[Warning: Wall of text ahead]
[Disclaimer: I am male, feel free to disregard everything i say if you are female. Until the day i can claim a female brain for my own use in the way of thinking, and experience life through a social female's eyes, i simply am not a reliable source of facts about anything regarding women. I can only use common sense to be as less wrong as possible]
Feminism as an idea sounds as good as communism. It's awesome! Everybody gets what they deserve, nobody has to suffer and struggle anymore, and we fix the wrongs and misdeeds some of us made in the past.
However, in truth Feminism perhaps should not be about equality. For the longest time, females have been at all sorts of mercy to the males. As i like to say, though, the fact that you can doesn't means that you do.
The fact that males could and still can say what females are or should be doesn't means that they have always done so. Not every man disregards women's opinion. Not every man treats them as goods, and most certainly not every man believes them to be inferior. But that doesn't mean that they can't, oh no that it does not. If more than a handful of men have ever been able to disregard women's opinion, to treat them as goods and to believe them to be inferior, then men hold a power* over women that women have relinquished and thus do not hold back over men.
[here, and all throughout the text, power is not only control, but also resources. To say a man has more power is not only to say he has more control over women than viceversa, but also to say that it is easier for a man to have opportunities and ways to improve than it is for a woman]
I do not know if women ever held such power. My history lessons fail me and common sense says too many things at once. The fact that men are inevitably born from women should be a point for women, but the all-too-often-stated fact that women bodies are ready to be weaker than men's takes that away. It might be that somewhere along the human timeline, women stopped fighting for power and thus lost it altogether. Men have fought for survival, then control over their peers and finally the path of least effort. Women might have had different fights, they might have them yet. I believe this to be beyond a historical problem but rather a conceptual one. I am not a female, thus, i can not know, only guess with varying degrees of wrongness.
In the end, men and women were born, not the same, but with the same potential. That still holds true, even when society tries to prove it wrong. The mind of a baby female and a baby male are supposed to be equally as capable, and their body is likewise able to grow and do great things. Feminism is, thus, not about trying to raise the potential of women because theirs was lesser than men.
So, what should feminism be about, then? A while ago i said men have had potential power over women for a very long time. Shouldn't feminism then be about women having the same potential over men for an equally long time, for the sake of equality? It makes sense, but it doesn't has to be right at all. After all, who says equality is the end game?
if it is not about retribution, and neither about fixing the damage, what is there left to say about feminism? I'd like to say it is about change. Changing the way the power already defers to males without even a second thought. Changing what hasn't been changed for the longest time, not on a whim, just to grant female and womenkind the very basic right of having their fate on their hands. A fact which i, as a male, can say i have always had. That i, as part of the hivemind that some call malehood, and other call "patriarchy", know for a fact defers to me unchallenged.
And change? Change is good. All change is good. But this change in particular, i believe, goes beyond good and into the realm of necessary. Granted, i am not affected nor benefit from feminism (At least, not directly), but i wouldn't like at all to live in such conditions. Would you?