At the risk of saying something completely banal and obvious, I think one’s relationship with feminism is profoundly shaped by one’s life circumstances. I’m almost 40 and grew up with a lot of low key feminist vibes in my family (grandma was a second wave feminist, mom always worked outside the home, my first concert was Lilith Fair) and have always, always identified as a feminist and think it’s kind of weird when other women don’t.
I’m going through a very unexpected divorce (having been married to a “good guy” known in our community for doing things like organizing for reproductive rights!) that is shattering all of the (pretty bleak and meager to begin with) illusions I had about my marriage representing a form of feminist security despite being in a patriarchal society. I thought I was married to one of the “good ones” and it turns out he wanted to blow it up. And I hate to say it but this divorce has 100% reactivated my latent misandry because of how I was blindsided.
In some ways I am profoundly grateful that being a feminist is my oldest identity because it feels like a self protection auto immune response right now. And I have to say that since this divorce has me questioning so much about my own relationship patterns and other very personal things and returning to a life of being single for the first time since my twenties, it’s also at the same time revealing to me how deeply heteronormative and couple oriented American feminist discourse is, when almost half of the country is single.
If feminism is always anchored in discussions around the things that partnered people face (especially things that partnered hetero couples face), then feminist discourse is always going to have an air of navel gazing for the many millions of people who are navigating life, whether by choice or by circumstances, without a partner.
"If feminism is always anchored in discussions around the things that partnered people face (especially things that partnered hetero couples face), then feminist discourse is always going to have an air of navel gazing for the many millions of people who are navigating life." THIS RIGHT HERE. Thank you for your incredibly generous and reflective comment, Eira — I'm so glad you're here.
"In some ways I am profoundly grateful that being a feminist is my oldest identity because it feels like a self protection auto immune response right now." I love this analogy. Strength, sister.
Your comment brought up so much for me, especially what you said about feminist discourse orbiting around partnership. It really made me reflect on how many feminist conversations I’ve been part of that focus on how to survive relationships, rather than how to fully live outside of them.
Even the empowerment narratives often still hinge on “getting the right man” or “making the relationship more equitable.” And you’re right, half the country is single. I’m 42, and honestly, the majority of my female friends are single!
Thank you for sharing this. These are the kinds of strong, necessary conversations that move us forward...and you gave me something to really sit with. 🙏
Solidarity in going through an unexpected divorce after being married to a "good guy." I'm surprised by how much it has affected my identity. I feel like outsider now as a single woman and single mom. Which is was unexpected because so many people in the baby boomer generation of my family are divorced!
YES THIS. I was single (like, perpetually single) until fairly recently. I definitely went through periods of feeling overlooked and resentful -- both by my married friends, and by the discourse around feminism.
Over the past several years, there has been so much attention paid to Fair Play and emotional labor and learned helplessness; a tidal wave of women calling out husbands who are not pulling their weight. And that's a big deal, and it's warranted, especially by women who are drowning trying to raise their kids.
AND/BUT...those women still have the immense privilege of a partner in a society that is explicitly designed around married couples. My women friends who don't have a partner to be their emergency contact, save up for a mortgage (or split the skyrocketing cost of rent), provide a financial safety net if they get laid off, etc. etc. etc. are struggling too, and yet I don't see feminist rallying cries around their needs.
I think there is this insidious cultural/patriarchal stigma that a woman who doesn't attract a man is less-than. She needs to solve that problem for herself, and then "feminism" will have her back. I hate it.
I, elder millenial, have had this thought floating around for a long time, and it is something I think is both small (because it relies on individualism to understand it and change) and half-formed, but in a couple of sentences, it's this:
So many of my college-educated, hetero- and cis- female friends married 'feminist' men and now find themselves cracking the sad jokes about their 'third child' (oh hi, buyer's remorse). When we were growing up, all of us being brought up by feminist or just in the workplace mothers, boys and girls, heard the messaging that girls can be anything and can be a man's boss and it doesn't make her bossy and girls can be at the table, too! And we all embraced it. All of my friends' partners are absolutely fine with their wives working and often out-earning them. They have women bosses and never make a weird noise about it. But there wasn't a model that also showed the boys, *and that will mean you will be a caregiver and homemaker and responsible for your family beyond a paycheck and grilling the meat*. We somehow didn't all get hook's message that feminism was for everyone - and that radical restructuring was needed of all gender norms, not just the norms around women's roles in society. So these men don't see their own responsibility in making the home function, because as far as many are concerned, they are absolutely feminists (voted for Hillary, clearly happy to have a woman as boss!) and they just magically don't see dirt and clutter and birthday invitations.
