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Eh, it's the usual Caplan stuff.
If he re-defines feminism to mean "the (false) belief that men are unfairly treated better than women" and he wants his daughter to be Not A Feminist, then what does he want her to believe?
"Men are not unfairly treated better than women" which is:
(1) Men are treated better, but this is fair
or
(2) Men are not treated better
Anyway, it doesn't much matter. If she's the daughter of Caplan, she already has a set of advantages (dare I whisper the word 'privilege'?) that means she already has advanced a couple of rungs up the ladder than lower-class men or women.
You can't define (or redefine) the meaning of a word in common language. It already has a meaning. What you might call a definition is a description of the meaning, and you measure it by how accurately it overlaps the usage.
Caplan notes that the "classic" description of feminism is inaccurate and offers a better one.
This shouldn't be surprising as a self-description of a political movement is unlikely to be optimized for accuracy or clarity. It's optimized for supporting a political goal, and that goal may well be furthered by deception and deliberate confusion.
(You can take a word, redefine it, and then use it throughout the scope of that definition (e.g. a book).
In math, this works fine, but in politics/political science, it takes exceeding intellectual rigor and honesty, because the words you use have connotations and it's hard to keep them out and use your definition straight.
And when you talk to other people, who don't subscribe to your definition, you have to redetermine all implications of the new concept, and that's not going to happen.)
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He wants her to not believe feminism because:
Its probably not correct
Wrong ideas when converted to policy can hurt people
Having a belief in feminism can be personally detrimental. (being angry all the time is a rough kind of life to live)
It is possible to have a negative preference for one thing while not having a strong positive preference for any alternatives. I really don't like olives on my pizza, it ruins the whole pizza for me. There are lots of other pizza toppings I'm happy with being on my pizza, but no lack of a topping I enjoy will completely change my mind about whether to eat a pizza.
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Going off The-WideningGyre's summary, I'm fairly certain it's something along the lines of "Men are not treated better". Most anti-feminists (including myself) don't typically think "Men are treated better than women and this is okay", rather they're anti-feminist because they reject the idea of patriarchal oppression of women which is what feminist theory is based on.
EDIT: Just noticed you stated that Caplan is "re-defining" feminism. I think Caplan's definition is fairly accurate, and while it doesn't entirely capture the sheer extremity of the idea that underpins the entirety of feminist activism (the idea being "male dominance, exploitation and oppression of women") it works well enough. The repeated feminist attempts to paint themselves as being a gender equality movement, no ideological strings attached, is what looks like re-definition to me. It's a classic example of a motte and bailey that's engaged in to maintain a fluffy-bunny image of feminism, often justified by pointing to whichever dictionary definition suits their purposes as if dictionaries are meant to be prescriptive instead of descriptive and acting as if they are unchallengeable.
If I form a group called the justice league and pitch it as "a group that wants to achieve a just world for everybody", then start promoting rhetoric that states that in order to have a just world we need to tear Jews down because they use their stranglehold over culture to unduly benefit themselves, there will be a lot of people who say that the justice league is antithetical to their idea of justice. For me to tell them "if you believe in the idea of justice then you're part of the justice league" would be absolutely ridiculous, my ideology does not have a monopoly on justice which is an abstract thing anyone can believe in without agreeing on what justice actually looks like in practice or what actually needs to be done to achieve it. The fact is that people's ideas surrounding "justice" and "gender equality" are almost entirely informed by their underlying beliefs about 1: How they think the world looks and 2: How they think the world should look, and feminists hold a set of beliefs ("patriarchy theory") that informs their views of what needs to be done. Similarly to how the justice league cannot define itself simply as the movement for justice without being intentionally misleading, feminism cannot define itself as the movement for gender equality and expect everyone to simply accept that as a valid description.
Ironic, coming from a (formerly) revisionist movement.
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