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alt title(s): Feminazi; Straw Feminism
We swear allegiance to Valerie Solanas and shall purge this earth of disgusting male pigs!!
There are now women politicians, women soldiers, women scientists, women astronauts. But our mission is only half-done: we still haven't prevented men from doing those things!
April June, Chilly Beach

Maybe it's a fault in vision. If men always hold back in giving women the power they request, then a goal set at mere equality will never be attained. So screw equality—Let's take it all! IT'S OUR TURN TO DOMINATE!!
Suzette Grady, Precocious

This standard TV "feminist" character isn't very nice at all. The vast majority of real-life feminists are only out to get equal pay for equal work, respect for their rights as people equal in dignity to a man, and a lot of other phrases that use the word "equal" in similar ways. A lot of female characters have this as an understated part of their personality. Indeed, so do quite a few male characters.

However, a character identified as a "feminist" in the media nowadays is often really a "militant (read "psychotic") feminist"; the radical, paranoid, potentially violent misandrist type subscribing to the Second Wave who wants to bring the patriarchy to its knees so she can more easily kick it in the gonads in retaliation of the centuries of oppression and coercion men have put women through just because they could. In short she wants revenge for something she may not have suffered from herself... As a result, she will be hostile to any heterosexual male present, and quite possibly gay men as well.

The character will usually express a wide range of idiosyncratic beliefs, from an insistence on spelling the words "woman" and "women" differently, possibly with one or more Y's, and that the honorific "Mrs." is the possessive of "Mr.", to the view that any object that is longer than it is wide will be seen as a phallic symbol intended to express patriarchal power. She can usually be found wearing Camo, or at least a ball-breaking power-suit, but skirts are a definite no-no. And be careful if you happen to say either that God is a man or that women can choose to not work outside the home. If this character does express any opinion on a subject not directly related to women or the oppression thereof, she'll be speaking like a grown-up Granola Girl.

And not for no reason is the term "FemiNazi" sometimes used to describe this type of character; expect her to view every single thought, word and deed on the part of a man as yet more proof of the hateful patriarchal conspiracy to suppress and dominate women (no matter how innocuous the action or how many logical loops she has to jump through to reach this conclusion), whilst at the same time actively yearning to suppress, dominate and, in certain particularly extreme examples, completely exterminate all men. As such, it goes without saying that she'll often be depicted as a complete hypocrite, automatically buying into any Double Standard that denounces in outrage particular actions of men whilst simultaneously applauding any woman who engages in the exact same behaviour, usually under the justification that women are "reclaiming" themselves or "striking back" against the evil tyranny of men. This is usually based on the assumption that a woman possesses automatic moral superiority to a man.

For perhaps obvious reasons, this character is often a lesbian, and usually a pretty fanatical one at that; if not, then she'll either be "sex-negative", i.e. opposed to sex on principle, as the act itself is seen as biased in favor of men, or take the exact opposite approach, and try to use men as she perceives they use women. For added irony value, the supposedly sex-negative variation will often be far more obsessed with sex than any of the supposedly 'perverted' men she condemns. She will also have a rather alarming tendency to define 'rape' as 'any method by which a man might convince a woman to have sex, including a supposedly sincere emotional relationship'; no matter how explicitly the woman consents, the Straw Feminist will nevertheless twist it into a case of rape. And if the man ever stops loving her, he raped her retroactively! Curiously enough, in many cases despite her raging hatred for men, all she usually needs to transform her from raging anti-man crusader to submissive 1950s Barbie housewife doll is the love — or even just a close encounter with, If You Know What I Mean — with a good man... or, at least, a handsome one.

As you can (hopefully) see, she's a special and particularly extreme case of Strawman Political, and exists largely to express the writer's own dislike of feminists, or at least the more psychotic ones. Note that it's not always all the writer's fault, however; this is a particularly pervasive stereotype in Real Life, to the extent that normal feminists can be reluctant to be identify themselves as such, due to the powerful and unpleasant connotations associated with the term. Some might prefer to be known as egalitarians, a term with broader application, but no less accurate for someone who wants equal rights to bridge the gender gap specifically. Unfortunately, this trope is not without its basis in Real Life, and a few radical feminists have been heard to express views not dissimilar to those raised above: they're just a much, much smaller minority than you would think from watching TV, is all.

A society built upon this mindset is a Lady Land.

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