Follow up comments on 'The lie of socialist feminism'

2026-09-06

This is a collection of comments to the feedback I received regarding my article titled The lie of socialist feminism (2026-09-05). I group them by topic.

Women can decide what to do

Indeed. I never made an argument to the contrary. Actually, I wrote about harmony in the family and also talked about solidarity in general. You do not have those under conditions of tyranny. I wrote about love. Love is consensual. Unless you know of love through brutality, which is an alien concept to me.

What I do is point out that “socialist feminism” is the trojan horse that brings individualism into socialist discourse, first as an ally and then as a usurper. If I am seeing it and you are not, then I ask that you think things through and tell me exactly how I am wrong in this assessment.

My comment that feminism’s main target is womanhood is descriptive. I am describing what feminism says in words that are more direct. They tell women that your problem is you can have kids, your problem is that the man sees you as a baby machine, your problem is that kids relegate you to secondary roles… Your problem is that you are not a man. This is the logical conclusion.

So what will happen when the woman tries to be a man? She will be pushing against natural limits. Can she work at the construction site day in day out? I have done that for years and never saw a single activist show up to prove her feminist case. If you are saying things that can happen, then I expect you to be doing them. Otherwise, I grow suspicious. Yes, there is the woman who can do this sort of work, but not the average, no.

And the same is true for limits the man faces, of course. Either you accept that there is a baseline of biology or you do not. If it is a thing, then why are you effectively blaming women for being women? And if it is not a thing, then why are you valorising women for something that is made up?

Furthermore, this assumes that the man is having the good life out there. This is a topic I did not cover in my last article, though I had plenty to write about it in the post I wrote about the war in Ukraine in relation to narratives of manhood. I linked to it in my essay about the lie of socialist feminism, so please check it out. In short, men are not having the good life you imagine and you will not have fun when you try to do what the man does while being a man manqué.

Patriarchy as the domain of the abusive man

A key term in feminist discourse is “patriarchy”. It can mean all sorts of things, as each thinker will fasten upon the construct their own significations. At its core, it is the dominion of the man over the woman.

As I also noted in my article about the lie of socialist feminism, the argument basically is that the household is the woman’s hell. There she is ensnared by a man.

This man, we learn, is an abuser. He uses violence and mental pressure to force the woman to do whatever he wants. In other words, the woman is just an object; an object of pleasure as well as an instrument for some work.

This abusive man, the story goes, is not allowed by the patriarchy, which now represents all other men, to show emotion or to recognise that he might not be as strong as he pretends to be. In other words, each man is abuser and abused by himself in isolation and by all other men in concert.

If we accept this narrative, then by definition every father out there is a psychopath. We are dealing with monsters, my friend, fiends who will enslave women and who have no emotion whatsoever. Those ghouls will teach their boys to do the same, so the boys are also little monsters. And so on.

Given this, I expect to walk into a random group of men and find complete psychos. Are you telling me this is a representative sample of ~50% of society? Is the surgeon who saved your life a psychopath? Is the musician whose songs you enjoy a perennial abuser of all other people? Do the men who hug and kiss their mother, who show love to her, to their aunts, to their grandmothers, to their sisters and cousins, are all those men actually hating their family? Is there no man who just loves his girlfriend or wife?

I do not accept this premise, sorry. Yes, there are abusers and yes those men are insecure. But there are secure men who have no need to remind themselves how tough they are by picking on easy prey. The secure man only wants a challenge greater than him, which is how he contributes to civilisation. He thrives in difficulty. You know this if you have done sport, for example, or rigorous thinking. The easy mode is not interesting.

My position is that there is nothing inherently evil with manhood. If there are individuals who are abusive, then we have a problem of individuals, which we can manage collectively in the context of a community—and we will definitely need other men who talk tough and mean what they say, if we are to contain the bullies. Though we do not have a problem with men as such, which is what feminists ultimately claim.

Patriarchy as a precondition for capitalism

Which brings us to the next part of what patriarchy does. This system of abuse normalises exploitation at home, which then normalises exploitation in general. Whence comes capitalism.

