Real feminism and what it takes

Outlaw MRAs! | Clarissa's Blog

"- I hate, hate, hate it when people mask psychological issues under the guise of political activism. This goes both for pseudo-feminists who confuse crappy personal lives and daddy issues with feminism and the MRAs who confuse crappy personal lives and mommy issues with fighting for gender equality. I feel extreme contempt for creatures that are so incapable of self-awareness."

This is interesting because in my case my fight toward a more feminist level of consciousness and my "daddy issues", as it were, were deeply intertwined and related.   And consciously, I knew that they were, that my capacity to think for myself was deeply threatened by an internalized sense of my father's profound rage.   He was angry at a number of issues and most of them had social origins and meanings in relation to gender.



For instance

1.  He was extremely angry at his mother for marrying a step-father who abused him emotionally.  His mother had had no choice but to remarry very quickly after his biological father died in action in WW2.


2.  He was extremely angry at losing the war in Rhodesia, and blamed, as it seems, feminine or socialist traits in the world at large for his sense of betrayal.


3.  He couldn't make a swift adjustment to the new social environment and start again easily from a lower social status, and was extremely angry about that.


4.  His abuse by his stepfather and emotional neglect by his mother at a very early age had given him a borderline personality disorder, which became salient whenever he felt under stress.


So, I myself had to grow up under circumstances of extreme hostility, where my father basically replayed the scenario of his own rejection by his step-father and his rage at his mother in relation to me.  At times he was the hostile and demeaning step-father (in relation to me) and he was the raging two-year old, tearing strips off his "mother" (who I seemed to represent to him, at times) and hurling abuse about allegedly weaker feminine traits.

Now, add to this mix:

5.  That he had been in the army for much of his life, indeed from his teenage years, and that an extremely common tendency in the military is to hurl abuse at others by accusing them of having "soft" or feminine traits in order to toughen them up.  Misogyny is psychologically systematized in the military.

So I hope I have now explained to modern people, who still don't get it, why my relationship with my father was so pivotal to developing a feminist consciousness.



I'm sure that other people haven't had to bring themselves up within a blizzard of extreme animosity, but I had to try to do this, and I finally succeeded after many years.



I don't take kindly to people to misunderstand or minimize my efforts, which were substantial.