 Here's the story, fellas. A few weeks ago I made a video about why men should avoid dating feminists. It's part of my Pointing Out the Obvious series. One of the most important points in that video is the fact that feminists cannot tolerate success, and you can't have a solid relationship if one partner's invested in failure. But I took that important point, and I buried it at the end of the video, and I didn't explain it, so let me take a few minutes here and talk about one of the most important reasons men should adamantly avoid women who have bought into feminist ideology. First off, let me repeat something I said in that original video, which is that I don't lump all feminists together because two different women can describe themselves as feminist and be nearly opposite things. On one end of the spectrum are equity feminists who want equality between men and women, including equal opportunity and equal responsibility. And at the other end are the gender feminists. These are the female supremacists. They have no interest in equality. For them, it's about making men pay. And I suppose there are women on all points between those extremes. In that original video, I used two primary sources. One was a prominent Washington Post editorial from last June called Why Can't We Hate Men, and the other was a popular gender studies textbook. I chose the editorial because it's a blunt and accurate representation of feminism in the media, and I chose the textbook because it's a fair and accurate representation of the kind of feminism young women are exposed to on campus. The college campus is ground zero. It's where young women are taught to think and act like gender feminists. And let me tell you, reading that book was not easy, but there's no better way to understand what's being taught to young women in universities than to go to the source. And women are being taught that masculinity is built on violence and oppression and racism, and that men should be hated and punished for all the sins we've committed against women over the centuries. I suppose that doesn't include things like indoor plumbing or English common law, but you know, all the bad stuff. So today I'm talking about the kind of feminists who are not necessarily obvious pink-haired intersectional extremists, but they believe what they hear from gender studies departments and almost every other department in the humanities, and they believe what they hear so often in the media about how unfair their lives are. Let's look at something like the pink tax. It's a great example of the type of thing that makes gender feminists absolutely undatable. If you don't know what I'm talking about, the pink tax is the feminist belief that hygiene items and basic services like dry cleaning cost more for women because it's just one more way evil men can oppress them, as if there are no women working at Estee Lauder or the local dry cleaner. The pink tax has been repeatedly debunked. Some products just cost more for women because the ingredients are more expensive and women like expensive packaging. And as for the dry cleaning argument, it's cheaper for men's clothing because women's clothing is more complicated to clean. But facts don't matter when you're on a mission to be oppressed, and that's what gender feminism is all about. What matters is the narrative, and I'm not just talking about the spoken narrative. I'm talking about the internal narrative. Feminists have to maintain the belief that they're being oppressed. Feminism is logic for losers. It's a pursuit of misery, but it's misery with a purpose. The wretchedness that they're trying to achieve is their ticket to the high moral ground, and the high moral ground is their ticket to financial and personal success. Victimhood is their currency. Let me give you an example. In the original video, I quoted Susanna DeNuto Walters, who wrote that Washington Post editorial where she complains about institutional male power and unpaid labor in the home and a culture permeated by violence against women and everything in between. Her argument is that men, all of us, deserve to be hated unless we step aside and voluntarily give gender feminists like her the reins of power. So who is this Walters? The way she talks about her society, she must live in some backward corner of the world where men treat women like chattel, right? Well, no, she's a tenured gender studies professor at Northeastern University in Boston. That's one of the most liberal places in one of the most liberal cities on the planet. If she were being mistreated in any way, I'm sure we would certainly know about it. Now, tenured professorships are some of the most secure cushy gigs in the world. And in a department like gender studies, you don't even have to think logically. You can't even get fired unless you completely lose your noodle and actually assault someone. And even then, you might end up with a better position inside the system. And how does a person earn this cushy, high-paying gender studies gig? Well, you don't have to cure a disease or rescue anyone from a burning building or grow food or fix plumbing or drive a truck or do anything useful at all. You just have to find new and exciting ways to be outraged. You complain your way to the top. It's winning by losing. Now, I've read my share of essays by people like Walters. And I notice a theme that flows through all of it. And I have to assume that this idea sits in the mind of every woman who buys into feminist ideology. It's the idea that they're not responsible for their own success because society is responsible for their failure. They're oppressed by everyone from the president all the way down to the guy who sells their deodorant. And whenever something doesn't go their way, they can always convince themselves that they've been treated unfairly. But that's just one benefit. Victimhood is a path to power because it rallies people to your side. Most people love a good underdog story, including me. One of my favorite movies is Braveheart. In that movie, the hero, William Wallace, fought for people who were truly oppressed. They were dealt with violently and they were taxed into poverty. Wallace rose up against the oppressors and he martyred himself. It's a very cool story and if you have any kind of soul, you have to root for the guy. Now, feminists can trick people into believing that they're fighting the same battle as Braveheart, then they can cash in on that same kind of sympathy. But since they're not actually oppressed by anyone, then they have to pretend that they're oppressed. And the pretense of victimhood comes at a heavy cost, which is that they can't allow themselves to appear successful. Because appearing successful would undermine the victim narrative. And anything that undermines the victim narrative threatens the currency that leads to success and power. This is the quandary of the modern feminists. You can't be powerful unless you're a victim. But you can't be a victim if you're powerful. An influential psychologist named Leon Festinger put a name to this kind of internal conflict. He called it cognitive dissonance. That's when the behaviors that you see yourself doing don't match your beliefs. Now, people don't like feeling cognitive dissonance, so we try to resolve it by either adjusting our beliefs to match our behavior or adjusting our behavior to match our beliefs. And we do this because we're an animal that values consistency and predictability, even within ourselves. So when a feminist hears herself complaining about the patriarchy, but at the same time sees herself in a world where men are actually treating her pretty well, then she's got a bad case of cognitive