Are Women A Class?

At the suggestion of someone on Facebook I have been reading about feminist theory. It appears that the central contention of contemporary feminism is that women are a class that has been historically oppressed and exploited, and that gender roles are a part of that exploitation.

First of all, are women a class? I do not believe that they are. Women are not a class, women are a gender. Some women are born high, and some women are born low. There are women in positions of influence and there are women in positions of complete powerlessness. There are all sorts of differences among women, just as there are among men. A woman can mean anything from Queen Elizabeth to the woman in Zambia selling tomatoes to earn $1 a day. I do not see how it is rightful to regard women as a class.

Can gender roles be oppressive to women? Of course. But then again so can women being robbed of their right to being beautiful. In Sweden, feminism is more advanced than it is in the United States, and women there are not under pressure to suppress their beauty. Denying women the right to beauty is like denying men the right to physical strength. It denies them the area of their clear superiority. And that is not liberating toward women; it is oppressive to them.

I do have things in common with any number of feminists. Like them, I was an unattractive brainy person in school, and I can understand how an intelligent woman would justifiably get angry because she is not valued for her intelligence and is seen as a loser or a freak. However attacking beautiful women and men who like them is not the way to solve anything at all. A woman in this position has two choices. One – the path that I myself took – is to become more attractive; and in my adult life I have been at no shortage of female attention, including extremely beautiful female attention. Another is to arrange her life in such a way that her appearance does not matter, and that she can work as an engineer or a technical professional, where things of this sort count for nothing.

There was a person on the Internet whom some saw as a misogynist, and someone said that he liked women who behaved the way that he wanted them to behave and did not like women who behaved in a way that he did not want them to behave. My question is, Isn't that everyone? Does the fact that someone dislikes one woman mean that he dislikes all of them? Does the fact that most people dislike Jeffrey Dahmer mean that all of them are misandrists? Women are different. Men are different. So you don't like some women. That doesn't mean that you don't like them all.

Lastly, if one needs to like all women in order to not be considered a misogynist, then one needs to like all men in order to not be considered a misandrist. According to this logic, disliking just one person makes you a cad. This is not a realistic standard. People will like whom they like, and they will dislike whom they dislike. This is the case both with women and with men.

So let's put an end to all this crying wolf. If a real misogynist comes along, fine, call him that; but don't apply that to people who aren't. The more one cries wolf, the less people become credible when a real wolf appears. And this plays right into the hands of real misogynists, of whom they are plenty and with any number of whom I had the misfortune to interact.