I'm the mother of a male child and I have a male partner who was raised by a single, working mother (who would never call herself a feminist) but who was just expected to be part of making the house run because there were no options. My son sees what I think is a pretty good role model for someone who runs the house and our lives just as much as I do, and yet... where are my blind spots? What am I missing in this conversation? What am I missing in making sure my child is raised to know he must also be able to look at a full laundry hamper and understand the myriad tasks related to doing laundry without someone else telling him it must be done? How much is an individual problem and where does that intersect with whole societal changes?
I'm a young millennial, and I'm seeing very much the same underlying trends at a different life stage. It does feel like feminism sort of left men behind -- not in a *poor men* way, but in a way where they were not invited/encouraged to re-imagine their place in society as part of the feminist project of our youth. I and most of my friends are at the stage of trying to find a partner, and it does feel like there's an essential lack of compatibility between women who think SO MUCH about gender and norms and domestic labor and wrestle with it daily, in any quadrant, and men who have never thought about it beyond being like, "and I'm fine with that," about their woman boss and getting a gold star for it. Even acquaintances who are maybe in between the "fuck feminism" and "status quo buyer's remorse" quadrants are in some way wrestling with it daily -- do I succumb to the concept of preventative botox or is that actually anti-feminist of me, etc. And then you get these dudes who have NEVER thought about it, which feels impossible when I would love to STOP worrying about it for one literal second, and I have no idea how to bridge that gap into anything resembling genuine partnership.
I was part of conversations about helping men understand how feminism would help them, too, but I think we truly never articulated the specifics and that yes, they might have to do a bit more. We wanted to make it so it went down too easy.
THANK YOU. I love this. So true. I've raised two young men (in their mid-20s) and I hope they are not these guys but I don't know. I do know I was in your shoes at your age, having thought about it endlessly, and no, none of the guys ever thought it was their problem.
Terry Real’s writing helped me appreciate how harmful to men patriarchy is. In the past, when I thought about patriarchy, I was primarily thinking about it as it affected me as a woman. It’s incredibly harmful for men and emotionally unhealthy. I’ve definitely gotten more in touch with that over time.
I just started reading Another World Is Possible by Natasha Hakimi Zapata, and she has a chapter on parental leave in Norway that talks about the policies that strongly encourage dads to be home with their kids solo (time that cannot be transferred to their partner but is use it or lose it), which generated a lot of the shift you are talking about: non-primary-parents recognizing what the day-to-day physical and emotional labor looks and feels like, and kids seeing equity in their parents' involvement in household life. In my house, I married someone seven years older, who already had a career teaching high school when we met, whereas I was barely out of college, and he has always worked more hours (during the school year) and made more money than me BUT he takes every summer off while I continue working, and so for two months of every year, he is scheduling and managing kids activities and cooking meals and doing laundry and taking on the majority of the house work and teaching our boys by example that caring for our home and family is a responsibility we all share to the extent we are able. It's an imperfect system, and most people don't have the luxury of a partner being off work for two months a year, but I can say that if we figured out a way to get our partners home doing these things for significant amounts of time, it has a huge impact on their understanding.
I find myself returning to this point so often — I believe I first read about it in Darcy Lockman's ALL THE RAGE. That the only reliable way to create a more equitable distribution of labor in the household is to have men stay home *by themselves* with the kids. When I've brought it up (here or elsewhere) people often say that if a man has paternity leave, they want to share that leave *with him* so they can be together *as a family,* which I understand.....but think about the downstream effects!!!
I’m just now reading Father Time by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy—she cites studies showing that anyone who serves as a primary caregiver over a long period has brain changes that make them more nurturing and aware of a baby’s needs, whether they are men, women, bio parents or not bio. Feels like some solo primary care for both parents would be so beneficial for everyone.
Agree, my husband had more parental leave than I did and that alone time with the babies made such a difference for him being a completely competent, enthusiastic, and confident parent.
In Norway, it seems like they intentionally have ALL of the buckets, so there's time parents can be home together and time that can only be done apart. Both have value!
I just had a baby and our initial plan was to take leave one after the other to save daycare costs, but my husband's company required him to start within 60 days. The result was 2 months me alone, 2 months of overlap, and now 2 months of him on his own. I agree with you: both options have had such value - in the memories we made and then building confidence in parenting/better sharing of household roles. If only scenarios like it (and for much longer!) could be more accessible to families, particularly in the US.
