The idea that all have equal humanity is called humanism – not feminism

Humanism is concerned with the rights of all, feminism only with the rights of some. When protection of rights of only half of humanity is accepted as the full concept of equality, the rights of half of humanity exist nowhere.

I believe in equality, which I understand as equal rights, opportunity, cultivation and human value (and not as sameness of sexes). This is the basic perception called humanism, and I see myself as a humanist. Feminists often attempt to argue that feminism is just the belief in equality for all – that is, they attempt to say that feminism is humanism. This is a mistake, and if men and women won’t be able to realize where the mistake lies and how to point it out, none will be able to achieve well-being, because the mistake goes down to the replacement of rights for all with a perspective that requires society to understand “equality” as rights to only part of humanity. That is, the following discussion is about essence, and not about words or names.

Feminism is separatism. The separatism is written into its name. Feminism is not concerned, like humanism, with the rights of all humans. If a woman abuses her husband out of cruelty, the husband’s right for safety does not concern feminists, protections that would have allowed him to realize his right for safety and not to be abused, do not concern feminists, and in fact most of them would protect the wife who committed the violence (demand her release from prison, blame the man for her violence), as demonstrated in the sad case of the abuse of the actress Amber Heard against the actor Johnny Depp when he was married to her.

This occurs because feminism is not humanism, and in fact, is similar to nationalist movements, with the collection of individuals called “women” replacing the collection called “nation”. Many if not most feminists even speak explicitly of “the women’s nation”. Just as the response in racist-nationalist movements to a case where a person of their own collective committed a crime against someone from another collective (with whom the nationalists feel they have an existential political conflict), would often be to see their countryman as innocent, arguing “he’s only defending himself against the cruelty of the other group” or, “this is only a rational response to the evil of the other group”, so will almost all feminists treat any wrongdoing by a woman to a man or a boy (sexual exploitation by a teacher, violence by a wife), with the same argumentation. Feminists are not the least concerned with humanism – the aspiration for equality for all of humanity as the same rights and protections for each and every human being – and their treatment of women is not that of a humanist but that of a nationalist, whenever a woman is not the victim but the perpetrator they will be loyal not to equality but to women, to the “nation”.

To hide this contradiction between feminism and humanism, feminists have no other choice but to apply two rationalizations. Firstly, to argue that women are never violent or “very rarely”. This is said because feminists assume, not necessarily explicitly, that if they can believe that women are seldomly violent, then even if feminism is nationalism, “it won’t make a difference” because there will be no instances where feminists support injustice by siding with “the nation” instead of with equality. Because of the refuting data showing that women do anything that men do and in some areas nearly in similar rates (as presented from time to time in this blog), feminists are struggling to keep the idea that women never hurt men or boys believable. As a result, they need to apply a second rationalization: that whenever a woman does hurt a man or a boy, it’s justifiable. And feminists will go through great lengths to describe a female perpetrator as the victim, to perserve, ultimately, their belief that they can be nationalists of sex-nationalism without being the anti-humanists that nationalists typically are. If all women who do hurt someone from the other sex can be presented as only exhibiting “reactive” violence (including in “reacting” in adulthood to events that occurred decades earlier in childhood with people completely unrelated to the present incident), then feminists can retain their belief that their sex-nationalism is not anti-humanistic. When no means of describing a female perpetrator as a victim is available, feminists would finally resort to describing her actions as justifiable “globally”, “holistically”, as part of a general existential conflict between women and men, which would be the very same response of a nationalist.

On their way to continue disguising nationalism as humanism, feminists are left with no other choice but legitimizing female violence and crimes, hiding perpetrators, suppressing data, and silencing victims, because without all this it would become evident that when a feminist has to apply humanism, the rights of all do not concern her, only the arbitrary classification of individuals into what she regards as “her group” and “the group of others”, like all nationalists.

But the discussion is far from being only about the fact that feminism is sex-nationalism more than anything resembling universalism. Because, under the pretext of self-affiliation with humanism, separatist feminists have been advancing into a large number of positions of power, until they had enough power to replace in countless cultural frameworks universal humanism with separatist feminism, while calling the new method, “equality for all”. This is the reason many younger feminists, who did not witness the replacement, attempt to define feminism, with the definition of humanism, while feminists have always defined feminism as the women’s rights movement, not as “equality for all”. Feminists have taken the definition of humanism and “painted it” over separatism, which remained as shown above, a type of nationalism. But if a movement concerned only with the human rights and protections of one part of humanity is accepted as the universal framework for equality, we need to ask where then, the human rights, dignity and value of the other part are articulated. The answer is that under such circumstances the humanity of that part which was never included in the “nation”, is articulated nowhere, and is the concern of no one.

We see then, that by being in fact sex-nationalism but pretending to be first part of humanism and then humanism itself, and eventually being accepted as the universal and singular framework for equality and rights, feminism, becomes the very denial of the humanity of half of humanity. It becomes a severe form of chauvinism. Had it still defined itself as “a party”, within “a larger framework called humanism”, then it could still attempt to disguise sex-nationalism as “part of” universal humanism. But once a party concerned only with the rights of half of humanity demands to be accepted and is accepted as the holistic framework for rights – and this demand of feminists has indeed been granted by nearly all of the institutions of humanism, including the UN, its agencies, international human rights organizations, the civil rights organizations that evolved out of the civil rights movement, and countries’ legal and educational systems – then half of humanity is left outside of what is now the only and universal framework for protection of rights and equality.

The problem with applying separatism as a framework of equality, and this is what fundamentally makes separatism different from universal humanism, this is where the error lies – is that if separatism succeeds in achieving its goal of becoming a hegemony it defeats itself and becomes what if fought against. Because it was separatist. It only articulated and was concerned with rights of part of humanity, so when it became the hegemony, the rights and humanity of half of humanity were left outside. Separatism, is not “part” of universalism. It is the inverse of universalism. Separatism is the idea that “every person will choose some attribute he or she happens to have, treat all humans with that arbitrary attribute as ‘a group’ separated from humanity, and fight only for the rights of what he/she now regards as ‘his/her group’ instead of everyone supporting everyone”. If adopted instead of universalism as an equality movement, by accomplishing its goal of becoming the holistic definition of equality it necessarily and by definition becomes chauvinism. Becoming what it fought against is the essential and unsolvable self-defeating genetics of separatism. Of feminism.

I am inviting women to be humanists, and to leave feminism. Feminism is sex-nationalism. It is leading only to more chauvinism, a female one, not to equality. Men are responding to the new institutionalized feminist chauvinism against them not by embracing their own discrimination, marginalization, and dehumanization, but by abandoning society and relations with women. Humanism is sufficient. Humanism has achieved almost all the equality men and women have, not feminism. I am so sorry, women were told by the nationalists called feminists, that they owe them their rights but this is historically not the case. It was universal humanism of people of both sexes who joined forces together for the rights of every human and not of one group, that reached that, not separatist feminism. Women don’t need and never needed sex-nationalism for rights, only universal humanism, and on the other hand, sex-nationalism only makes women the chauvinists, and there’s no humanism in that, and no benefit for any human of any sex.

Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash