Looks like I'm the lone female dissenter here in the feminist question.
I am not a feminist because I do not believe in the rhetoric I have heard from feminist writers and intellectuals. I believe in equal rights for women, but I do not believe this is a feminist stance but rather a humane one. The risk that I see from the feminist intellectuals I have read is that there is a destructive component to feminism that sees men as inherently subjugating women, that society as a whole is geared toward subjugation and diminution. I simply don't believe that. I think that sex roles (I don't use the term "gender roles", gender to me is a grammatical term pressed into usage in recent times to mean sex) are taught, reinforced and advertised largely by women. Men mostly benefit from them. It is women who played the instrumental role in turning the clock back on the Equal Rights Amendment. It is women, women like Phyllis Schlafly and most recently, Sarah Palin, who believe that there is some strength in maintaining outmoded "traditions" which involve restricting access to family planning information and birth control, limiting and outlawing abortion. I do not believe that feminism addresses the fact that women, themselves, due to their own upbringing and their own determination to suppress progress and equal rights for women, particularly reproductive rights, are at the leading edge of the opposition to an equal society. The real culprit in solving the issues of inequality, to me, lie not in feminism, but in a freedom from religious intolerance and imposing outmoded and extreme religious ideals on society, and on women in particular.