Dismantling Feminism
On October 3rd, 2026 I will be participating in a three-on-three debate in which myself and two others will be taking on three feminists. What better way to prepare than a blog discussing my views on feminism, going through a few of the prompts we may be presented with, and really getting my understanding out there. These blogs are not only to convey my worldview but to also help prepare for any future debates.
The Roth’s Children
In order to dismantle feminism we must first understand its history. Feminism did not emerge in a vacuum. Its earliest intellectual roots lie in the Enlightenment, particularly in the writings of thinkers who applied the language of individual rights and rational autonomy to questions of sex. The most frequently cited foundational text is Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (1792). Wollstonecraft argued that women were not naturally inferior to men but appeared so because they were denied proper education. She demanded that women be treated as rational beings capable of virtue and citizenship rather than as ornaments or domestic servants. While her call for education and moral agency contained elements that many conservatives would later affirm, it also introduced a lasting tension: the elevation of abstract individual autonomy over the complementary roles that had long structured family and society.
These ideas were carried forward in the nineteenth century by a relatively small but vocal group of reformers in Britain and America. Figures such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and the women who gathered at Seneca Falls in 1848 framed women’s legal and political subordination as a parallel to other forms of injustice. They borrowed the language of natural rights and applied it to suffrage, property ownership, and access to education. What is often omitted in popular tellings is that this was never a mass movement of women at the outset. Many women of the period—particularly those who valued the distinct moral authority and domestic influence they already exercised—viewed the new agitation with skepticism or outright opposition. Organized anti-suffrage efforts by women themselves were substantial and argued that the vote would pull women out of their proper sphere and weaken the family as the foundational institution of society.
From a conservative perspective, the early project already contained the seeds of later excesses. By treating sex-based legal distinctions primarily as arbitrary barriers rather than as recognitions of biological and social reality, the first theorists began a long process of abstracting “equality” from the concrete goods of marriage, motherhood, and complementary sex roles. The Roth’s Children—those intellectual descendants who inherited and radicalized these Enlightenment premises—would eventually move from seeking equal protection under the law to viewing the traditional family itself as a system of oppression. Understanding this origin is essential: what began as a demand for certain legal reforms gradually became a comprehensive ideology that measured progress by the erosion of sex distinctions and the prioritization of individual autonomy over familial and social stability.
The Feminism Flood
The feminist movement, as shown in the Roth’s Children section, is a historical movement that is typically represented in three waves, with some feminists representing a fourth wave.
First wave feminism was primarily a suffrage movement that sought to give women property rights, voting rights, and access to education. We see the success of this movement in events such as the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. From a conservative perspective, it is worth noting that first-wave feminism was far from a unanimous demand among women themselves. Significant numbers of women actively opposed suffrage, forming organized anti-suffrage movements that argued the vote would disrupt the complementary roles of men and women within the family and society. Many women of the era believed their primary influence was properly exercised in the domestic and moral sphere rather than in electoral politics. While equal legal protection under the law is a legitimate principle, the first wave also began a longer trajectory of treating sex-based distinctions as inherently suspect rather than as reflecting real, biologically rooted differences that had long ordered stable societies.
Second wave feminism took place during the 1960s and continued into the late 1980s. This movement expanded feminism into workplace discrimination, reproductive rights that include abortion, and critiques of the nuclear family and patriarchy. This movement largely eliminated legal distinctions between the sexes. Conservatives have long observed that second-wave feminism achieved certain legal equalities while simultaneously weakening the institutional supports that most benefit women and children over the long term. The aggressive critique of the nuclear family, the normalization of no-fault divorce, and the elevation of abortion as a central “right” coincided with measurable rises in family breakdown, single motherhood, and the associated social costs. By framing traditional sex roles and the two-parent family as instruments of “patriarchy,” second-wave thought is treated as oppressive. What many women experienced as sources of meaning, security, and intergenerational stability. The result was not just expanded opportunity, but a cultural shift that often left women expected to perform as interchangeable economic actors while the distinctive goods of motherhood and family life were devalued.
