Finally somebody has had the courage to point out the "critical flaw" in contemporary modern feminism, a philosophy noted for it's static nature and universally shared beliefs!

Your thoughts and ideas are reasonable enough but you should have a little more intellectual humility when presenting them.

My only counter to what you've said is that I think while you acknowledge the inertia of the status quo makes on current gender dynamics, you are not appreciating how making even the slightest decision against the prevailing culture is incredibly difficult.

For example, I have a male, married friend who had a child and they used the mother's last name. This seemingly minor, insignificant little protest has already caused him like 10 problems because nobody can imagine a child not having their father's last name. Going against the status quo is not easy!

Not normally something I'd get involved in (and I don't necessarily agree with OP), but I think you need to take a hard look at how you interpreted that. When you say sarcastically say "noted for it's static nature" and OP has already added the "contemporary, modern" qualifiers, well you're pretty much straw-manning them. They've already addressed the point that they don't think it's static, that they're pointing to specific ideas at a particular time in the best way they can.

So like, OP predicted your argument and tried their best to explain that's not what they meant, and you ran with that interpretation anyway. Unless there's some edit shenanigans going on that I don't see, I don't know. I'm trying to figure out a polite way to say this, but like from where I'm sitting you don't look like you're responding to OP, you look like you're responding to a straw-man that OP went out of their way to explain was not what they were actually saying.

> Men, of course, also use their agency to create this world with restrictive gender roles.

> The large majority of women choose the tradeoff that results in the current social structure we see.

As I said, the OP has reasonable points but to skate over these two obviously connected points while pointing out a "critical flaw" in feminist theory is very incomplete.

It it also a disingenuous argumentative technique to say that his points are so dangerous that to bring them up would get somebody called names. Most if not all academics would be happy to argue any of these points without name calling.

And also it is ridiculous to say that "contemporary, modern feminism" is a well defined term that means the same thing to everybody. What's modern conservatism mean? Modern liberalism?

Nothing is a well defined term that means the same thing to everybody, so if those are the standards you keep it's going to be impossible to have any kind of discussion. None the less it is possible for people to communicate, even given the vagaries of language, if you're willing to extend people the benefit of the doubt and try to actually understand what they're saying. I think you were remiss in your duty to extend that benefit of the doubt, to try to understand what OP was saying, and I think that's why you were dismissed and they're not responding to your more substantive arguments.

You might benefit from a read through of these articles: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-th...

Particularly the bit on "The Cluster Structure of Thingspace"

>>A verbal definition works well enough in practice to point out the intended cluster of similar things, but you nitpick exceptions. Not every human has ten fingers, or wears clothes, or uses language; but if you look for an empirical cluster of things which share these characteristics, you'll get enough information that the occasional nine-fingered human won't fool you.

Ok, what's the generally agreed on definition of popular modern conservatism?

There isn't one, and yet we still manage to have conversations about the alt-right and republicans and overturning abortion.

Also I'm not from the US so this really isn't my fight at all, I'm not arguing with you about this I'm just trying to point out where you're making a mistake that is going to make it difficult to communicate.

Here's an example, instead of saying "you can't point at contemporary modern feminism because language is hard and ideas are fuzzy" you can say "I don't think that the vice you're accusing these people of really comes up that often". Instead of trying to debate whether true feminists are whatever OP accused them of, you can just say that you don't think whatever OP accused them of is really a big deal that affects very many real people. Skip the definitional debate (you know what group they're trying to point at) and get right to the meat of the argument, whether that issues actually shows up in real life.

Note I said contemporary popular feminism. Obviously feminism contains multitudes, but what dominates the mass and social media is much less sophisticated take that doesn't do justice to the thinkers who conceptualize it.

> The critical flaw in contemporary popular feminism is the inability to acknowledge both that women have agency and that women use that agency to enforce gender roles. [...] point out that women also bear responsibility for their use of agency to create it and you get, at best, called nasty names.

This isn't accurate: Contemporary feminism has long been obsessed with this topic; specifically, how some women contribute to their own oppression. Books have been published debating whether or not this is an inherently bad thing. You're conflating feminism and society, but society isn't feminist. Sure, libertarianism exists, but our current governments aren't libertarian, even if they pay lip service to the ideas and ideals; the same applies to feminism.

Contemporary popular feminism treats women as reactive objects; slightly more sophisticated takes grant that women contribute to their own oppression, but usually through the lens of being duped by the patriarchy. And it has frighteningly little to say about how women contribute to oppressive gender roles placed on men, with many variants denying gender based oppression is even a valid category for men.