Question: How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?Feminist answer: That’s not funny.

That is the corrosive paradox of gender feminism's misandrist stance: no group of women can wage war on men without at the same time denigrating the women who respect those men.

I call [fourth-wave feminism] fainting–couch feminism, a la the delicate Victorian ladies who retreated to an elegant chaise when overcome with emotion. As an equality feminist from the 1970s, I am dismayed by this new craze. Women are not children. We are not fragile little birds who can’t cope with jokes, works of art, or controversial speakers. Trigger warnings and safe spaces are an infantilizing setback for feminism—and for women.

Here are young women with more opportunities, more liberties than almost any women in history and at that moment we tell them they’re short-changed silenced victims of a patriarchy? It’s defeatist and demoralising.

Playing on the biblical double meaning of knowing to refer both to intercourse and to cognition, Ellman and MacKinnon claim that men approach nature as rapists approach a woman, taking joy in violating “her,” in “penetrating” her secrets. Feminists, says MacKinnon, have finally realized that for men, “to know has meant to fuck." In a similar mood, Sandra Harding suggests that Newton’s Principles of Mechanics could just as aptly be called “Newton’s Rape Manual.

Feminist critics have looked at the metaphors of “male science” and found them sexist. I recently heard a feminist astronomer interviewed on CNN say in all seriousness that sexist terminology like “the Big Bang Theory” is “off-putting to young women” who might otherwise be interested in pursuing careers in her field.

Feminist Gloria Steinem has called research on sex differences “anti-American.” She says, “It is what is keeping us down.” According to Gloria Allred, such research simply should not be done. “This is harmful and dangerous to our daughters’ lives, to our mothers’ lives, and I am very angry about it.” Feminist critics have a term for neurologists who study sex differences: “neurosexists.

Trigger warnings and safe spaces are an infantilizing setback for feminism - and for women.