I once asked my husband how my cousin and her wife in Norway could have 3 kids when I’m overwhelmed by one and he replied, “Because they have amazing parental leave.” I was like, damn, he’s right.
That's just to start. They also have very low cost (~$200/month), guaranteed early childhood care starting at age 1, and a closer-knit, community-based culture that continues to offer the "village" support we all express nostalgia/longing for.
Growing up, my dad was the SAHD & ran his own consulting business on the side, while my mom worked full-time. He did an amazing job at it and was in charge of the house, our schedules, carpooling to school + endless swim practices/swim meets, appointments, etc. He was the only SAHD in our majority white, middle class community...I think a lot of my peers' moms didn't understand it and didn't know how to interact with him. He was deeply involved with our PTAs and swim club board, but was constantly facing resistance and manufactured drama from the moms.
Now that my brothers and I are older, we're seeing all those long-term, downstream effects of seeing our dad be our main caregiver in how we're approaching our own relationships, expectations within our friend groups, etc. As far as I can tell, my brothers are much more home/cooking capable vs their peers. One brother recently told me that his dream is to be a SAHD himself
Yes imagine a world where it’s not only women that take parental leave, where it’s assumed that both men and women will take extended leave at some point! Imagine the opportunities in the workplace that arise from men taking extended periods of leave or negotiating job share arrangements! I feel it would reduce the discrimination women experience in the workplace by a lot.
Here to say that my male partner has been the SAHD. In some ways its true as it drastically changed what he does in the house. In other ways not because he wasn’t socialises / just doesn’t care about certain things, e.g., our child having well rounded nutritional meals, bed time routine
My (cis male) partner stayed home with our child after I (a cis woman) went back to work, from the time she was 3.5 months old to 2.5 years. He is much more suited to be a full-time parent than I am, and he and our kid have a special bond. In the rare cases that they're not with me for a night or two, how people sometimes ask if he is able to handle our child for a couple of days (she's 3 now). No one would ever ask him that about me! It makes me sad — so unfair to both of us, and still so entrenched in our culture.
I worked retail when I had my first child. She was in daycare, which was closed on the weekends. I worked every Saturday, and occasionally Sundays too, which meant my husband was weekend childcare once I went back after maternity leave. Boy, did he learn fast. He had to learn her moods, what she needed and how to give it to her. The first month or two, the apartment was a mess, as "the day got away from me", but he eventually got it together. We always say that was the best thing that could have happened for him to really understand what it meant to raise a child. Luckily for him, she was an amazing sleeper and good natured child.
Yes it’s so true. When I decided to buckle down and finish my PhD - in the US with no child care (still have student loan debt to pay for part time care), my partner cared for the kids alone nearly every weekend for a year while I worked. He had a full time job during the week, then I holed up in my office Friday night to Monday morning. The kids were about 3 and 1. He had cared for them before and also took several weeks parental leave for each, but usually with me around. His confidence and capacity rocketed astronomically when he did this solo care. I’m not saying it made things equal overnight, but it’s the number one most dramatic shift in my experience.
Having to solo care for an extended period - at least from wake up time to bed time - means it’s on you, and that if you decide to be relaxed about food or diaper bag packing or the like, you are also the one to see and deal with the consequences. He also developed his own style and preferences for how to care for them. Not mine but ones that also worked. It was great. Wish we had better US child care
I live in Germany now and two of my friends here talked about their FREE child care following a healthy parental leave, and I honestly felt like crying for all the stress, debt, and career stoppages I suffered at the hands of the patriarchal US state when this other world is possible.
When my AMAB kids were little and I was a SAHM (due to poverty and an acutely feminist value of caretaking as work) with a feminist husband, I was part of a Consciousness Raising group that met monthly for probably 8 or 9 years. I spent much of my time lamenting the fact that while raising boys I desired to “eradicate the patriarchy in a single generation,” but *never could.*
I now have two 20-something children who lack any apparent ambition in a world where they were not included in the notion that The Future is Female and didn’t have a cultural guide similar to Girls can be Anything (except president, but I digress). They’re too anxious - especially having come of age during a global pandemic - and have no vision of themselves in the cultural conversation.
In their early 20s, they *can* cook, but don’t, and *can* clean, but don’t, and are the worst, most depressive roommates (who still say “Love you mom” when we part).
