I nearly choked on my coffee, had to wipe the screen down after reading the title.

However as amazing as it may seem that someone was actually game enough to right such an article, a few years ago there was a discussion about the subject of infertility and feminism, but it mostly blamed men for the fall in fertility rate and that men were committment phobes.

So when an egg donor decided it was time to become a incubator and went looking for a sperm donor, the sperm donors weren't ready to commit.

Did feminism fail women? I think that is a matter of perspective.
Did the media led women up the garden path?

Many of the early feminists, claimed that marriage was invented by men to keep women oppressed. So women who don't get married are not oppressed.

I have to agree with David JS's comments about "blaming feminism being as immature as blaming your parents". Feminism arose because of a need to address issues relating to the role of women as a group within society vis-a-vis the role of men as a group in society. These issues are ongoing as exemplified in debates about expanding maternity leave provisions or expanding family friendly workplace policies so that men can truly take time off work or reduce hours for family priorities without compromising career instead of women always having to struggle with the work/family dilemma.

Unfortunately, under the banner of the slogan/message "The personal is political", feminist ideas have been able to intrude into the dynamics of relations between individual men and women.

In this private domain there are no "right" or "wrong" answers that transcend the individuals concerned - ideologies of both the feminist and the patriarchal conservative-religious stripe can dangerously infect vulnerable minds with poisonous "memes" with devastating results on the imperfect individuals in those relationships and the children concerned.

Jung warned about the expanding role of ideologies and "isms" in the modern world and their corrosive effect on the soul. Feminism belongs in politics - women (and men) seeking to address inequities as they are perceived. Keep it political, not personal.

A few replies:

According to BN it's my view that "women are only there to support men and to spit out babies irrespective of whether that's what they want or not."

Well, that's news to me. I wouldn't even frame the issue this way. I tend to view love, marriage and motherhood as being more at the centre of life than careers, and so I would more readily frame things in terms of men working in jobs to support the motherhood role of women, rather than mothers "only" existing to "support men".

And why would I expect women to have children against their will? It's clear that most women naturally desire to have children of their own, so the "forcing" scenario is an unreal one.

Some commenters wrote that feminism wasn't to blame because Danielle had simply met the wrong men, e.g. "Mark is attacking this poor woman for meeting the wrong person(s) when she was younger (and making the reasonable decision not to have kids with the wrong person)."

This misses the point. It's not that Danielle was unfortunate in meeting the wrong men but that she deliberately sought them out. She postponed meeting the right sort of man until some time in her later 30s - which was not unusual for women of that feminist period to do.

It fits the feminism of the period because women at the time were urged to remain autonomous and to focus on careers above all else - what was held out to women was a single girl lifestyle in which independence, casual relationships, travel, shopping and careers were the glamorous trappings of success.

Then there were commenters who wrote that feminists couldn't be expected to warn women of issues relating to family formation and fertility.

But feminists could easily have done so - they had tremendous influence in the media, in academia and in the government. They were engaged in an attempt to socially transform society. Some warnings to women not to leave things too late wouldn't have been so difficult - but feminists were uninterested and remained silent.

The author offers a single anecdote from a trashy pop-culture magazine, waxes all world-wise about the socialised cul-de-sac he sees, and then tries to superimpose "feminism" out-of-the-blue as the obvious monocausal explanation. There's no sense that the author even attempts to come to grips with what "feminism" is, to then establish a definition and finally to fairly assess how that definition, at an empirical level, contributes to the phenomenon under discussion.

Why is it that conservatives so often give themselves licence to critique feminism on the basis of mushy ephemeral sense of things, or worse, as a juvenile South Park stereotype. If you want a serious discussion, do some work. Read primary feminist authors and paint us a real picture of their failing. Don't rely on this kind of vague, generalised sense that feminist empowerment somehow robs people of satisfying horizons. That's putting the cart before the horse and offers us nothing to consider but your self-evident preconceptions about "feminism".

A couple of years ago I would have burned with indignation at Mark's comments and world-view and entered - yet again - into the fray. But seriously folks, its all getting a little bit old now, isn't it? HRS cuts and pastes a hundred things he's said before on a hundred other sites yada,yada, yada. This Mark bloke gives us the benefit of the same old reactionary stuff my father's generation went on about, yada, yada, yada, geez, someone who admitted reading neither the article nor knowing anything much about feminism decided this gave him/her the keen edge to jump into a debate of this kind...and they were right. They are on an equal footing with the rest who rely on blind prejudice, soured life experiences, and limited knowledge of their subject to submit the rest of us to their obsessive, repetitive and passe ideas on women.

People - face it: the world just doesn't match up to your expectations. Get over it. Go collect stamps or learn a foreign language or something.

The whole Evil Feminist World Conspiracy thing is so tired. Like TRTL, frankly my dears, I couldn't give a damn. There's good people, there's bad people...and that's it: Life. Or as close as most people get.

Romany,
Would you like to nominate an “ism” that has actually worked.

Feminism told women to put career before family. They got that wrong.

Various feminists are now suggesting to women that they have children without a husband or a father to those children. They are destined to get that wrong also.

Nature rules, and not feminism.