Comments Elsewhere

Ayn Rand, for good or for ill, is pretty decisively not a founding figure in modern conservatism, but rather in modern libertarianism. Many conservatives did read her books at some point or another, but she was and is reviled by movement conservatives, from National Review’s slashing review of Atlas Shrugged, in which Whit Chambers declared “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber — go!’,” to their surprisingly nasty obit on the event of her death in 1982. The hostility was over a number of issues, but especially her militant atheism, her hostility to cultural traditionalism, and (according to Rand at least) her willingness to insist on free market policies as a matter of moral principle when conservatives were willing to compromise for the sake of religion or the purchase of political pull.

Vacula: “It’s a very narrow view of oppression that leaves very little room for the negative(/sexist) influence of female anti-feminists on women and ‘bad’ feminists on men, much less the positive impact of male or female pro-feminists on women.”

You raise some important points, but I don’t understand what you are trying to highlight when you mention the “negative influence of … ‘bad’ feminists on men.” Speaking quite frankly, I have never met a man who talked up some kind of hostility or political opposition to feminism on the “bad experiences” he’d had with feminists, who had any genuine knowledge or understanding about feminism as a movement or as a body of theory. Men who make this complaints very typically have had some limited unhappy experience with feminists in their area, or an impressionistic idea of who feminists are and what they do as gleaned from the mass media; have made little or no effort to make themselves less than ignorant about the history or theory or practice of feminism, as explained by the women involved in it (say reading a book, or even keeping up with a feminist periodical over any period of time); and are extremely petulant about remaining in their state of ignorance while also expecting feminists to cater to their delicate sensibilities. Thus when they start talking up bad experiences with “bad” feminists, what follows is a mishmash of anecdotes, caricatures, ignorance, half-truths, dishonesty, and nonsense. Having tried talking with men like this before, I can’t say I’m very much interested anymore in trying to deal with them or take the trouble of educating them; at root, the problem isn’t the fault of feminism, and probably isn’t the fault of the feminists that they’ve encountered either; the problem is that they are not making a good-faith effort at learning or understanding.

Maybe there are men who fit the description you offered but aren’t like this; I’ve yet to meet them, though. Or have I simply misunderstood your point?