dissonance, and she has to make a choice. One option is to drop the victim narrative and start enjoying life. But that kind of attitude adjustment is a pretty tall order for most people, especially someone who believes that they're not the ones who need to change. It's the rest of the world that's unfair. So option two is to alter her behavior to prop up her beliefs. For feminists, that means doubling down on the victim narrative and finding any evidence of that imaginary patriarchy that's keeping her down. That's where they come up with ridiculous irrational complaints like the pink tax. Facts don't matter when a person is trying to resolve cognitive dissonance by propping up their failing beliefs. And that's a human trait, not just a feminist trait, but when a gender feminist sees herself succeeding and isn't willing to question her worldview, then the only thing that matters is finding any kind of evidence that she's being oppressed. Because when she sees herself fighting her oppressors, even if they're only imaginary, then she sees that her behavior is aligned with her beliefs. And that resolves the cognitive dissonance. I think this is why feminists protest more and more loudly the better they're doing in life. And by the way, this is why you probably shouldn't be married to your ideology. You should have one, I do, but you shouldn't attach it to your identity or your success because sooner or later reality is going to disagree with your ideology and you'll have to make a choice. You can either adjust your worldview and get on with your day, or you can fight for your stupid wrong beliefs and look like an idiot. So let me give you an example of how the feminist establishment teaches women to reject success and look like idiots rather than adjust their worldview. This example comes from the textbook I used in my original video. That book is overflowing with examples of feminists who appear to be resolving cognitive dissonance by shitting on their own good news, but my favorite example comes from a 1994 essay by Lisa Marie Hoagland called Fear of Feminism. And you might be saying, Sean, that essay is almost 25 years old. Why don't you use an example from this century? And you'd be right, that essay is old and my copy of the book is outdated. It's from 2011 and the current edition is 2014. But the same 24 year old essay still shows up in the current edition. It's right between an essay called Feminist Men written by a feminist man and an essay titled Fracking is a Feminist Issue. Because when you're a gender feminist, everything's an issue and it's always personal. So in this essay, Hoagland is making the case that it's difficult to be the one who speaks out against society. And that's a valid point in general, though I'd argue that feminists aren't punished for their beliefs, at least not in the western world and certainly not at the University of Cincinnati where Hoagland teaches. I'm sure she's considered brave and admirable by the people around her. But anyway, as she's meandering toward her main point, she has this passage. Feminists have fostered awareness of violence against women and it is to our credit that we've made our analysis so powerful. At the same time, however, we must attend to the ways that this awareness can be deployed for non-feminist and even anti-feminist purposes and most especially to the ways it can be used to serve a racist agenda. Now feminist essays are always hard to read because writing is so convoluted but she's clearly making the case here that by decreasing violence against women, you increase racism in men. Nowhere in the essay does she explain that alleged correlation. Nowhere in the entire book can I find anything approaching an explanation and without a very clear and persuasive explanation, this is just a non-sequitur on stilts. From a logical standpoint, it's pure gibberish. However, from an emotional standpoint, it's a thing of beauty because it resolves the cognitive dissonance. First, she grudgingly acknowledges a success but then she immediately and irrationally and baselessly asserts that the success will create more racist men and racist men are probably the worst thing imaginable in her ideology. That's how she turns the good news into bad news and once she's done that, her world is once again a terrible place filled with evil men and she can relax because she's reestablished her consistency. Personally, I would expect anyone to celebrate a safer world for women, anyone except gender feminist. To them, good news is a threat to their identity and their power. So fellas, let's bring it back to you and your life. When you attach yourself to someone who's invested in losing, you're going to lose. For one thing, you'll never be able to resolve a conflict with her after the honeymoon phase because conflict is her natural state. You may experience little victories here and there, but if she starts to feel warm feelings toward anything masculine like you, then her feminist ideology and her cognitive dissonance will drive you right back into conflict. And guess what? If she sees men as her oppressors, she's eventually going to see you as her oppressor. But even when she's not in conflict with you, her natural state of conflict with the rest of the world is bound to steer you away from your goals. There's going to be a lot of long exhausting conversations about how people are mistreating her and eventually her enemies start to become your enemies. I see this in my clinical practice all the time and not just with feminists. People are naturally sympathetic to their partners and we tend to take up their causes, so it's really counterproductive to attach yourself to someone who has a beef with the whole world because you're going to end up with a whole lot of antagonism in your life and if you have any kind of goals or ambitions, you just don't need this kind of obstacle. Now most guys will naturally turn away from perpetual victims once they know how to recognize them, but let's be honest, there are plenty of guys who are actually attracted to this dynamic. It's usually because they're good guys who are looking to help and they get a lot out of it. What they get is not generally healthy, but it is reinforcing. For one thing, partnering with a gender feminist or any other perpetual victim creates this false camaraderie where it's you and me against the world and you can show her what a great guy you are by really empathizing and getting angry at the world right along with her. But that camaraderie only lasts until she gets mad at you, then you are the oppressor and you have to work your way back into her good graces and unfortunately that's the unwinnable battle that some guys are attracted to. Another benefit to partnering with a victim is that it just gives you a sense of purpose. She becomes your project. If you can keep her happy then you get to feel like you're doing something useful in the world. The problem of course is that happiness is not her goal so you can't succeed. You might as well put your energy elsewhere. But I imagine that most guys end updating feminists just because they don't know what they're getting into. They haven't been burned yet and if that's you I hope you can spot the signs and get out before it's too late. And really this all comes down to one bit of advice. Only allow people into your inner circle and that includes dating if they have a strong sense of personal responsibility and an investment in success and you can't find that in someone who needs to believe that they're being mistreated. All right fellas that's all I got to say about that so be careful out there and we'll talk to you soon. Take care. Patriarchy fuckface!