If this is the case, then we should expect to see less capitalism in modern Western societies which have long now conformed with various feminist demands. Sure, not the entire feminist programme but parts of it. If patriarchy and capitalism are intimately linked, then reducing the one must reduce the other. Is this happening?

What does it even mean for there to be “less capitalism”? If we define it as exploitation, then all the single parent households, by virtue of breaking free from the aforementioned men/psychos have cumulatively led to less exploitation at home which must have translated into less exploitation elsewhere. Did it? Are those single mothers better off now?

There is, however, a more pressing concern. If patriarchy, which basically is the household, is tied to capitalism, then we cannot have households for as long as we are living under capitalism. Those will always be patriarchal, else capitalist. It follows that to undo capitalism we have to nudge all the women away from men. Once we do that, capitalism will collapse, because the transmission mechanism from household to the rest of social life will be interrupted.

I find that self-destructive because of the toxicity it will create in society everywhere. In other words, it will not work.

But this transmission mechanism is problematic in a different way as well. If men are inherently abusive and if we are here because there have been generations of households through the millenia, it follows that capitalism has been there all along. Capitalism now becomes this “make your own story” kind of term, where you can use it to describe manhood and any kind of conditions manhood creates in the world. Capitalism becomes essentialist as inseparable from the man.

As such, the end of capitalism necessitates the end of man.

So we already learnt how feminists blame women for their womanhood and now we have the other piece of the puzzle of them blaming men for their manhood. The feminist must be neither of those, of course, while the feminist thought is necessarily culminating in transhumanism at stage one and posthumanism at stage two. All in the name of undoing capitalism. And all this wrapped in socialist parlance. How convenient that you do not see the trojan horse!

The importance of hierachy

This is a point I made at length in my article about broken relationships and rootlessness, where I also commented against the modern antipode of feminism which is masculinism (or the “masculinity merchants” as I have described them before). It is a general point about a human’s behaviour.

[ Also read an unrelated, non-political entry of mine on managing curiosity, which I also published yesterday together with the piece about the lie of socialist feminism. ]

Every person needs structure in their life. Otherwise their potential is wasted. They fall into self-harming habits, lose sense of their commitments, and so on. Structure means that you are reminded of your duties and your goals.

A disciplined person brings structure from within. “I shall do X because I said I will do X and my word is sacrosanct”. This is how discipline is in practice. There are degrees. The most disciplined person operates this way in every aspect of their life. They can afford to live without much feedback because of how they already behave within constraints. Everybody else is better off having people around to give them guidance. But, fundamentally, every person needs structure.

When you are studying, your teacher will point out your errors and guide you to the correct method. If the teacher does not do that, you will embed the errors as second nature, which makes it much harder to change them later. As soon as you recognise the teacher’s superiority of skill, you are consenting to the emergence of a hierarchy. In its simplest form it is you and the teacher, but there can be many levels to it.

For every aspect of life there are such hierarchies. Families have hierarchies as well. Grandparents, parents, uncles and aunts, elder siblings. Depending on the specific community, there is the neighbour, the sage, the police officer, the doctor… All those people contribute to some form of structure around the individual.

The generic term is “hierarchy”. If we are talking specifically about a male figure because for whatever reason their masculinity is relevant then we say “patriarchy” and if we are talking about the female tutelary figure we have “matriarchy”. There is nothing wrong with those words. In every society we find patriarchs and matriarchs because every society has structure throughout.

Now, feminism poisons the debate by making patriarchy a necessary evil. It follows that a certain aspect of the social structure will have to be dismantled. So either feminism will replace patriarchy with some other hierarchy, such as matriarchy or the rule of the feminist, or it will abolish structure altogether. The latter means that every single person will be left to their own devices to make decisions they are not prepared for. Imagine the child having to navigate the world without any feedback from its parents or other tutelary figures. That will be disastrous. And if it is some other hierarchy, then the feminist has to tell us why that is superior to what is in place, to what has stood the test of time? Is there no value in a father figure? Does the man who has discipline and integrity not serve as a role model for other people, including other men but also women? Do women not admire a skillful man in whatever his area of expertise is, such as a guitarist?

