Reply To: Oh, they just wanna be like men

Curiosity:

First of all, welcome back! 🙂

Sure, if everyone was as honest about their motives and thought out as you are we wouldn’t need to stigmatize feminism, but that simply isn’t the case. People generally do what makes them feel good while putting in just enough thought as to avoid doing something that will sit uncomfortably on their conscience.

I think the problem is that those that are distgruntled see gender roles as their supposed opponents do, without separating the actual mandates of halacha from the “pseudo-religion” (this does sound very uncomplimentary, I am trying to think of another way to describe it). So they end up either trying to apply reforms directly to halacha, unable to differentiate between the law and the mindset, or rejecting the religion althogether. So I am not so sure that the blame lies entirely with them in such scenarios.

The problem lies in the fact that the vast majority of people do not have the Torah hashkafa to know whether what they are doing is a mitzvah or a pritzus geder, and so we, as a society, have to dissuade the average person from breaking out of the norm because 99 times out of 100 people will lack the knowledge, seichel, and daas Torah, and they will do the wrong thing even though they think they are doing a mitzvah.

This is exactly what I think is the heart of the problem. People need to learn how to learn proper hashkafos–not just learn hashkafos–instead of being blindly herded into certain mentalities. Otherwise you will always have those that will wise up and probably end up really confused and disillusioned. (Not to mention that this is a really sloppy way to go about things.) I firmly believe that most people are capable of this.