Being a red-blooded American boy, I like women and appreciate what the Victorians used to call a well-turned ankle. I also respect women perhaps because, as a librarian, I've spent most of my working life with female colleagues and bosses. It hasn't been a problem. Moreover, I've been married for 33 years to a woman who runs her own business and who, possessing a black belt in taekwan-do, could kick my butt if she wanted to. She's as independent and accomplished as they come. But she also is quite feminine and femininity is the key to understanding what went wrong with feminism.

It is precisely because I like and respect women that I regret what happened to modern feminism. It became the enemy of everything feminine.

When it was about voting or equalizing property rights or "equal pay for equal work," one could hardly object. And most men didn't. It was, after all, male legislators who voted to institute female suffrage. But, like all aspects of "progressivism" (horribly abused word), feminism was taken over by its most radical proponents who have set the tone. Today, feminism is about two things: abortion and gay rights.

Abortion is the only way, feminists claim, that women can truly be free, as if a woman's freedom depends on her having a right to kill her children when their presence becomes burdensome.

Gay rights became part of the feminist equation because the normalization of homosexuality creates the perfect rad-fem world. It masculinizes women and feminizes men. We can thank that Stalinist bisexual, Simone de Beauvoir, for turning her twisted, abusive, self-destructive relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre into this ideal for modern women. De Beauvoir might be called the "Eve" of radical feminism; the Eve of destruction, so to speak.

Today's feminists confuse equality with sameness. They want to eliminate "gender differences" which they dismiss as "merely cultural." But their anger really should be directed at biology because the basic problem for them is biological: women have babies.

But they can't actually attack biology so they go after men for creating that horrid, oppressive, western, male patriarchy that has kept women down for all these thousands of years. Oh, the humanity!

Nonetheless, women have babies and feminists don't like that fundamental biological reality or its inevitable consequences. Drives 'em crazy, in fact, because it stands in the way of their insistence that women "can have everything." They can't, of course. Neither can men. As Walker Percy once said, "Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him." The woman too.

It is true that, because men don't have babies, there typically have been courses of action open to them that haven't been open to women. Western society, naturally and sensibly enough, developed with this biological consideration in mind. But biology is not oppression.

Feminists continue to spout silliness like the old saw that women are paid 77 cents for every dollar paid to men when, in fact, full-time working women who stay in the work force long enough to gain the same experience, make pretty much the same as men. Moreover, there hasn't been a "glass ceiling" for decades except in the fever swamps of the radical feminist imagination.

What is truly sad, though also quite funny at the same time, is that feminists hold up as their pre-eminent icon none other than Hillary Clinton, a woman who has never accomplished anything except as an adjunct of her husband. If today's feminists were serious about respecting successful, independent women, their icon would be Sarah Palin who actually has accomplished significant things on her own. But they scorn Palin because she opposes abortion. Oh, and because she's feminine.

But, alas, feminism is the enemy of the feminine. And that is where it went wrong.