There are a growing number of scholars today who can be considered anti-feminists. These men and women are starting to look under the hood of the feminist ideology. What is surprising is that more people haven’t done so before. Most people have blithefully believed that it is simply a movement about helping women. In my forthcoming book, Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused with Christianity (due out Jan. 20), I look deeply into its ideological roots, going all the way back to the time of the French Revolution. Surely, 200+ years are enough for people to notice something amiss. Why is it that so few have even dared to look? As I discovered, even a light scratch beneath the surface reveals that not all is gold — that feminism is responsible for a bevy of societal ills, including abortion, and has led to mass immigration, mental health issues (particularly those connected with attachment issues such as the Cluster B pathologies), higher rates of unhappiness among women, greater strife between the sexes, and, for men, the loss of purpose, positions, and child custody, to name a few. The reason why so few have exposed feminism, despite the mounting evidence that feminism has had very negative effects, is because of some highly effective safeguards that keep the curious from looking too closely. As I’ve gotten deeper into researching feminism, I’ve discovered recurrent patterns that keep most of the world from looking behind the curtain. What, then, actually lies beyond all the glitter and the gloss, the empowerment and pantsuits, the girlboss and botox? The Guard Dogs To start, guarding the periphery are menacing dogs, unrelenting in their barking, threatening anyone shining light on the overgrown fortress: You can’t speak about this! You are a man! You can’t speak about this! Feminism gave you your rights and degree. Feminism is just about helping women. Don’t you want to help women? This perimeter fence is where most turn back. Most accept these sharp barbs as justification to just keep one’s head down and avoid drawing attention that could invite ire from an angry woman. Few are willing to breach this barrier. Impenetrable Writing For those brave enough to venture further, they immediately encounter a brick wall of impenetrable language, like this award-winning example from Judith Butler: The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power. All of that is one sentence. It is hard to imagine any amount of context that would suddenly make that sentence comprehensible (I still have no idea what it means). There is also a whole lexicon of dizzying terms, such as gender fatalism, kyriarchy, manterrupting, womanism, not to mention the bevy of modifiers used to specify which feminism is being used: eco, radical,  Marxist, mainstream, maternal, reactionary, black, separatist, difference, and queer. Theologian Emily Dumler-Winkler pulls this odd amalgam altogether tidily: “I use the word ‘feminist’ in the broadest sense to include the anti-racist and anticolonial commitments of Black feminist, womanists, mujeristas, Asian feminist, decolonial feminist, and LGBTQI+, intersectional, and gender theorist, among others. As Flavia Dzodan famously and eloquently put it ‘My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit.’” More recently, conservatives have been convinced that Mary Wollstonecraft is somehow a feminist heroine for all women to rally behind. Most promoters of this “the first wave was good” vision have not read Mary Wollstonecraft, except for a few pages assigned in college. Wollstonecraft’s opaque prose and passionate rhetoric (too passionate even for her husband William Godwin) make one’s eyes glaze over. A wider scrutiny of her work reveals that she can easily be called the “first leftist woman.” Her mentor, Dr. Richard Price, has been referred to as the first leftist thinker. Wollstonecraft was not at all a woman of the Right or a woman for the Right. Put on Your Gloves If one can get past the prose, passion, and opacity of feminist writing, the real philosophical roots of the feminist ideology come into focus. Deep inside, there’s a weak and sick old woman, functioning like the wizard behind the curtain. She’s rail thin, sterile, and pale, fingers yellowed from years of smoking, hoping no one will recognize that she is the embodiment of the feminist movement. Her home, filled with hoarded tropes and twisted reason, wreaking of cat urine and stale smoke, is truly inhospitable. When she dies, it will take a dumpster to hold the bags and bags of refuse extracted from her home. This is the ugly trove that awaits those willing to pull on rubber gloves and pick through the mess, overgrown and left unchecked for decades. Personally, I’ve thrown up in my mouth more than once. Here is some of the “wisdom” I excavated: In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation. ―Simone de Beauvoir Love has been the opium of women, like religion by the masses. While we loved, men ruled. ―Kate Millett Institutionalized in sports, the military, acculturated sexuality, the history and mythology of heroism, violence is taught to boys until they become its advocates. ―Andrea Dworkin [T]he ratio of men to women must be radically reduced so that men approximate only ten percent of the total population. ―Sally Miller Gearhart [W]hy is it not as illuminating and honest to refer to Newton’s laws as ‘Newton’s rape manual’ as it is to call them ‘Newton’s mechanics? ―Sandra Harding The movement is revolting against the Christian West because the feminist founders believed men used Christianity to keep women enslaved. It is also pro-communist, serving as a stepping stone to get the West to become woke. It fuels the abortion industry by telling women that their children are an obstacle to their careers and happiness. And it is responsible for the tremendous uptick in depression, anxiety, and mental health issues across the generations. No one wants to mess with this mean old ideological lady and her minions. It’s ugly and heartbreaking to see just how much damage has been done by and to women who honestly believe that feminism is their friend and savior. The widespread neglect of feminism’s roots is understandable, but given the stakes, it must be done. Her pale and frigid hands dictate and dominate our public policies, elections, and the psyche of most western women. The conservation of Western Civilization depends on it. Carrie Gress is the author of Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused with Christianity. READ MORE by Carrie Gress: 5 Ways to Right the Women’s Vote Think the First Wave Is a Model for Women? Think Again. The Gospel of Discontent: How Feminism Shattered Our Understanding of Motherhood