This Week In Feminism: Break The Spell, Save The Family

From a popular meme going around:
“Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.”

Pat Robertson said it. The internet memed it. People laughed. And then a lot of that cultural program rolled right into policy, pop media, and classrooms.

On my Facebook page I shared that image and said what I’ve been saying for years. Modern feminism, especially the third-wave flavor that dominates institutions, is toxic for families. A commenter shot back, “not true.” I replied with what I know. The biggest feminist org in the country has spent decades normalizing ideas that undercut marriage, motherhood, and male responsibility, and I pointed to my video about Kate Millett as part of that story.

Now, a quick correction for the record. The National Organization for Women was founded in 1966 by Betty Friedan, Pauli Murray, and others, not Kate Millett. It is still the largest feminist organization in the United States by membership. That said, Millett’s writing and the radical wing she shaped influenced the movement for half a century, and her own sister Mallory described early “consciousness-raising” sessions that fixated on tearing down the family. You do not have to accept every recollection to see the trend. Plenty of influential feminist texts call the nuclear family a problem to be solved, not a home to be strengthened. Shulamith Firestone asked out loud whether the family should be abolished. Newer theorists openly market “anti-capitalist” feminism and family abolition manifestos. If you think that never jumped from seminar rooms into HR departments and school policy, I have a speed camera to sell you.

So let’s frame this week’s headline moment.

Ayesha Curry, Crowder, and the new normal

Steven Crowder’s latest breakdown of Ayesha Curry’s Call Her Daddy interview is brutal, sometimes crass, and not wrong about the core point. A wife of a faithful, publicly Christian, wildly successful husband went on a top podcast and said she never wanted kids or marriage, resented losing “identity,” and complained her husband can’t understand her level of scrutiny. That went viral, drew a pile-on, and Steph defended his wife. Of course he did. He is the man in his house.

Here is the thing. A culture that treats family as optional lifestyle décor teaches wives to talk like solo brands and husbands to shut up and take it. It tells girls that fulfillment is out there somewhere, never in the home, and it tells boys that provision is a one-way bargain. You know what? That bargain crashes societies. It also wrecks kids.

But what about the history?

Second-wave and third-wave feminism did win real legal equality in places where it was missing. Good. Keep that. Keep due process. Keep equal protection. Keep the right to leave a truly abusive situation. None of that requires turning the family into an enemy.

Yet a clear strain inside the movement has pushed for exactly that. Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex questioned the family as an institution and dreamed of technological work-arounds for motherhood. Today’s “feminism for the 99%” markets itself as explicitly anti-capitalist and treats the home economy as class warfare. Academic departments publish “abolish the family” essays like it is edgy, then shrug when those talking points show up in school board training.

This is not fringe anymore. It is faculty-lounge ideology with corporate PR. The meme looks less like a joke and more like a checklist.

The costs you can measure

I said on Facebook that single-mother households fuel antisocial behavior. That ruffled feathers. It should. It is a hard truth. The specifics vary by study, but the direction is not in dispute. Kids raised without a resident father are at substantially higher risk of poverty, behavioral problems, and trouble with the law. Educational outcomes decline. Teen pregnancy risk rises. None of this means single moms are villains. It means father absence is a social crater we keep pretending is a pothole.

And about “abuse goes one way.” It does not. Bidirectional intimate partner violence is common, and women perpetrate a significant share of lower-level physical aggression, even as men tend to inflict more injury. That is not a talking point. That is CDC survey work and peer-reviewed research.

Men also take the harder hit in suicide after family breakdown. The exact numbers vary, and I am not going to claim a clean line from custody court to every tragedy. But the risk spike for separated and divorced men is real, and child-contact problems correlate with chronic mental health issues. We should care about that if we claim to care about men and boys.

“That’s third wave.” Right, and third wave runs the show

My commenter said the extremism is just third wave. Fine. But third wave runs the largest nonprofits, the campus clubs, and the press releases. NOW, the most powerful U.S. feminist org, has hundreds of thousands of members and a national network. That is the mainstream. Pretending it is fringe is like pretending the Federal Reserve is a book club.

And yes, feminism intersects with anti-capitalist projects on purpose. Read the manifestos. They say it plainly. Housework is “unwaged labor,” the family is a “site of exploitation,” and a real feminism must be anticapitalist. That is not me spinning. That is their copy.

Where Crowder is useful, and where we go further

Crowder’s rant hits a nerve because it says what a lot of men are quietly thinking. If a man can do everything right, love his wife, provide for his kids, keep his vows, and still get treated as a hindrance to a woman’s “brand,” then why risk it. I do not want young men tapping out of marriage. I want them to marry well, and I want them to stay. Which means we have to fix the incentives and the culture.

Here is the libertarian part nobody on daytime TV will touch.

1. Shared-parenting as the default after separation. Children do better, on average, when they have real time with both parents. We should presume equal parenting time unless there is clear evidence of danger. That is not “men’s rights.” That is child rights.
2. End the state-funded culture war. Stop using public dollars to launder ideology through agencies, grants, and school “equity” programs that pathologize motherhood, fatherhood, and the nuclear family.
3. School choice and real civics. Teach kids that strong families precede strong states, not the other way around. Teach them how markets lift households. If you want to help women, make it easier to start a business, homeschool, or work part time while raising children.
4. Drop the double standard at work. Equality is not the HR brochure. If we want “equal representation,” then we talk honestly about brick-and-mortar jobs too. About 97 percent of bricklayers are men. No protests, no quotas, no glossy campaigns. Just men sweating in the cold. You want total equality, start on the scaffolding.
5. Stop lying about what humans want. Men and women overlap, but they are not identical. Many men still want to protect and provide. Many women still want to nurture and build homes. We should honor that without shaming either sex out of their strengths.

Answering the pushback

“Divorce was illegal in Ireland. Women had zero rights.” History is messy. There were unjust laws. Fixing those did not require treating every husband as a suspect and every family as a power structure to be smashed. The state should prosecute actual abuse and then get out of the way. Liberty protects people best when it limits rulers, not fathers and mothers.

“The patriarchy is over.” Maybe. Maybe not. But I will tell you what is not over. Human nature. When you humiliate men in family court, mock them in media, and treat fatherhood as a punchline, you do not get a utopia. You get lonely women, checked-out men, and kids growing up without anchors. Inflation is like watering down your whiskey. Same glass, less kick. Cultural inflation works the same. We watered down marriage with slogans. Less kick, less joy, more hangover.

The better path

The family is the smallest, freest unit in a free society. It is the original voluntary association. It predates kings, Congress, and the Supreme Court. You do not have to be religious to see why it matters. The Fed can print dollars. It cannot print fathers. No legislature can mass-produce unconditional love.

So here is my challenge to my friends who still defend modern feminism as the only path to dignity. Look at the scoreboard. Family formation is down. Births are down. Loneliness is up. Anxiety is up. Kids are medicated and miserable. Meanwhile, the same writers who call the family oppressive are selling you anticapitalism out of a university office paid for by your taxes. It is like hiring the fire department to mow your lawn. Expensive, slow, and you will probably lose the house.

If you want women safe, kids thriving, and men honorable, stop treating the family like a prison. Treat it like what it is. The best startup most of us will ever build. A place where resources pool, love multiplies, and freedom gets learned around a dinner table.

And that Facebook thread? I stand by it. We are living with the results of a movement that told women to despise the home and told men they are disposable. Time to break the spell. Build families that outlast hashtags. And yes, defend capitalism, because free exchange is the best friend a mom-and-dad shop ever had.

You know what? If that sounds radical, the culture drifted farther than I thought.

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Sources

• National Organization for Women, “History” and founders: https://now.org/about/history/
• NOW, “About” and scale: https://now.org/about/
• Kate Millett biography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Millett
• Mallory Millett, recollection of early radical sessions: https://www.frontpagemag.com/marxist-feminisms-ruined-lives/
• Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dialectic_of_Sex
• Sophie Lewis, “Want to Dismantle Capitalism? Abolish the Family,” The Nation: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/socialism-family-abolition-lewis/
• Feminism for the 99%, Verso manifesto page: https://www.versobooks.com/products/2879-feminism-for-the-99
• Silvia Federici, “Wages Against Housework” (PDF): https://caringlabor.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/federici-wages-against-housework.pdf
• Brookings, “Marriage and Child Wellbeing Revisited”: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/marriage-and-child-wellbeing-revisited/
• McLanahan et al., “The Causal Effects of Father Absence,” Annual Review of Sociology: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-soc-071312-145704
• Annie E. Casey Foundation, “Children in Single-Parent Families are More Likely to Experience Poverty”: https://www.aecf.org/blog/children-in-single-parent-families-more-likely-to-experience-poverty
• CDC, National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey 2010 Summary: https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs_report2010-a.pdf
• Whitaker et al., “Differences in Frequency of Violence and Reported Injury Between Relationships With Reciprocal and Nonreciprocal Intimate Partner Violence,” AJPH: https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2006.097973
• Kposowa, “Marital Status and Suicide in the National Longitudinal Mortality Study,” PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10888055/
• Bauserman, “Child Adjustment in Joint-Custody Versus Sole-Custody Arrangements,” Journal of Family Psychology: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2002-01383-010
• Warshak, “Social Science and Parenting Plans for Young Children: A Consensus Report,” ResearchGate PDF: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259874277_Social_Science_and_Parenting_Plans_for_Young_Children_A_Consensus_Report
• Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employed persons by detailed occupation and sex,” Table 11: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm
• People Magazine recap of Ayesha Curry interview: https://people.com/ayesha-curry-says-she-didnt-want-kids-or-marriage-8003256
• My Facebook post with the meme: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1CHzosvmq4/
• My Kate Millett video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FUErT2Iqa8
• Steven Crowder vlog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QYQqO5Z9IQ