Humanism > Feminism

When we view these two terms in the same light and context as you describe, feminism seems to be exclusionary. It focuses solely on women, and in it's attempt at empowering women so they don't feel like the victims, turns around and makes them the victims of a supposed "Patriarchy". Within these boundaries, it would seem that feminism is a circular argument with selfish goals. But this is only due to the way inequality is handled within the United States and, possibly, the world as a whole. It is equivalent to the way laws are handled, we don't have a way of dealing with a situation until we are faced with that situation, so if you do something that isn't against the law, but it should be, you won't be punished for it. Racism, for the longest time, was considered a holy and correct thing to do. Even when slavery ended, black hatred stayed around because it was commonly accepted that blacks were lower class citizens, and some even believed that blacks were lower forms of humans. Today, for the most part, these ideas would be shockingly racist and hateful, especially now that America has a black president. However, these ideas would likely have never been scrutinized if black people never rose up to defend themselves. It would still be a perfectly normal thing to do to throw rocks into their house windows or beat them up in the street simply because racist parents where teaching their children to think like them, and the children seeing the way blacks are treated, accept this way of thinking as a fact of life. Now, not all children of the times grew up to hate blacks and some even joined the black marches and defended blacks whenever they could, but those types of people were rare compared to the amount of racists on the opposition side. The need to maintain a "status quo" and not get ridiculed by their fellow peers kept far too many secret anti-racists from speaking out, mostly because they didn't know they could. Now, I could have been talking about any type of inequality topic with a few replacement of words. This is because each movement of unequaled people has followed a similar path that was originally blazed by blacks (talking mostly about America right now). Women's rights, Gay rights, Religious rights, Black rights, etc. Each of these groups have had their own extremist sections, such as the blacks Black Panthers, but those groups have done almost nothing to slow down the equalizing of the original movement. They were mostly ignored and treated as outliers by the more moderate activists, often saying, "These people don't represent our cause". Muslims is another example of extremists within their community being the most outspoken and violent of the Islamic cause, making some people have distorted views about what Islam is for and what Muslims's want. The same can be said for Christianity when viewing Fundamentalist Christians as the extreme section of the belief. The impact each of the extremist sections has on the views of the people they supposedly represent is entirely on the person who is trying to make an opinion about them. If everyone viewed the Black Panthers as the face of the civil rights movement, MLK Jr would have been waved off and forgotten about as an extremist idealist, but because there were enough people willing to listen to what he had to say, it was clear to most what the original intention of the movement was and that it was an issue that needed to be addressed peacefully. The point I'm making here is that change doesn't happen over night. Not everyone is aware that there is a problem to be sorted out simply because it isn't a factor in their daily lives. Meat processing is a newish issue that was never thought about as an actual problem until people started looking at the way the cows were being treated and that they, shockingly enough, had to be slaughtered to garner their meat. Now it's in everyone's lives that we mass produce meat to keep up with demand to the detriment of the cows and Vegans have sprung up from that information. It wasn't a problem before because no one thought about it. Someone had to say something, to make a video or documentary, someone had to stand up for animal rights and bring the issue to the public eye. We can say all day how everyone should be treated equally and no one should be excluded from this, but we don't actually know what the problems are until they are pointed out. In the Islamic religion, women are subjugated by men simply because their book tells them it's what their supposed to do. Now, the Muslim women have a problem; continue to be subjugated and keep their religion, or be free women and lose their faith. Anytime you see a Muslim woman with her head covered, no matter how free she looks, she has chosen to continue with her religion and to accept that her head should be covered, because she is a woman. She has chosen religious freedom over her right to wear whatever she wants because that is how her priorities have been set. There is no middle ground she can reach to be equal in both aspects because her beliefs prevent it. Feminism, non-extremist feminism, is simply women standing up and saying, "We have been mistreated by men and we demand equality". Now that the feminist movement has started, people are now aware that there is a problem within the status quo. The only way the public will ever see that men are also being mistreated by women, on occasion because it certainly isn't that often, is by standing up and speaking out about it. Men actually have a harder time of doing this because we are not supposed to be victims, we are not supposed to complain about our situation because, as men, we are supposed to fix the problem. The fact that men can't complain will never be considered a debatable issue until the public sees it as one, and the only way to get the publics attention is to cause a ruckus. As nice as it would be for equality to be a clear and obvious term, it just isn't. Humans don't think that way, we would rather live our lives peacefully and blissfully ignorant of what's going on around us, as long as everything seems hunky-dory. We even invented a word for it, Normal. As long as everything is Normal, there isn't any problems, as soon as we realize there is a problem within our normality, we do whatever we can to fix that problem so we can go back to our previous state. It's up to those who feel victimized and hurt by normal to speak out against it, otherwise, everything just seems... Normal.