All of which is to say that the cultural narratives and perhaps the language (Sapir Whorf hypothesis?) and the other people in the world (on and off the internet) will be the blind spots that cannot be controlled. It’s the water we swim in.
I'm not going to convey my gratitude sufficiently in writing, but thank you for being so honest about your experience. I was mentally so ready to have a female child and have been floundering a bit for the last 8 years on how to raise a son. Your honest story gives words to something I've seen (or thought I've seen) in the older male children of friends.
I think you echo/substantiate Ruth Whippman's whole thought process in BoyMom - a read that was as illuminating for as it was dicomfiting to me. I didn't notice what wasn't there in my childhood and young adulthood - updated cultural touchstones for boys that equally work to a better society for everyone. I worried more about what is put in front of girls. It's so hard to wrestle with how little control I and my partner can reasonably exert here (or in many aspects of parenting, I keep learning over and over). You're right, there's a huge behemoth of culture surrounding us that I alone can't plan for the effects of. Godspeed, indeed.
Again, seriously, thank you for responding so genuinely.
100% and I really appreciate AHP for bringing BoyMom to my attention. I do feel like there is a reflexive feminist aversion to any sympathy for men, but that seems at odds with the idea that patriarchy hurts EVERYONE. I don't want to raise my son with the idea that cis straight white men are THE WORST because there's a reasonable chance he will be one (at least white passing, as he is mixed race but doesn't appear to be), and where does that get him? But whence the positive frame in feminism for how men can contribute (other than "sit down and listen to women") and what's at stake for them?
I think Kate Manne's framework is the most useful: Patriarchy is a power system, misogyny is the law enforcement. We smash patriarchy to *protect* our sons as much as our daughters. Men can't live up to the patriarchal ideals either. They will never be strong enough, tall enough, rich enough, white enough, virile enough... It's the patriarchy that teaches my son to distance himself from his nurturing nature, even when his mother and father encourage it at home. He will go out into the world and learn what is the 'right' and 'wrong' way to be a boy.
We need to teach our sons that freedom comes from dismantling the power system, even if they think they're benefitting from it. When the richest guys in the world, when the global political holders of power, are still engaging in body modification to become "more manly looking"--that's a system that's still oppressing the supposed winners. It's about teaching our sons that Andrew Tate isn't offering freedom--he's selling young boys oppression back to them under the guise of power.
I'm going to quote it so wrong, but the whole "Yes, smash the patriarchy, but sometimes I want to wrap the patriarchy up in its blankie and give it a cuddle..." from Whippman just really put some of those feelings from early years into context for me. I also had to grapple with my own feminist aversion to sympathy for men (I have long been in the Burn It Down camp) when I became a mother to a son.
I hope we're the change? Maybe the fruits of our efforts won't play out in all the husbands today, but 3 generations down the road? I'd love to see the results, but I will just keep hoping the seeds are there just like we've been the fruit of the seeds planted generations before. Even if, to the main point of this essay, we're all so tired and it's so much and the regression of today is so real. Sigh.
Thank you so much for expressing this - as mom to a 20yo boyman, who is debilitated by anxiety and ADHD - I feel you SO HARD. I have so much worry about how he will launch if I don't push. And who are his role models? I have much I could say but won't about the men in his life...and when you look beyond that...ugh.
Gen X mom of two trans autistic/auDHD 20-somethings who are similarly depressed, anxious, and have no idea how they fit into this world. They are un/underemployed and have no hope for their future. Could not do college. I feel like COVID did something to this generation that I cannot define, but there's more to it than that. I am so exhausted from emotional and logistical support and from teetering along an axis of wondering how much help is too much vs. the harms of not helping them (skipped meds, missed appointments with late fees, overdrawn accounts, etc.).
And I am continually questioning my role in all of this; I've identified as feminist since the '80s but somehow raised three kids and have married a good man and none of them clean up after themselves like someone raised as a woman would. I'm working on undoing that for all of us.
Gurllll… the GAD/AuDHD game is strong here. I think in our life the role models show them that they have no idea how they’ll ever earn a living or change anything about the world or be anything resembling safe. Because precarity is everywhere despite working your whole life for something. But beyond that - good god.
My 20 yo is nonbinary and completely paralyzed by anxiety and cannot find any blueprint for how to move forward.
My 23 yo is equally struggling but differently.
At this point, I feel like the frontal lobe is my last possible hope.