Third wave feminism, which took place in the 1990s and early 2000s, moved to make women more individualistic and identity-focused, emphasizing personal empowerment, sexual agency, and cultural critiques. It often rejected what it saw as the second wave’s rigidity while incorporating postmodern and queer theory elements. From a conservative standpoint, third-wave feminism accelerated the fragmentation of a coherent understanding of womanhood. By prioritizing radical individual autonomy, sexual self-expression, and the deconstruction of norms, it further eroded shared cultural expectations around marriage, delayed gratification, and the formation of stable families. The infusion of postmodern and queer theory made sex itself increasingly negotiable and subjective, laying groundwork for later confusions about biological reality. What was marketed as “empowerment” frequently translated into higher rates of relational instability and a cultural atmosphere in which the complementary strengths of men and women were treated as problems to be overcome rather than realities to be stewarded.
Fourth wave feminism is a more modern approach characterized by digital activism on social media, a heightened focus on sexual assault, body positivity, and expansive gender identity issues. Conservatives regard the fourth wave as the point at which feminist ideology most clearly detached from biological and social reality. While opposition to genuine sexual violence is a shared moral concern, the movement’s dominant online expression has often substituted due process for public accusation and treated disagreement as violence. The simultaneous promotion of “body positivity” alongside the rapid medicalization of gender-confused youth reveals deep inconsistencies. Most significantly, the embrace of expansive gender identity theory effectively dissolves the category of “woman” that earlier waves claimed to defend. In practice, fourth-wave activism has frequently prioritized ideological conformity and institutional capture over the concrete interests of women and girls in areas such as sports, privacy, and single-sex spaces.
It was briefly mentioned in the paragraph about second-wave feminism, but what exactly is the “good” we are chasing when we talk about feminism? When any society decides to shift toward a new goal, we ought to be clear about what benefit that shift is supposed to deliver. Take the example of slavery. If you could listen in on the debates of the mid-19th century, you would not hear a conversation that was purely positive. Freeing the slaves was the clear moral good, yet it also meant uprooting a major part of the Southern economy and, as it turned out, fighting a civil war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. The anti-slavery side weighed those costs and still judged the moral good worth the price. I agree with that judgment. Now apply the same standard to feminism. What is the concrete good it claims to have achieved, and has that good actually been delivered?
Bodily autonomy is one of the most frequently offered answers. Feminists argue that control over one’s own body, especially in the realm of reproduction, was a necessary and liberating advance. Yet when this principle is elevated above every other consideration, it quickly becomes a net negative. The most obvious example is abortion. Treating the deliberate ending of a developing human life as a simple exercise of personal autonomy requires us to ignore or redefine the moral status of the unborn child. Beyond the direct loss of life, the cultural normalization of abortion has gone hand-in-hand with a broader devaluation of the permanent bonds that once ordered family life. Easy access to abortion, combined with the second-wave attack on the nuclear family, helped sever sex from commitment and children from their fathers. The result has not been greater female flourishing but higher rates of single motherhood, relational instability, and the very economic and emotional pressures feminism claimed it would solve. Autonomy purchased at the price of millions of lives and the weakening of the family is not a clean moral victory.
A higher GDP is another good sometimes credited to feminism. The argument runs that putting more women into the paid workforce expanded the labor pool and therefore grew the economy. The pushback is straightforward: is raw GDP really the highest good? If the government drugged the entire population and turned us into compliant workers logging eighty-hour weeks, the GDP numbers would look impressive. Almost no one would call that a success. Economic output matters, but it is a means, not an end. A society that gains productivity while losing stable families, declining mental health, and thinning social trust has not obviously advanced. GDP can rise while the things that make life worth living quietly erode.Two further claimed goods deserve the same scrutiny.
First is the idea that feminism produced greater “empowerment” and personal fulfillment. The trouble is that subjective measures of well-being have not cooperated with the narrative. Economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers documented what they called the “paradox of declining female happiness.” Using multiple large data sets, they showed that women’s self-reported happiness in the United States declined both absolutely and relative to men’s from the 1970s onward, even as women gained education, income, and legal rights. The old pattern in which women reported higher happiness than men flipped. If the movement’s central promise was a better, more satisfying life for women, the data suggest that promise has not been kept.
