It was the bit about "embittered retrogrades".
Did Narz actually call for the reversal of most of women's gains, or is he just irritated with the excesses and attitude of CFC feminists?
It's important to remember that some of the bitterest fighting is usually infighting. Not that many posters here want women's rights to regress to 1950's levels, despite the accusations. Most are in favor of gender equality, but there's just disagreement on how to reach it. It doesn't help that the most militant feminists here attack reflexively. Just as a cat chases and tries to kill almost anything small that moves without asking if it's really food, they go on the offensive against anyone who disagrees with them, without asking if their targets are really MRAs or other bogeymen. One of them (I'm not naming names of posters not involved in this thread) even admitted that he basically argued out of muscle memory. Rather than asking, "Is this poster really a sexist/racist/bigot?," they leap to the attack and pat each other on the backs when they gang up on designated targets. I've basically been tarred and feathered as a racist (not by you, though) for disagreeing with you and some others in that disastrous "Ivy League" WH thread, and now I've seen others like Narz get branded as sexist MRA pigs for arguing with the feminist camp. And then that camp (or at least two posters in it) tried to link MRAs to the latest massacre, which, combined with their eagerness to brand people as MRAs, makes it seem like they're subtly implying that people who argue with them about feminism belong to a movement of violence.
What's sad is that the feminist camp and their opponents are basically
on the same side. Both want gender equality and an end to sexism. The same can't be said of a lot of conservatives, the
real opponents of feminism. But the most aggressive feminists ignore the conservatives, probably seeing them as lost causes anyway, and save their attacks for people on their own side who nonetheless disagree with them. If anything,
they are some of the "embittered retrogrades." That they are deeply embittered is clear enough, but I'd suggest they're retrogrades, albeit unintentional ones, because their infighting and attacks on more moderate feminists weakens the movement, gives it a bad name, and leaves a lot of moderates unwilling to be associated with feminism.
This principle of infighting has always plagued revolutionary and social movements--the infighting between the bewildering array of communist and Marxist groups with similar acronyms is familiar enough, but I'm reminded of the black civil rights movement of the 1940s through the 1980s, what Manning Marable called the "Second Reconstruction." All the groups involved wanted increased rights and an end to discrimination for African Americans, but they differed in how they wanted to bring this about, and in the end they fought with each other at least as much as they fought with the government, the established order, and actual racists. SNCC ended up driving out its white members for a time, Malcolm X and other radicals bickered with King and other moderates, and eventually the movement fell apart. It was splintered into a wide array of organizations from the start, but that needn't have killed it. When SNCC, CORE, the SCLC, and other groups worked together despite their minor doctrinal differences, they could, and did, accomplish something. But when the civil rights movement tore itself apart with fights over Black Power, black feminism, black LGBT rights, and other things, it failed, and black political activism faltered.
Really, the different groups should have asked themselves if a victory for one of their rivals would really have been worse than the status quo, or a victory for white supremacists, racists, or simply those who didn't think there was a problem with the system. Surely a Black Power advocate would have preferred the moderates' less racist version of America to America as it was. But they let perfect be the enemy of good, and ended up getting neither.