OMG yes I'm holding hope that he just needs more time to mature his brain - and if 27 is avg frontal lobe for typically developing men...are we looking at 30?! will he be living with me FOREVER?! He has a job but can really only do a few hours a week because it requires SO much energy to leave the house - I really do feel for him! It's not easy with his brain wired the way it is from the beginning, and then COVID and parent divorce as a freshman in high school really amplified all the hard stuff.
Jennifer and annakiss - solidarity. My 21 yo son with ADHD and depression is living at home and I don't know what his path forward looks like, or when he'll be ready to live on his own. So many people offer empathy and understanding, which is nice, but it doesn't change that all our systems in society are built for neurotypical kids that can go to college. He's grown up in a house where I'm the primary breadwinner and his dad and I split household stuff pretty equally, so I hope that he sees that and can participate equally in a household at some point (but when?!?)
"We somehow didn't all get hook's message that feminism was for everyone - and that radical restructuring was needed of all gender norms, not just the norms around women's roles in society."
YES!! I think about all of this a lot too, as a mom to two boys and with a husband who identifies as a feminist but wasn't trained do do housework/mental labor. It's a big conversation in our house with lots of learning all around.
My sister and I just talked about this. We were raised by a single mother who taught us to use a drill and get a prenup. And guess what? We both ended up with “men” who met us and saw a mommy who could take care of their every need. We’re both divorced.
I’m on the hunt for the unicorn of a man who is emotionally intelligent, responsible, good with money and a high earner, generous, a good cook, but ALSO (and this is new to me!) can do man things like fix a car and chop wood and build things around the house. While also not leveraging any of that physical brawn and skill over me? My god, I’ve come close, but getting that entire package, plus an ability to use “I” statements to talk about his feelings has proven impossible. I’ll keep looking.
Love this, so well said. As a fellow mom of a boy who’s also an only, I’m very aware and careful to make sure he is doing all the things. Fortunately my husband also does all the things, and my son sees us thank each other for getting this or that thing done, and has always known me to be dedicated to my career. But I feel a real responsibility not to enable any learned helplessness in him, that I sadly am seeing in some friends’ sons. I have said to more than one friend still doing their teenagers’ laundry, cleaning the bathroom for them, etc., ‘think of their future partner’. Their intentions are good in that they think they are being kind and taking care of their sons (and often … it’s the sons only, which is a whole other thing) but it does these boys no favors. We have to show care in other ways.
This drifts a little bit from the point of this essay, but one of the best advice I received about having an only is, treat them like you have a whole bunch of kids. I think the same rule applies to the whole family. Even if you can do it, and don’t mind doing it, whatever ‘it’ is, that’s not the point. The point is we’re a team and everyone contributes.
I think about this all of the time, as the mom of a boy and a girl. How can I raise them with the same expectations in terms of what it means to be part of a family? Especially because one set of grandparents have such regressive gender roles. Although I will say, the product of that regressive household (my husband) does at least half of the household labor, and while the mental load is still a work in progress, so I know it is possible for people to reject what they were raised with and do better if they are motivated to do so.
Your point about boys absorbing the “girls can do anything” message while never receiving the parallel re-education about their own roles is exactly the part I think many of us are reckoning with now, especially those of us who married the “feminist good guys”.
I love your question, “Where are my blind spots?”. Because I think that’s the very heart of this whole evolution. Not just for our sons, but for us. I'm a boy mom too (2 boys), and I think about what their futures will look like in partnerships...their roles, their responsibilities... and you brought up some really good points, making me reflect on the messages I am not just saying but showing in my actions as well.
Those of us who are raising boys with better models are doing something revolutionary. But as you said, that’s still not enough if the world they step into doesn’t reward or expect the same from them.
I'm loving how detailed and personal and reflective the comments are so far. This is all important and fascinating.
I do think so much of the Great Feminist Exhaustion is rooted in
1. the commodification of EVERYTHING, which is tangled up in the shift of collective movements like the mid-century women's movement into an individually practiced identity / lifestyle increasingly packaged and sold back to people (notice the difference between "I am a feminist" and "I'm joining the women's movement")
(Adrienne Rich made this point beautifully in her later work)
2. relatedly, the fracturing of collectivities in Euroamerican culture (bowling alone and all that), many of which gave us practice in working with people who didn't perfectly align with us (like in community groups, churches, etc.) and the fracturing of an imagination of the common good in the US, especially
3. the acceleration of (1) and (2) by c21 technological developments AND economic developments that make us more atomized, overwhelmed, optimization-oriented, and outraged.
