Several of the blogs I read frequently are written by strong, outspoken feminists. And I enjoy their writing and respect them. I myself have considered myself a feminist for as long as I can remember. I can scarcely imagine thinking otherwise: it seems to me it would amount to saying, yep, I think men are better than women. How could any woman choose to say that about herself and her sisters-in-arms? Yet there are very many women, including very young women, who don’t count themselves as feminists.

I’m sure the reasons for this are varied and complex and have been studied by people much more versed in the subject than myself. Certainly the mainstream culture has encouraged negative stereotypes of feminism, and there is also a barrage of attitudes throughout society that reinforce sexism, prejudice, and even self-loathing on the part of women. But what has been bothering me lately is how off-putting feminist rhetoric itself can be. To the point where I think it becomes part of the problem rather than a means to a solution. And part of what makes it so off-putting, which also makes it very hard to talk about, is that offering dissenting views or even raising questions is often not very welcomed, to put it mildly.

There are a number of widely-read feminist blogs that have formed a kind of online community: they often reference one another and are hosts to extensive discussions in the comments sections. I read them at times, sometimes with interest, but I tend to find the tone extremely grating, and I’ve struggled to put my finger on why that is exactly.

I can appreciate tongue-in-cheek humor and sassiness, but there are a number of examples where humor is not used to kid around with readers in a friendly way but to deliver a pretty strong and quite unmistakable put down. If you consider yourself to be an insider to the club, then you can have a good laugh along with the author at all the stupid bastards who don’t get it, but if you don’t, then you are clearly a stupid bastard who doesn’t get it. There’s not really any possibility of a gray area: either you’re with us, or you’re an asshole. The premise that would seem to make this kind of outright nastiness okay is that, given that patriarchal and sexist attitudes are hateful and deplorable, it’s perfectly all right to make fun of those who hold them, since misogynists can scarcely be considered deserving of sympathy. That’s fine as far as it goes, but frankly it doesn’t go very far: everyone who is not in lockstep with the strictly defined parameters of a given acceptable orthodoxy is not by definition a laughable buffoon, nor a hate-monger. That holds true regardless of the belief system being espoused.

Looking more broadly at the community of feminist bloggers, the problem with the belief system being put forth there is that it is so narrowly defined that it excludes anyone who does not embrace it in every last, most minute nuance. I share nearly all of the core beliefs of feminist theory, I just happen to find some of the current tactics alienating even to myself — a natural ally! — as well as to a very large segment of women, and, therefore, counterproductive to the cause. That earns me a defiant boot at the door.

What tactics? Well, things like obsessing over terminology, or finding fault with even the most subtle or trivial of remarks that could remotely be interpreted as having sexist overtones. Throwing around graduate-school jargon and scoffing at — or even demonizing — those who don’t adopt it in its most gradated nuance. Interpreting the phrase “the personal is political” to mean one should engage in incessant, self-obsessed, and obsessive ferreting out of the misogynist sub-context in all of the most minute details of one’s personal experience, and then scoffing at or demonizing anyone who dares suggest that sometimes it’s possible that plain rudeness, cluelessness, or mundane, unconscious gestures like wiping one’s nose are not always in fact meaningful examples of hatefulness [though at times they certainly may be].

One might say, okay, even assuming it’s excessive or obsessive to behave that way, where’s the harm? One might also say: since it helps some people to think this way in order to better understand their oppression, then why in the world would anyone want to stop them from doing just that? Well, I would say, for three reasons: The first one, which is the most subtle and probably most controversial [meaning I’m gonna get spit on for saying it], is that what I outlined above is not fundamentally a search for truth and insight: it too easily devolves into a hunt for hidden clues in which the reward comes in the cleverness of uncovering the most hidden clue, not the most relevant or truthful one.

The second reason is that this prattling and fussing over terms and minute behaviors takes away the focus from more fundamental issues: the feminist struggle is not the struggle to make sure everyone uses the most correct and most sanctioned language, nor is it the struggle to make sure everyone can call out the most minute manifestation of sexism in their everyday lives. It is a struggle for equality, dignity, and respect, among other things. Which brings me to the third and what seems to me most obvious point: carrying on about the nuances of terminology makes us look silly. It makes us a very easy mark for our detractors, who love to point out how we waste our time on fatuous “political correctness.” I don’t think that any and all attention to detail is fatuous, but when it reaches a level of absurd extreme, it certainly begins to tend that way. More importantly, isolating ourselves and our movement with academic jargon and strident insistence on conformity of thought makes us seem irrelevant to the very people who most need to be reached by the message of feminism: for instance, the teenage women who think they need to look like Britney Spears in order to be loved.

If this were a subculture, and not a social movement, I could just say, well, it isn’t for me: I don’t fit in, so I’ll leave it alone. But this is FEMINISM. Not something you can just give up on.