MRA's (Mens Rights Activists) are extremely critical of feminism.

[Squinch]

305. I hear what you are saying, but at a young age, I made a conscious

choice that I would never again use a man's ego problems against him through manipulation. The method you describe of "surreptitiously educating him to see himself as a trail blazer for women's rights through his own intellect and decisions" would, I think, fall under this description after the man had passed the age of, say, his very early twenties.

I was once someone who used this kind of manipulation with men quite expertly. I never had to fight, and I was able to easily get what I wanted in all kinds of relationships. But even as I was doing it, I was aware of the fact that it was horrifyingly disrespectful to the man I was manipulating.

It also had a lot of negative effects: any relationship where it is present is necessarily shallow and dishonest, it never gives the man the opportunity to rise to your higher expectations (which they often do when manipulation is not present), it allows the man to believe he has never been challenged, it mires the woman in a mindset of powerlessness because she is using the tools of powerlessness.

I can see the expediency of what you suggest, but I think that would be a very shifty, sandy, contradictory foundation on which to build respect and equality between men and women.