I think sites of resistance/resurgence will be embodied, fiercely nonviolent, humble and open to working with folks who don't entirely line up with us, and counterculturally tender. And they'll often see how the wisdom of intersectionality isn't just about our identities (which we're pressured to perform perfectly/publicly as an end game) but our initiatives (like Kimberlé Crenshaw's original coining of the term intersectionality to talk about class action lawsuits for Black women workers justice, or Anna Julia Cooper, who was a Black liberationist feminist arguing that working for women's liberation shouldn't be in competition with Black men's liberation or Native American liberation, but that all our liberation is bound up together).
I'm teaching ENG 282, Introduction to Feminist Theory and Literature by Women for the fourth or fifth time this fall and thinking a LOT about how to frame it for a new generation right now, so your essay touched something bright-hot live in me in this morning. Thank you!
So great to see Adrienne Rich’s name come up. I was very lucky to have her as a teacher in the mid-70s and she was amazing and so generous with her time.
Oh, how wonderful, Laura! I never met Rich, but I've studied her as a scholar for 15 years, and I've read so many stories of her public and also more private generosity. <3
This is such a a minor piece of all this, and I'm in conditioned fear that I'll be accused of saying "what about the men", but sometimes it feels like you aren't allowed in quadrant A or B if you don't hate your husband. I've been trying to form a coherent theory lately of why Substack is feeding me so many essays that amount to "you are oppressed if you don't divorce a man in your 40s". It feels like a new version of the shaming in my 20s if I ever tried to talk to friends about supporting my (then boyfriend) with being a messy, flawed human. The attitude was like it's his own responsibility to figure his whole life out and never show it to you because that would be oppressive. I think the idea that every individual man is a stand in for the patriarchy has backed parts of the movement into a corner, and fed some of the TERFy impulses. I don't totally know where I'm going with this, I'm definitely not coming from "not all men" or "not all marriages" but maybe this is one of my (many) access points to realizing how little we let ANYONE of any identity be a flawed and messy human that spills the out of their boxes.
I've thought about this a lot — and I think it's a very warranted over-reaction that's not actually an over-reaction but *feels* like it is, because there's just so much of it in bourgeois publishing spaces right now (and in the Substack universe in particular). I think it's a really powerful testimony for so many women — and a vision of way forward — but I think it curdles when it tries to convince women that if they're partnered they should OBVIOUSLY hate their (cis male) partners.
This was on my mind too - in part because rather than divorcing my husband I chose to encourage therapy for both of us and work through resentments I had held onto. Things are actually getting better because he is able to understand - in his words - that he has been an 'unreliable narrator' about how things in our lives play out. I want us to move towards something that is sustainable for the future where we both feel fulfilled.
One of the places I see the most healthy, useful, and thought-provoking feminist discourse is on tumblr. Tumblr! I know, right?! The circles I'm in there are generally weighted by women, trans, and non-binary people in the 30s, and they are having *deeply* interesting conversations about slippage-toward-TERFdom. why misandry hurts everyone (especially transmascs), how liberation is about liberating everyone from the expectations of a patriarchal capitalist hellscape but also liberating everyone from their internalized allegiances to the same. The feminist project has never been clearer to me than as voiced by this group, with its explicitly pro-trans / trans-centered / understanding-racial-capitalism center. There was just a great thread about marriage as personal v. political, for example - who gets shut out of its benefits; who gets the privilege of saying marriage is about love and family rather than taxes and health care rights; who thinks they're making a singular choice and who understands the state has a vested interested in determining the parameters of marriage as part and parcel of facilitating and withholding access to political power. I really do not see these conversations elsewhere. (But I would also love to know where else they are happening, if they are!)
I wonder if part of this is the queerness of it all. Reading the essay, I was reflecting how a lot of what was promised in feminist spaces previously, I'm now finding in queer spaces and conversations, at least more tangibly. And queerness is feminist (and also hopefully intersectional; see: Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Angela Davis), but it doesn't always go the other way (even if feminism is not pro-TERF, it often assumes cis and hetero identities and positions, as AHP notes). I also notice an emphasis on community, if not the collective, in queer spaces; queer folks will show up for each other in crisis, even if we're late as hell to regularly scheduled plans.
