ASHE SCHOW: Where Feminism Went Wrong:

No one suggests men and women shouldn’t have equal rights. So by the textbook definition, we should all be feminists.

Why then, do so many women — especially young women — refuse the label?

Feminism has gotten a reputation in the past few decades of being less about equal rights and more about crushing men in order to raise women up. A new report from the Heritage Foundation (a conservative think-tank and my former employer) suggests modern feminism (and some of second-wave feminism from the 1960s) no longer views the movement as being about erasing inequalities in opportunity, but about enforced parity. . . .

This is in contrast to first-wave feminists, Villegas wrote, who referred to the Constitution in their bid for equal rights. They also approached their movement from a limited-government stance.

But modern feminists request government assistance at every step of their quest to overturn perceived inequality. No longer are feminists devoted to equality — because men and women do have equal rights under the law (although Janet Bloomfield has pointed out five legal rights women have that men don’t). The focus now is on parity, and the refusal to accept that men and women might just be different enough on aggregate that they have different priorities in life.

“A system focused on group achievement, in contrast, actually requires unequal, preferential treatment of some individuals over others based solely on their membership in a particular group or class,” Villegas wrote.

That’s right, this sort of thinking is what’s driving the current feminist movement’s claims of sexism while at the same time engaging in sexism against men.

Like Walter Reuther, when asked what they want, the only answer is “more.”