Sixth Wave Feminism

First wave feminism, which ended with the right to vote, was the only successful feminism out of all the ideological waves that have since then washed ashore on the rocky shores of modernity.

Second wave feminism left behind broken families and uncertain relationships that men and women struggle to unhappily navigate while third wave feminism gave us identity politics, Hillary Clinton, the #MeToo movement and abortion as the apotheosis of female identity.

Fourth wave feminism took women out of feminism and replaced them with men in dresses while fifth wave feminism dispensed with even the pretense of feminism and instead hollowed out what was the left of the movement and replaced it with radical leftist causes like BLM, Hamas and crushing capitalism. If second wave feminism had been accused of being Marx in a dress and third wave feminism, Marx in a pantsuit, fourth wave feminism was a Marxist man in a dress and fifth wave feminism was Marxism in which the involvement of women was limited to advocating for Marxist causes and accepting that rape was the fault of capitalism, not the rapist.

The trouble with the latter ‘waves’ (itself a reworking of a Marxist concept) was not unique to feminism. The same crisis arrives with every identity movement infiltrated by the left which begins by appearing to advocate for a particular group, when it is actually recruiting members of that group to advocate for it, and then proceeds through its ‘waves’ to eliminate that group.

What feminism did to women is what Marxism also did to the working class, what Jewish leftist movements did to the Jews and what the Latinx movement began doing to the Latino men it had once recruited. And what every separatist Marxist movement will eventually do to its base.

The paradox of Marxist activism is that the movement in its ultimate fulfillment has no room for differences or individual identities, yet can only grow by appealing to the solidarity of oppressed groups (and if they’re not oppressed yet, convincing them that they are or ought to be). Eventually the bait is switched and what seemed like empowerment becomes disempowerment. The ultimate test for the true believer is to abandon the particularistic wellspring of their activist passion for the party discipline of the larger movement and its promise of salvation for mankind.

Identity politics replaces old identities with new ones. The new identities it creates and champions are only a means of destroying the old. And then once the new identities have become old, it is their turn to be deconstructed as oppressive systems to be replaced by newer identities still. Feminism began by pitting women against men, then pitted different women against each other, and then finally pitted men claiming to be women against women.

The details may be unique to women, but the pattern appears across leftist movements.

Feminism being older than more recent arrivals like civil rights movements for minorities or gay rights, is also further along the waves of betrayal and closer to its own elimination. The other group closest to it in age, campaigners for Jewish rights, can best appreciate its dilemma. Jewish activists, like feminists, have been faced with the choice between their people and the Left, and much of the professional feminist and Jewish activist class have chosen the Left.

And yet the 2024 election provided solid evidence that growing numbers of women (and Jews) are rejecting the identity extinction mandated by their movements. The blow dealt to the transgender movement and its demand that the female sex disappear into a black hole of pronouns, chestfeeders, vagina-havers and similar euphemisms by women has staggered it.

The rejection of fourth wave feminism with its resentment of white women, the BLMing of feminism and the evocation of transgender men as the ultimate women, along with fifth wave’s feminism’s insistence that rape required understanding, not punishment, and that the ultimate fault lay with systemic racism, the justice system and capitalism, left behind an empty space.

What next wave might fill that void and what would ‘sixth-wave feminism’ even look like?

The trouble with ‘feminism’ was always the ‘ism’. Marxism and the leftist movements it influences view the world through the lens of oppressors and oppressed, victims to liberate from systems rather than individuals making their own choices. Politics is the study of power and viewing everything as a power relationship creates perpetual conflict between people.

Defining people as a thesis and antithesis leaves no room for human relationships on any other terms. It’s what ultimately destroys every leftist relationship with anyone on the outside and with each other by eventually making everything into a zero sum purity test over the right to power.

The politicisation of the personal is at the heart of leftist totalitarianism. But escaping it requires leaving behind ideological formulas for the more complicated mysteries of human relationships.

There are actual abuses and societies based around oppression, but the problem with leftist movements is that viewing all interactions as a series of power relationships, they can conceive of no other kind of society and out of that they turn liberation into oppression. Human relationships should not be subjugated to the political, rather liberated from the political.

And if there is to be a sixth wave feminism, it ought to liberate women from politicisation.

Any feminism based along the lines of Marxism will deprive women of choice by politicising those choices and then demanding that they conform to its ideology, it will deconstruct women and then eventually define womanhood as a problematic construct and seek to replace it.

If feminism is to be based on an ‘ism’, it ought to be individualism.

Collectivist liberation is just another form of oppression. The only freedom it offers is the passage to another kind of conformity. The ‘waves’ of feminism redefined what a woman was supposed to be until in their final redefinition a woman was truly a man. A true feminism would allow women their individual choices and recognize that women are not all the same.

The true ideal was already written in the Declaration of Independence as a return to the ‘right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ that the first feminists had sought before the Marxists came in and put the movement on the path to nullifying freedom and womanhood.

Women have come to exist for feminism rather than feminism for women. The final feminism would be a liberation from feminism.

Source: http://www.danielgreenfield.org/feeds/1366526360322929516/comments/default