The First Wave of Feminism

Like the entire history of feminism, the first wave was driven by a combination of social, economic, and sexual factors, or rather ‘forces’, that were largely contingent and blind.

The first successfully organised ‘feminist’ political activism involved campaigns not for the vote, nor even for ‘equality’, but rather against prostitution and for the raising of the age of consent.

Women had been stirred into political protest through social and technological changes that had resulted from Industrialisation and that were threatening their sexual and economic interests.

The campaign for the vote was a secondary and much smaller movement, gaining credence through the acceptibility of female activism that the first campaign had won.

The suffragettes achieved their aims as a result of violence and of male Enlightenment thinking which saw women’s enfranchisement as a natural progression of other civil rights movements.

In fact, women did not exercise their newly won franchise very differently to their husbands, and when they did vote differently, it was to vote in facist dictatorships throughout Europe.

It was not until the 1960’s, and the second wave of feminism, that women began voting differently to men….

The Second Wave of Feminism

The 1960’s saw the beginning of possibly the most remarkable event in human history. The end of ‘patriarchy’. Within the space of a generation, a social system that had endured in every corner of the globe for over 10 millenium had more or less crumbled.

In every corner of the globe…except the Islamic world.

In his book ‘The Decline of the Male’, anthropologist Lionel Tiger identifies the introduction of the contraceptive pill as the trigger for this unparallelled social revolution, the ‘second wave of feminism’.

For Lionel Tiger, the pill shifted reproductive power from men to women, for men could no longer be sure as to the paternity of their offspring.

I don’t accept all of the details of Tiger’s thesis, but I agree wholeheartedly that the pill was a catalyst for the second wave of feminism. An unforeseen technological innovation had revolutionised sexual relations and, in a blind and uncontrollable way, had transformed society almost overnight.

According to most feminist thinkers (and many MRAs), the pill gave women power over men. I disagree.

In fact, the very thing that was supposed to free women from men, left them – or at least older/unattractive women – dangerously exposed in the free sexual market that had suddenly been created.

Suddenly, women became active in politics. Suddenly, women demanded (and won) the right to university education, to a carreer, to easy divorce, to an abortion. Suddenly women began voting differently to men.

The pill did not give women power over men.

The pill forced women to take power from men.

But, of course, this did not happen in the majority of Muslim societies. Under Islam, there is still no free sexual market, and thus unattractive Muslim women have no need for feminism.

The Third Wave of Feminism

Just as the first wave of feminism has been wrongly reduced to the suffragette movement, the third wave of feminism is wrongly being associated with insignificant but highly visible feminists such as Jessica Valenti.

In fact, it would be fairer to describe the astonishing and sudden representation of women at all levels of government as the Third Wave of Feminism.

In the space of the last decade, from having virtually zero representation in high government, the female sex has come to near dominate many of the leading democracies of the West.

Currently, the Home Secretary or equivalent in the UK, France, Germany and the USA are all female. The chancellor of Germany is female. Women have recently narrowly lost presidential elections in the USA and France only because of the staggering incompetence of the candidates facing ‘unique’ male rivals (Obama and Sarkozy). Even macho South American holdouts such as Argentina and Chile now have female feminist presidents.

Alongside formal governmental representation, largely female dominated non-governmental pressure groups have suddenly come to hold massive sway over an increasingly powerful United Nations, as well as other international bodies such as the European Union.

Why has this astonishing Third Wave, no less extraordinary than the second, suddenly come about? That this is the first generation of women raised as feminists no doubt has played a part but it cannot alone explain the sheer rapidity of change. Like the first and second waves of feminism, the third has been propelled by technological changes threatning the interests of ordinary women.

The globalisation of society and of communications has threatened to further open up the free sexual market to an extent as great as the introduction of the pill itself did.

Suddenly men had before them a whole new array of alternatives to a ‘real’ sexual relationship, from the cheap Polish hooker at the street corner, to the nubile, young slut showing herself on cam from her bedroom half way across the world.

This was a brave new sexual world that an already politicised generation of middle-aged women could not tolerate for long…and certainly not entrust to men to control or put an end to.

The Future of Feminism

The future of feminism will be dictated by the same forces that have shaped its history – blind and largely uncontrollable economic and technological changes altering the balance of sexual power between men and women.

The further increase in mass global communications, advances in robotics, artificial intelligence and the growing realism of sex toys, are all rapidly coalescing into a perfect storm that will either achieve sexual and emotional independence for men…or a fourth wave of feminism that might reduce ourselves and society to a level unimaginable even in the atavistic fema-supremecist society of today..