I'll be curious to see if Queer as a radical political identity (allies can count here too) will replace Feminist in the coming years, given how much we need to be very loud right now given the explicit attacks on queer and trans rights. If that happens, will feminism get wrapped up into it, or will there be a bifurcation? I dunno, I'm no social theorist!
So much this. I feel like I've been mentally adding an asterisk to the word "feminism" for years to actually mean something more expansive and queer, similarly to how those of us gen-x and older might still say "bisexual" but we actually mean pansexual. Maybe it's time for both those older terms to retire, as should be the right of all the exhausted.
arriving late but I'm curious why you think people ought to retire bisexual. If it's around the idea that bisexual suggests only two genders, that's not true and is sort of a biphobic talking point. The way I think about it, as a bisexual person myself, is that the other existing words are "homo-," a prefix typically meaning "the same as" and "hetero-," a prefix typically meaning "different than." So "bi-" in this instance would suggest, to me, attraction to both same and different genders.
I mean, I don't think you're wrong, and I don't think the word is wrong... just like I don't think the word feminism is inherently wrong either.
Rambling parable tangent... I fell in love with bicycling and bicycle activism through Critical Mass. The police fell in love with treating Critical Mass like a terrorist group in many cities. Often in those cities, people do exactly the same type of bike ride in every way, just using a different name, and the same police departments are often supportive of (or at least waaaay less violently harassing of) those identical rides under the new name. I absolutely hate capitulating to that crap, but also recognize that the goals of the riders may sometimes be better served by letting the terminology evolve.
Anyway, I don't think there's a right or wrong answer in any of these cases, just strategy.
Fair enough! I don't personally feel that surrendering the use of a term I identify with serves me in this case, but I can see in your analogy how that could make sense.
I love how you put this. Language does evolve, but it’s often in those fits and spurts, and we need to be ready to let go of old words for new ones (and their impact) to come in.
This is super interesting to consider, especially looking for community that somehow is not open and welcoming in certain feminist spaces. For me, you don't as a marginalised group shit on other marginalised groups.
This —> “…liberation is about liberating everyone from the expectations of a patriarchal capitalist hellscape but also liberating everyone from their internalized allegiances to the same.”
I grew up in a high-control religion thinking feminism meant having choices like a man. Once I left, and made those choices, I thought maybe feminism meant choosing whatever I wanted, even if it looked ‘traditional.’ But only recently (and it feels so late!) have I come to see feminism as just another symptom of patriarchy. It’s not about choices at all! Because there aren’t that many choices, really, when the whole system defines anything feminine-coded as ‘less than.’
I live in heteronormative spaces and am slowly un-learning all that I’ve internalized. This conversation is so helpful and I appreciate it!
I will see what I can find! Many of the posts are just one-offs from someone who's sharing, say, photos of Chris Evans the rest of the time, usually blogged into my feed by a mutual. But I will see if I can dig up any that are dedicated to these conversations.
I love this whole essay. I’m a young millennial who recognizes myself in the MOM THAT SUCKS category (my mom is a miserable pastor’s wife, who is partially estranged from 2/3 of her kids and is now stuck taking care of a disabled husband who doesn’t like her and whom she doesn’t like), but honestly I’ve been in the FUCK IT LET’S FIGHT category for awhile simply because I grew up in evangelical purity culture and feminism is a huge part of what got me out. Partly because I had so many girl friends who I realized would make fantastic pastors, and yet they weren’t allowed. Partly because I didn’t want to get married (turns out I’m ace lesbian, lol) or have kids and there seemed to be no other path around that except for becoming a missionary (which was my plan initially).
Feminism was freedom to me. I think it always will be, even though I’m so tired now and it feels like the Christian right that I fled like my hair was on fire is now taking over my secular refuge. I thought getting out of the church and rejecting purity culture was the end of having to contort myself to fit the patriarchal norms I lived under for so long. Nope! But I’m not sure I see any other path forward besides digging in my heels. These Christian nationalists aren’t smart enough to tie their own shoelaces, fuck letting them decide feminism’s limits.
“…it feels like the Christian right that I fled like my hair was on fire is now taking over my secular refuge.” — Thank you for saying this! I fled an evangelical religion too and I have this same thought all the time.
As another escapee, I feel the exact same. And knowing how dangerous these people are because WE KNOW WHO THEY ARE while the rest of the political world refuses to take it seriously is terrifying.
I love this framing, and might suggest an overlay of Internet Impact across each quadrant— how has learning/performing/building community/fighting both feminism and femininity online, versus the in person, analog, and 20th century media/culture modes of first and second-wave feminism shaped what you rightly identify as today’s feminist exhaustion?
