Have you ever been asked if you are a feminist? How would you answer? I don’t know. Yes. No. Of course! Absolutely not! Would you know how to define feminism? When asked to do just that during a fundraiser, Republican Presidential candidate Carly Fiorina replied, "Over the years, feminism has devolved into a left-leaning political ideology where women are pitted against men and used as a political weapon to win elections," she says. "Being empowered means having a voice. But ideological feminism shuts down conversation - on college campuses and in the media. If you are a man - or a woman - who doesn’t believe the litanies of the left, then you are 'waging a war on women' or you are a 'threat to women’s health' or you are variously described…show more content… Very much a universal model equating the ideology that all women are oppressed. According to Andrea Dworkin, men’s violence at physical and symbolic levels is a key determinant of the inequities and inequalities of gender relations, both disempowering and impoverishing women. Yet, men’s ‘natural aggression’ is often invoked as a defining characteristic of an essential gender difference and as an explanation for the gendered hierarchical arrangements in the political and economic lives of richer and poorer countries alike (New Statesman, 2000, p.22). The solution is to challenge patriarchal power, violence and control; a struggle to gain female control over their bodies, sexuality and intellectual ideas (Powell, 2013). Radical feminists believe that in order to gain equality we need to rid the world of the idea of…show more content… The approach places a strong emphasis on the historical nature of female oppression and the way it changes over time and between social classes. Men as a group gain real and large advantages from current system of gender relations; the scale of this “patriarchal dividend‟ is indicated by the fact that men’s earned incomes, world-wide, are about 180% of women’s (Connell, 2000). The solution is a critique of and challenge to patriarchal capitalism that reinforces women’s role as “dependent‟ unpaid career and low paid workers. “Caring‟ should be socialized and the sexual division of labor challenged (Powell,
