Feminism (in India and globally) suffers the same problem a lot of political and social movements face - blind advocacy.

Feminism does not mean:

Women are better

All men are evil

Women and men are equal in every measure

What true feminism implies is that men and women should be treated with the same amount of respect, should be accorded equal rights, and should not face any discrimination whatsoever based purely on gender differences.

When Deepika Padukone, in the “My choice” video said, “To marry or not to marry, to have sex before marriage, to have sex outside of marriage, to not have sex, my choice..”, I cried out in agony.

To have sex outside of marriage is cheating - plain and simple.

When companies promote female employees over male employees just because they want “greater women representation in senior management”, it is preferential treatment.

Expecting men to stand up in buses and train and offer their seats to equally capable female travelers is not feminism - it is a misplaced sense of chivalry.

I recently saw people championing equal reward money for men’s and women’s Grand Slam titles. That is not feminism, that’s being opportunistic. The prize money for anything competitive should directly be proportional to the revenue it generates.

All of these issues go away the minute people start thinking logically about it. And by being slightly malleable in our convictions.

Are men and women equal? Philosophically, yes.

But there indeed are differences. Men are physically stronger, women are more flexible and graceful.

Should men and women have equal rights? Absolutely, with some exceptions of course.

For example, the right to decide whether to abort or not should lie with the female sex.

Should men and women be compensated equally? If they have the same qualifications, same aptitude, and they put in the same amount of effort, definitely.

However, not just for the sake of putting up a front of being equitable.

Don’t quote flawed studies that say that women on average earn 30% less than men. Did the study control for all variables - education, tenure, expertise? Did they even try and analyze comparable figures or did they just calculate the average of earnings by men and women in a country?

Feminism falls victim to the same 2 human fallacies that most social revolutions do:

the futile attempts of humanity to delineate everything as either black or white, whilst in reality, the world is just a never-ending gradient of grey the uncanny human ability to selectively focus on issues and points and arguments that support their convictions and disregard the ones they don’t, irrespective of their veracity

And it’s again just a bunch of rotten apples who have managed to derail what was once a noble cause.