I think that hierarchy cannot be removed. What matters is to have harmony. It is neither patriarchy nor matriarchy because it is both of them complementing each other for different aspects of life. Sometimes you have to give people a warm hug, while at others you have to call out their nonsense. If all you have is warm hugs or judgement, then you are doing them a disservice: you need both.

Yes, some feminists are problematic but read this one instead

Once we go into the details, we end up with a common rhetorical practice of positing a more true version of the subject matter which has the potential to radically shift the debate. In this specific case, we have to contend with decadent feminisms while there exists a virtuous one. The Jacobin piece I was commenting on was also unfolding along those lines in juxtaposing neoliberal versus socialist feminisms, with the latter being the virtuous one.

I have two principal objections here.

1. It posits a true feminism. It then needs to explain why are all the non-true feminists not switching to the authentic version. Are they traitors? Is this a psy-op of the CIA or some other shadowy forces? Whom shall we trust and how should we go about telling truth from falsehood? What means do we have to confirm that our choice of true feminist is the most true? Do we run each opinion piece through some “true feminist checker” program? Do we monitor discussions between people to confirm they are in line with the truth? This sounds silly, but I am serious: will you police all discourse?
2. If we accept that there is a more true feminism, we are going down the slippery slope of fundamentalism. There can always be something more true and more authentic than it. The history of leftism is full of sectarianism. The radicals will not be radical enough. This pits one group of people against another in a competition of self-righteousness. The “self” here will have to be a person in the end, because the generic category of “women” is the contested group already and also because of point 1 above. As such, fundamentalism leads us once again, willy-nilly, to individualism.

My commentary is about the common in the multitude. I am not trying to find truth in the words of one person or some authoritative source. I am examining the trends and am telling you where they are going.

The truest feminist is counterfactual. We can run the thought experiment to indulge our curiosity, but we are no longer describing phenomena.

My commentary on feminism concerns the irreducible part of it, which is the victim narrative of a group of people, namely women, being exploited by another group of people, namely men, on a binary of good versus evil. There are layers of complexity built on top, but this core idea persists. In my original article I explained why this leads to individualism in how it undoes the family. I also made several clarifications here.

The socialist cause under feminism switches from a class issue to a gender issue and from a gender issue of women as a whole to a “me, me, me” contest of individualism writ large.

Elon Musk also talks about children, so you support him

No, I do not and you have to be more careful with your analysis before you cavalierly make me a villain for something I did not say. What Elon does in his life is not my concern. I do not have to apologise for what others say.

What I write about are communities. My language is clear. I mention intergenerational solidarity several times. I talk about the grandparents being in the same space as the grandchildren. I discuss how the parents are in harmony with each other. I comment how there are tutelary figures to guide people in life and to instil in them values. I elaborate at length on hierarchy and on collectivism. I even comment on the basis of campaigning against billionaires, which is the authority of the group over the individual.

That I mention children is only in relation to the feminist discourse of effectively asking the woman to be a man so that she can move away from so-called “secondary roles”. I say that there is nothing secondary about motherhood.

Now, the point about Elon Musk is problematic also in the way that we can always find some billionaire or otherwise questionable figure who has said something right. It does not mean that if there is a coincidence of views on one point that there is complete agreement on everything. This is dangerously simplistic.

In my article I mention refugees, for example, which I admire for their resilience. George Soros, another billionaire, has also done projects that support refugees. It does not mean that I therefore endorse George Soros in his capacity as a billionaire.

I still am secure in my independent thinking to say “I agree” or “I disagree” with anyone on any given statement, while maintaining the ability to have a different view of their conduct in general. I do so in accordance with reasonableness, not whether I vibe with the person or not.

Feminists just want equal rights

Then why are they calling themselves “feminist” and are making blanket statements about men, the patriarchy, et cetera? Why are they not egalitarianists? If this is what they want, then they can start by joining the army en masse, for example. There are so many wars they could go to get fed to the cannons. You know this is not happening.

If you are an egalitarian, you cannot be à la carte about it. This is a topic I covered in my article about the war in Ukraine in relation to manhood, by the way.

Equal rights is a laudable idea. Though if you call it “equal rights” but actually mean “special treatment”, then you are not being honest, or self-aware, or consistent.