Your essay is a powerful, unsettling window into a specific generational experience of feminism filtered through personal dysfunction. And I think this is precisely where so much confusion enters the cultural conversation: when ideology and pathology become tangled.
Your story raises a difficult, but necessary question: how much of what we experience as “feminism” (or any belief system) is the theory itself, and how much is the psychic projection of the person wielding it?
The danger of any ideology, including feminism, is that it can be used as armour for the unresolved, a righteous mask for personal wounding. What you describe, children raised by women who called it liberation but enacted instability, rage, or neglect, is not a flaw in feminism per se, but a reminder that movements get embodied by people. And people are messy. Sometimes deeply unwell.
But that doesn’t mean we abandon the movement. It means we disentangle principle from pathology. Your essay is doing that work, difficult, personal, and necessary.
Your essay is a powerful, unsettling window into a specific generational experience of feminism filtered through personal dysfunction. And I think this is precisely where so much confusion enters the cultural conversation: when ideology and pathology become tangled.
Your story raises a difficult, but necessary question: how much of what we experience as “feminism” (or any belief system) is the theory itself, and how much is the psychic projection of the person wielding it?
The danger of any ideology, including feminism, is that it can be used as armour for the unresolved, a righteous mask for personal wounding. What you describe, children raised by women who called it liberation but enacted instability, rage, or neglect, is not a flaw in feminism per se, but a reminder that movements get embodied by people. And people are messy. Sometimes deeply unwell.
But that doesn’t mean we abandon the movement. It means we disentangle principle from pathology. Your essay is doing that work, difficult, personal, and necessary.