I have a number of concerns about feminism.
- It's not respectful of men and masculinity.
- It analyzes the relationship between men and women as a zero-sum conflict over power.
- It neglects that relationships tend to be win-win or lose-lose. It provides little information that useful to improving real relationships between actual men having relationships with actual men.
- It undermines useful academic work on gender.
- It equates feminine with good and masculine with bad.
Feminism sees patriarchy as being the root cause of problems for women. Somehow these feminist gender researchers have overlooked the obvious that modern society isn't doing well by most men either.
Feminism extends the model of institutional racism to create the omni-evil of "patriarchy". The patriarchy model seems to imply all men have access to power and all women are shut out. This doesn't resonate with the 95+% of men that feel pretty disempowered on the job.
Some men embrace the feminist model, but most men just seek to avoid fighting over it.
The patriarchy model suggests the road to advancing women is tearing down men. If there's a fixed amount of power in society and the men have it, the women must take it.
Feminism lashes out at the achievement-oriented dominant "White" male culture. "You're a human being not a human doing," they say. How many womens studies professors that are married (to men) are married to guys that make less money than they do and don't have advanced degrees? Maybe there is something about the interplay between men and women that makes men more competitive?
In real relationships between real men and real women the relationship tends to work (win-win) or not work (lose-lose). The feminism model of competition for power (if one is gaining power, one is losing it) is obviously not the dominant model for real heterosexual relationships.
One frustration I had with feminism was reading Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality by Deborah L. Tolman. She made some excellent points about how society doesn't allow teenage girls enough safe space to experience and experiment with their sexuality. But then she went into a thing about patriarchy which didn't seem to connect to her earlier points. She went from something I could see a reasonable Republican suburban "White" guy with a teenage daughter embracing to something that antagonized her potential audience to score points with the feminist establishment.
Feminism seems to have an idea about how men should be and is hostile to the way we are. Ironically, feminism seems to be hostile to the way real women seem to want us to be.
Feminism doesn't pass judgment on female sexuality--straight, bi or lesbian--or gay male sexuality. Terri Gross can joke with a gay guy about his porn collection. But hetero male sexuality is something to be judged, not understood.
But if feminism starts with a model like patriarchy as the root of all evil then the conclusion of feminist analysis usually is going to come to, "men are bad, women are good."