I have to confess that although I do like you as a person and think you have your heart in the right place, I find it incredibly emotionally difficult that you never seem to acknowledge all that is dysfunctional and distressing for women today and on an ongoing basis. You keep acting as though things are mostly pretty equal and so therefore women who are speaking up are antagonistic and out of line. They are the problem - rather than the pervasive bad experiences that pretty much all women I have ever met have routinely experienced - both related to sexual violence as well as to being treated as an equal in this culture.
About 3 or 4 years ago I planned a trip to a cool hotel in a nearby city - a place where a lot of musicians stay when they play in that town. I booked the room online in my name and used a credit cared in my name to pay for it. I listed my husband (who has a different last name) as the secondary guest. A few minutes later I got a confirmation email to my address which is my name @gmail addressed to Dear Mr. Husband's Name. Unbelievable!
This is just one example of the routine marginalization that I routinely have to deal with. And I'm white and economically upper middle class, so I experience these sorts of things less than women of color and ones with fewer economic resources. Something like 60% of hotel maids have been sexually harassed by customers. And our culture doesn't care about this.
I don't think SC thinks men are horrible by nature. I think she thinks that masculinity as it has been constructed in this country encourages most men to behave in ways that are commensurate with growing up in a dominance hierarchy - which essentially trains them to be rattlesnakes. In fact, I've heard her say essentially that.
Not being able to parse out the difference between men and masculinity in this culture is a huge problem in this discussion and it's something that I try to speak to a lot, but it does frustrate me how few people are able to make that distinction - both male and female. We'd all do better if we stuck to that.
And, you've pretty much confirmed my suspicion that your issue with feminism is not in the philosophy of it but in the practice of it as is done by a wide variety of people who may have differing points of view on some things - and who may be so blinded by their pain and frustration that they don't necessarily go about addressing that in the most productive way. That's what it looks like to me anyhow.
