before and already have an explanation ready. The decent man is an exception. The abusive woman was traumatized. The happy homemaker doesn’t know any better.
It’s identity-protective cognition.So instead of speculating about what might change women’s minds, let’s look at women who actually managed to recover:Janice Fiamengo says teaching university students made the asymmetry impossible to ignore: she watched young men treated as collectively suspect while female students were protected and encouraged in the name of equality.
Carolyn Baker had herself been seriously abused by women and worked with abuse survivors, making feminist claims that female abuse was negligible increasingly impossible to reconcile with what she had actually seen. Karen Woodallsays years of work with separated families repeatedly put her in front of manipulative or harmful mothers and excluded fathers, until the default categories of woman-as-victim and man-as-perpetrator stopped matching the families in front of her. Cassie Jaye approached men’s-rights activists expecting misogynistic adversaries and instead met a host of individual men describing suffering that didn’t fit her narrative. Rachel Bock attended a Women’s March and found herself surrounded by slogans attacking men, which clashed with her experience of the supportive men in her own life. Catherine Johnson stopped going out because feminist ideas had made ordinary male attention feel threatening; becoming more frightened of the world made her question an ideology that promised empowerment. Carolyn McCulleytravelled to South Africa, heard a Christian sermon, then began attending church and reading the Bible, where the demand to examine her own anger, pride and selfishness challenged her habit of locating fault outside herself.
Tara Kennedy-Kline became the mother of two boys and tried to raise them as courteous, chivalrous young men; seeing feminist campaigns describe behaviours she was teaching them as creepy, predatory or oppressive changed how she heard feminist rhetoric about men.The common denominator is that one powerful experience, or an accumulation of too many contradictory experiences, made it impossible to keep filtering reality through the theory of female victimhood and male culpability. I have seen motherhood work as one such powerful confrontation more times than I can count, including myself. A woman will be surprised by the strength of her attachment to her baby and by how quickly priorities shift. If motherhood suddenly feels deeply meaningful, the feminist framework becomes harder to maintain. This would the point, after such an experience has opened the door, at which exposure to different sources of information can get through: books by Erica Komisar, Suzanne Venker or Janice Fiamengo for example. But sadly, age matters. If she has already built a life that makes acting on those maternal impulses costly and if her surrounding values only material status, suppressing them might be the easiest way through. I have seen this happen many times, rarely without it leading to resentment building, and the old framework hardening around the conflict. The people around her can prevent this by attaching admiration to the new role: tell her motherhood suits her, that you are proud of how she cares for her baby, that her tenderness is attractive, that the family life is more important than wealth, and that selflessness and devotion to family are admirable. If feminism lowered the status of those qualities, part of the way out is to make them desirable again. Men Have More Influence Over Female Incentives Than They AdmitMen have an important role in the cure, and no, it’s not “grow up or stop playing video games.” It is that they reward the wrong traits in women. We have to bring back the distinction between being desirable and being marriageable. Modern dating, from apps to the removal of family and community from mate choice, has made it easier to choose somebody almost entirely on optics and “chemistry”. I continue to meet men in therapy who eventually reach an impasse in their marriages because their wives cannot tolerate discomfort, look past themselves or make the sacrifices when the going gets tough. When I ask why they got married, the answer is often awkwardly thin: they had a good time together and were attracted to each other.They dated in isolation.