Feminism can’t function without the widespread support by men, and that support can only be maintained if the people who shape the beliefs of men remain ardent feminists.
The most notable success of feminists in the United States has been the establishment of nationwide no-fault divorce laws, along with the enormous family court system that supports it.
This system is becoming more unstable as fewer people elect to go through with a feminist marriage. Feminism has always had trouble with marriage, equating it to a form of prostitution, but the financial relevance that feminism has, the thing that creates an enormous incentive for most women to cooperate with the ideology, is the institution of feminist marriage with all of the impressive privileges that it grants to women.
Dalrock coined the most salient term for describing the new female power: threatpoint. Women in marriage have a permanent advantage in negotiation with their husbands, in that they can unilaterally dissolve the partnership and be financially rewarded for it. With the help of a halfway competent lawyer, they can use all manner of libel and defamation to gain lifelong alimony, child support, and a share of the assets held in common and the husband’s assets as well.
What this tends to mean is male deference, supplication, and submission in marriage. It is not so much that the husband is supplicating to the wife, but supplicating to the wife’s ability to call down the might of the state upon the man and on the marriage. He lives as a free man only at her whim, and should her whims change, her will can be enforced by the state.
This is rather like a single employee at a shareholder owned firm being able to loot the company whenever, and renegotiate shareholder rights upon the arbitrary decisions of a government judge.
Men have increasingly reacted by opting out of marriage entirely, because it’s become a legal arrangement that uniquely disadvantages them, creating a shadow liability. The wife has a permanent option to buy the marital assets that she can exercise at the expense of her legal fees.
Since marriage-looting has become more difficult to pull off, as men either slack or just don’t pursue marriage, we see in the press attempts to scare up false rape accusations and other methods by which a woman could secure legal rights to men’s assets through the use of her sex and her wiles.
Again, men don’t have to even provide this opportunity: they can avoid women entirely, take a flight overseas to enjoy foreign women, visit professionals, or otherwise find alternative occupations than having anything to do with a woman who will demand deference while preserving a uniquely privileged option for herself.
This sort of change does not even have to be consciously pushed: feminists themselves are doing an excellent job selecting for men who hate, distrust, and fear the feminist state. The men who trust the system get looted in a systematic fashion. This sort of method selects for men who shirk marriage.
The key question is how long that feminists can enjoy their positions of influence. The answer is, didactically, stupidly, is as long as men permit them to enjoy their positions of influence, and not one second longer.
The idea behind the contractual family, the quick-dissolve family, is that it makes for greater happiness, that people should be permitted to pursue their own ends, and that permanent relationships of any kind are somehow oppressive, because they are inherently egalitarian.
Henry Dampier 
This was a good post.
Henry I am curious: do you think that the emergence of 1950s sex culture had any impact on this sort of thing? I mean stuff like Marilyn Monroe and Playboy magazine and such. It seems to me that much of post-suffrage feminism has been a panicked response to the devaluation of the housewife. As if a whole bunch of women were thinking, “Well apparently Johnny values these imaginary mistresses more than he values me,” and then female intellectuals seized on these concerns to try and make for huge political power grabs.
The situation now with rape legislation seems to mirror the same sort of thing, except the female justification seems to be something along the lines of: “Well, Johnny *certainly* doesn’t value me for motherhood because he’s oggling some new skank every day, so I might as well try to get in on the polymorphous perversity free-for-all by maximizing my own sexual decision-making power and minimizing his.”
Nope. Most of the feminist program was conceived of before even abolition, but especially afterwards.
I encourage people to take other groups at face value, based on what they write in their own documents.
So while feminists way downstream of the leaders may have thought processes like you describe, leaders created the framework for that to happen many decades previously.
Yeah, my question was more about the conditions that led average women to become warmer to extremism.
This sort of method selects for men who shirk marriage.
Or for men who have non-feminist marriages.
In the long run, this is good for us who are natalists and have traditional marriages, because we’ll soon be the only ones who have any marriages or kids at all. Unfortunately, the long run may be very long.
Sure. I can see that.
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