Second is the claim that feminism made society safer and more just for women by exposing and reducing male violence and exploitation. Heightened attention to sexual assault is a genuine good; no decent person defends actual predation. Yet the broader cultural package that arrived with later-wave feminism—casual sex as empowerment, the erosion of norms around courtship and commitment, and the collapse of clear sex-based standards—has not produced a safer or more trusting environment between the sexes. Instead we see rising loneliness, declining marriage rates, and persistent bitterness. Justice for victims is necessary; turning every interaction into a potential power struggle has exacted its own costs.
When I look for the good of a society, I tend to weigh things such as health, stability, and happiness. These are harder to measure than GDP or labor-force participation—you cannot scoop happiness into a beaker—but we are not without evidence. The Stevenson and Wolfers findings on declining female happiness sit alongside other troubling trends. Suicide rates for both men and women rose substantially from the early 2000s into the late 2010s and remain elevated compared with earlier decades. Male rates have long been three to four times higher than female rates, yet both sexes moved in the wrong direction during the very period when feminist ideas achieved their greatest cultural dominance. Correlation is not proof of causation, but it is fair to ask whether a movement that set out to improve women’s lives, and by extension the health of society, can still claim success when large-scale measures of subjective well-being and mental health have moved against it.In short, every major social change should be judged by the goods it actually delivers, not merely by the goods it promises. On that standard, the ledger for modern feminism is far more mixed—and in several crucial respects more negative—than its advocates usually admit.
Sexual violence is real, evil, and deserves swift, serious punishment. No serious person disputes that. Men commit the overwhelming majority of violent sexual assaults, and that fact should neither be minimized nor turned into a blanket indictment of half the human race. Biology is not optional here. On average, men have significantly greater upper-body strength, higher levels of testosterone, and a greater statistical propensity for physical aggression. These are measurable, cross-cultural realities, not social constructs. Any honest discussion of sexual violence has to begin with those differences rather than pretend they do not exist or that they are simply the product of “patriarchy.” Pretending otherwise does not protect women; it blinds us to the actual patterns of risk and the most effective ways to reduce them.
Two recent cases illustrate how poorly our public conversation handles these realities. The so-called Cornell 7 case involves serious allegations that seven fraternity members drugged and repeatedly sexually assaulted a female student at Cornell in October 2024. A lengthy civil lawsuit has been filed, the local district attorney has reopened a criminal investigation that initially produced no charges, and the university has faced intense scrutiny over its handling of the matter. If the allegations are proven true, the men involved deserve the full weight of the criminal law. At the same time, the speed with which social media turned the case into a simplified morality play—complete with disputed claims about essay punishments and calls for immediate destruction of the accused—shows how quickly due process and careful investigation get sacrificed to online outrage.
Contrast that with the Lindsay Clancy case. In 2023, Clancy, a Massachusetts mother, strangled her three young children before attempting suicide. She admitted the act but argued she was in the grip of severe postpartum psychosis and therefore not criminally responsible. Her 2026 trial ended in a hung jury and a mistrial. The case is tragic and complex. It also undercuts the simplistic narrative that extreme violence is somehow a uniquely male phenomenon or that women are only ever victims. Social media’s treatment of both cases has been selective and often misleading—amplifying some details, ignoring others, and demanding instant moral certainty long before facts are fully established. This habit of turning every incident into content for pre-existing ideological scripts makes it harder, not easier, to pursue actual justice or to understand the real causes of violence.
In the end, modern feminism has largely failed the very people it claims to champion. It began with legitimate concerns about legal equality and has ended in a worldview that denies biological reality, weakens the family, elevates autonomy over responsibility, and treats complex human problems as simple stories of oppressors and oppressed. The data on declining female happiness, rising family breakdown, and persistent mental-health struggles should force a reckoning. Women and men are not interchangeable. Stable societies have always recognized complementary differences between the sexes and built institutions—especially marriage and the two-parent family—that channel those differences toward the good of children and the wider community. Recovering that older wisdom is not a step backward. It is the only path that has ever reliably produced both ordered liberty and genuine human flourishing.