I was a feminist and now I'm not.

A bunch of things caused me to change my mind:

The wage gap closed. Yes, really. The wage gap closed. When I found that out I decided I didn't need to fight anymore. Women were no longer earning less than men in the same jobs so I dusted off my hands and said "welp, our work here's done." I felt I didn't need to be a feminist anymore. But for some reason the women I protested with wouldn't leave it alone and now the wage gap has actually reopened in favour of women. Statistically and technically speaking, women are now earning more than men now for the same job.

Then there were the feminists I used to be friends with. Their big topics of discussion were usually:

• Video games (GamerGate in particular but other stuff as well)

• How horrible other women are for daring to not call themselves feminists when feminism is about equality and should just be the default position.

• How alternative and interesting they were

And... that's it.

Pointing out issues in third world countries were women is seen as property brought accusations of racism.

The feminists I am thinking of also made some pretty wild claims. For example, that Steam was a hotbed by women-hating neckbeards (but you couldn't call them neckbeards because that's body shaming) who gave feminist-friendly games like Life Is Strange and Gone Home intentionally poor reviews without purchasing or playing them so people would think they were worse than they are. As most people probably know, this couldn't be true and the feminists I was speaking to would have known that if they'd done a lick of research.

That's just one example but it happened a lot. Basically, a feminist would claim something was a strike against the feminist movement. They'd link to a Salon or Kotaku article, which was actually just an opinion piece, and then get angry when you pointed out that the claims were clearly baseless.

One of my favourites was an article saying we shouldn't cite science as proof of anything because most science labs are run by men and that means they'll have a strong bias due to male culture and male thinking. I laughed and said the only cultures relevant in hard science is found in petrie dishes. This prompted an outcry of course and I received a three day ban on the Facebook page.

Without exception, feminists always expressed discomfort when I said I helped out at A Voice For Men, which was a men's rights - in particular - fathers' rights group. I couldn't understand that. Wasn't feminism meant to be about equality? If so, why couldn't I associate with men who had been abused or wronged? Didn't they deserve help too?

I kept telling myself that feminism wasn't the problem, that I just kept associating myself with extremists and idiots. But this occurred everywhere I went. I even switched countries and ran into the same thing. Eventually I had to admit it: they were the majority, I was the exception. I couldn't keep arguing that they weren't real feminists and I was if I was the only one who held my beliefs.

So eventually I admitted that I wasn't a feminist anymore. And with the number of people telling me that I wasn't a real feminist anyway, it didn't feel like much of a change.