Feminism, as originally formulated, is a movement and ideology for establishing and defending equality of rights and opportunities for all human beings regardless of gender.

In April 2013 a Huffington Post survey discovered that 23 percent of American women and 18 percent of American men identified as feminist, while 37% considered “feminist” to be a negative or insulting term and just 12% considered it positive or complimentary. The same poll asked whether “men and women should be social, political, and economic equals,” and 82 percent of the survey respondents — equal percentages of men and women — said yes.

In September 2013 David Cameron said that he was firmly committed to addressing “the historic disadvantage that women have faced” and that “I believe men and women should be treated equally.” However, he refused to call himself a feminist.

So what’s the problem? Why are human beings refusing to identify with a movement proposed to promote equality among human beings? Feminism did, and is still doing, a lot of good! In most democratic countries, women have access to the same voting power as men, can now go to good colleges, get good careers, generally have the right to abortion when needed, have the same access to divorce as men, have access to divorce in the first place, and have a generally if not universally acknowledged right to self-determination and respect… and depending on what country you’re talking about, there’s a long way to go and a lot of fights still to be won. So why are people rejecting this label now?

I claim it’s because they don’t want to be associated with nutjobs like the so called feminists who came up with the following quotes, nor lend their support to the frankly idiotic, anti-human, and hateful agendas that some of them are advocating.

Because Feminism, as a movement, more or less failed to speak with one voice and deny these frankly deranged voices, feminism, as a movement, lost credibility by becoming associated with them.

For one point, at least seven out of ten human beings are (broadly speaking) heterosexual. If you identify heterosexuality as an evil or oppressive force that you intend to fight, then you will lose at least 70% of your potential supporters. Most people want to marry, get married by choice and are happier for having done so. Most people who intend to raise children want marriage because it helps provide some security for their families. If you say marriage must be abolished, or that the nuclear family must be destroyed, then people whose marriages and families are important to them will reject everything else you say out of hand.

Worse, to be anti-heterosexual is to be anti-sexual, and that means anti-human. If you fall into that pit, then even lesbians can recognize your agenda as anti-human and refuse to support you. Think it can’t happen? Look again. In exactly the same way, more than half of straight people are now supporting equal marriage rights for gays because they have finally recognized the anti-gay agenda as anti-human and rejected it. Gay rights activists seldom or never sought to define heterosexuality as evil, and eventually succeeded. Feminists who define heterosexuality as evil will continue to fail.

For another point, most people know kind and loving men. Heck, at least half the potential supporters of feminism defined as an equal rights movement *ARE* kind and loving men. To insist that benevolent males do not exist is directly insulting to those who do exist. Further, it demonstrates to everyone who knows one or more that you are factually wrong. You should not expect people to support an agenda supported by arguments based on errors of fact.

Here’s a collection of quotes from Feminists gone Feral; many of these words come from clearly wounded souls in pain, and should be taken about as seriously as the paint-peeling language you hear when carpenters have just hammered their thumbs – but in the absence of voices saying sensible things and rejecting these excesses, just as loudly and widely disseminated, these “Feminists gone Feral” are the voices people associate with feminism as a movement, and the reason why people are rejecting it.

“The nuclear family must be destroyed… Whatever its ultimate meaning, the break-up of families now is an objectively revolutionary process.” — Linda Gordon

“Since marriage constitutes slavery for women, it is clear that the women’s movement must concentrate on attacking this institution. Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage.”
— Sheila Cronin (leader of the National Organization for Women)

“We can’t destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage.” — Robin Morgan

“Sexism is NOT the fault of women – kill your fathers, not your mothers”. — Robin Morgan

“I feel that man-hating is an honorable and viable political act – that the oppressed have a right to class hatred against the class that is oppressing them.” — Robin Morgan (editor of Ms. Magazine)

“The simple fact is that every woman must be willing to be identified as a lesbian to be fully feminist.”
— Sheila Cronin

“To call a man an animal is to flatter him. He’s a machine, a walking dildo.” — Valeria Solanas

“All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman.” — Catherine MacKinnon

“The male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.” — Valeria Solanas

“Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex.”
— Valerie Solanas

“Heterosexuality is a die-hard custom through which male-supremacist institutions insure their own perpetuity and control over us. Women are kept, maintained and contained through terror, violence, and the spray of sperm. — Cheryl Clarke

“And if the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual [male], it may be mainly a quantitative difference.” — Susan Griffin

“When a woman reaches orgasm with a man she is only collaborating with the patriarchal system, eroticizing her own oppression…” — Sheila Jeffrys

“Female heterosexuality is not a biological drive or an individual women’s erotic attraction or attachment to another human animal which happens to be male. Female heterosexuality is a set of social institutions and practices… Those definitions… are about the oppression and exploitation of women.” — Marilyn Frye

“The institution of sexual intercourse is anti-feminist” — Ti-Grace Atkinson

“Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice.” — Ti-Grace Atkinson

“I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig.” — Andrea Dworkin

“Marriage as an institution developed from rape as practice.” — Andrea Dworkin

“Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women’s bodies.” — Andrea Dworkin

“Sex and murder are fused in the male consciousness, so that the one without the imminent possibly of the other is unthinkable and impossible.” — Andrea Dworkin

“Romance is rape embellished with meaningful looks.” — Andrea Dworkin

“Only when manhood is dead – and it will perish only when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it – only then will we know what it is to be free.” — Andrea Dworkin

“Rape is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.” — Susan Brownmiller

“The more powerful and famous I get, the more power I have to hurt men.” — Sharon Stone

“In a Patriarchal Society, all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women are not strong enough to give meaningful consent.” — Catherine MacKinnon

“The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately 10% of the human race.” — Sally Miller Gearheart

“Men who are unjustly accused of rape can sometimes gain from the experience.” — Catherine Comins (Assistant Dean of Student Life, Vassar College, quoted in Time Magazine)

“Men’s sexuality is mean and violent, and men so powerful that they can reach WITHIN women to fvck/construct us from the inside out. Satan-like, men possess women, making their wicked fantasies and desires women’s own. A woman who has sex with a man, therefore, does so against her will, even if she does not feel forced.”
— Judith Levine

“All men are rapists and that’s all they are.” — Marilyn French

“Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.” — Germaine Greer