This is very much an opinion piece with no substantiated claims but my own subjective views.
I saw a TikTok Video by MorningBrew made in a traditional Gen Z fashion; a blatant mockery of the existing power structures. The content is on point, exposing something pretty much all of us know is going on. The white male CEO archetype doesn’t need an introduction. What piqued my interest was the female character with the words “Oh, I actually hate women”.
I believe this is a great insight into where feminism stands at the moment. It started as a struggle against oppression by men, as a movement towards true independence with a clear goal: equality. Where is it headed now?
Us boys had it good in elementary school. If you were a bit smarter than average you were “smart” and “capable”, whereas smarter girls were “good”, as in “nice”.
One can guess what that does to the self-image of a child; men develop an overinflated ego, and women develop an everlasting feeling of not being quite good enough. I’ll skip a few important years and subjects to hop into tertiary education, specifically universities where a majority of students are female and you have only a few male students. The attitude of many female professors towards male students vs female students is quite different. Once again, men are the smart and capable ones; they only need to “discover what is truly within them”. Praise is abundant. Female students most likely get either a pat on the head if they’re successful, and a “keep your head down and don’t cause problems” if they’re not.
The most interesting subject here is the female students who are capable and dedicated but don’t even realize it themselves. I strongly believe they scarcely receive the attention that nurtures ambition – we all need it. At most, their work gets overlooked or deliberately ignored, while mediocre male students get a disproportionately large amount of attention. One could argue this is due to gender (sexual) tensions. The stereotype of the male professor who sleeps with his students is well known, the methods and goals are mostly transparent (man in power -> authority -> intimate advance by either party -> sex). The unavailable father figure.
We like to forget that sex & sexual drive don’t belong to men. It’s present in women just the same. How it displays itself in this new age and new social structure is quite a mystery. To me at least. How do women in power abuse their position? I would dare to say by trying to eliminate competition and acting as a mother figure to their potential sexual partners. Dominance through submission.
Good for them. Good for women in power. The way to their power was paved by feminism, but their being in power doesn’t actually do anything for feminism, it likely even sets it back. The woman in power is now a new breed of Woman. They wiggled their way into the existing power structure and latched onto it like a parasite. And they don’t like to share their resources. So even by having female leaders, we do not necessarily improve the position of women overall. They laid their claim onto this new world, and instead of getting rid of the stereotypical male tyrant we now simply have female tyrants.
If you ask women who is more problematic to their career and/or personal advancements – men or women – I think we all know what the most common answer would be. And it seems women are at a point where they think they’re fighting a gender struggle when in reality it’s a class struggle that is causing issues. It seems not even feminism is safe from capitalism (duh).
Women in power are mostly outliers just the same as men. Power-hungry, goal-oriented and a bit sociopathic – gender has nothing to do with it.
Everything else remains the same. Men are incepted with no sense of humility, women are incepted with no sense of true self-confidence. We are back in the 1900s, but this time around we’re teaching women to find and make submissive partners to hide the fact that they feel powerless due to the power structures and not because of interpersonal relationships. You think you’ll find confidence if your partner is a bit worse off than you are. If your partner is a bit better off than you are, you’re pressured into feeling like you’ve betrayed feminism.
We all move at different paces and any pace is fine. Moving as a woman is a bit more challenging though since women are trying to kill you and men are trying to fuck you. C’est la vie.