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Feminism is a hot topic, a user before mentioned his thoughts on it's origin, and that got me thinking. What is the social driver behind feminism?
Personally, I see it as a response to modern medicine and work safety standards, and the resulting rapidly booming population. Without historic mortality levels, it is no longer necessary for women to devote their lives to maintaining the population. With women free to do as they please, society suddenly finds itself with a lot of free hands that could be working, and so there is a push to remove the social systems that forbid women from traditional labor.
What puzzles me, is through what force does society implement change like this? It's not like we suffered the woes of overpopulation, and responded with feminist cultural change. This seems almost pre-emptive. But the arguments behind the feminist movement (I think) were based around freedom and equality. Was there a secret utilitarian agenda? Did things just coincidentally line up? Does society naturally drift towards freedom when the roadblocks are removed? Am I simply stupid and uneducated? I don't know enough to figure it out, but I feel like it's at least an interesting question. Thoughts?
Links to a couple of relevant comments of mine on the topic of feminism from the last Reddit CW thread that got buried.
I think what is lacking in this comment thread is an acknowledgement of male outgroup bias and female ingroup bias (there are quite a large number of studies that measure the core phenomenon, it's highly reproducible). Men are very strange in being perhaps the only (innate/biologically defined) social group to not have a ingroup bias. Men have a more favourable perception of women than they do of other men. While it's possible this is simply a consequence of modern gender ideology, this finding largely holds in cross-cultural studies, including in illiberal, "patriarchal" cultures. There's also circumstantial evidence from history, e.g. chivalric codes and courtly love. Men have an innate psychological need to want to protect, provide and care for women. To put it, men have a predisposition towards "simping" for women. This can manifest in different ways, such as extreme paternalism towards women, or liberalism towards women, depending on the circumstances.
The counterbalance to this effect was essentially nature. The world was a very dangerous place (and still is in many parts of the world), and the danger and the risks present in the world would naturally limit the roles and activity of women, from childbirth to hunting to political leadership. Security is preferred over liberty for women, by both men and women. As my linked comments and other commenters have already mentioned, modern technology, medicine, industrialisation and modernity generally changed this balance and there was no longer a natural counterbalance to men's innate desire to provide for women, and they began to do so in a maladaptive way. After modernity also destroyed the female role, women began feeling empty and resentful, blaming men of course, who were have always to provide for them, tend to their emotional needs and fix issues. If something is wrong, it's men's fault one way or another! Men lacking an ingroup bias means that most men were pretty content to go along with the demonisation of men too. Thus you have all the ingredients for feminism.
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