The relationship between the internet and feminism is like this new heart medicine my dad is on: it helps the majority of people, but a not-small minority experience strong negative side effects that actually exacerbate the underlying symptoms.
On the one hand: infinite knowledge and ability to connect with others, elevating voices, stories, and ideas that wouldn’t have made it past 20th century cultural gatekeepers. The ability to organize and activate at scale and speed. Etc etc.
On the other: the anonymity and depersonalization that feeds trolls, abuse. Digital permanent records that turn IRL learning opportunities into online dogpiling. More modes of performing to learn, all in public. Algorithms that turn diverse communities into tiny bubbled echo chambers. No wonder we’re all exhausted.
I also think the 'all information is available online' assumption has become an interesting infighting tool - women's blind spots or ignorance are now seen as personal failings rather than opportunities for us to help each other learn. Obviously speaking in broad strokes, but there's something about feminist validity being tied to how much of the internet you're aware of that feels particularly exhausting
Ooh yes definitely. And the way the "correct" language/thought patterns can evolve so quickly and people are judged so much for not having kept up with them. Like it was polite to ask for someone's preferred pronouns, and then suddenly it was very rude to have the word "preferred" in there. Someone generally well intentioned but not super online could trip over that easily.
Oh YES this. AHP's essay made me wonder: what's a modern/digital equivalent to a 1970s style consciousness raising group meeting, where people at all different points on a journey with feminism could come together and support one another (yes, I'm picturing that one scene from The Heidi Chronicles)? It feels like that barrier to entry is impossibly high, in part for this dynamic you rightly name.
Yes, exactly! And what's so key about that structure is the containment-- engage deeply with the work, then step back into everyday life. With the internet being everywhere always, the feminist work feels constant and inescapable, which I think is a huge part of the exhaustion talked about by AHP.
Like not only are you supposed to know everything that's happening, but you're supposed to be always engaged with it. There's no natural break or boundary anymore.
I agree with this 💯. Not only are we just automatically supposed to know everything, there is little grace allowed for those who don't, yet. Way too much gatekeeping. Who has time to deal with that!
This is such a great point considering we're now at a point where we have less control than ever over the content we consume thanks to the algos and even Google searches are no longer trustworthy. Exhaustion begins at the very first step of research/education because where do people even go/trust anymore?
We're seeing a precipitous decline in people even going directly to websites because everyone is reading the AI summary at the top of the Google search, and those summaries come from very limited/established sources. Reaching the masses is going to become harder than ever.
Really great point. I've never seen a "tradwife" in real life. I assume she's at home churning butter, not somewhere I could actually interact with her and be influenced by her ideas and pretty dresses outside of the internet.
I think we’re in a moment where the shift from purposeful politically active feminism to surface level performative feminism is finally biting us in the butt.
In Australia our first female PM in the 2010s went on a tear in parliament one day against the male opposition leader at the time. The moment became known as ‘the misogyny speech’. And while her words were powerful and women everywhere loved seeing a woman putting a man in his place, that same week her government cut welfare payments to single parents, the majority of whom are of course women. More than 10 years later that speech is still being celebrated and every time I see it I think of those single mums that were left worse off and no one (including prominent feminists at the time) paid attention to.
I don’t know what we do to fix it but I know shouting online isn’t it. I’m trying to support friends to leave shitty marriages. I’m trying to donate to grassroots organisations where I can. But when a population the size of America votes for Trump twice it feels pretty fucking hopeless.
I'm a literary agent specializing in work that goes deep into the center. I work with Buddhists and radical nuns. I work with investigative journalists reporting on the far right and historians writing about abortion and gender experts deconstructing norms. Since the inauguration--and honestly, it started before that--it's been one of the most challenging periods in my work life. I've had 5 different editors at 5 different publishing houses and imprints all reinforce that in the last 18 months, the only thing people are buying is *escapism*. We can't come up with the comps to prove that the books that could really help us will sell at all. One editor darkly asked "well, if you have any quick fixes, let me know..."
This analysis of exhaustion feels so spot on. Exhaustion and escapism are now hallmarks of the Biden era, and it has proven to be a breeding ground for rightwing radicalization. It's showing up in our consumption (which, as Tressie McMillan Cottom says, is how we perform our citizenship). It's showing up in our content. It's showing up in how we educate ourselves.
The only answer I have is to just keep doing the work. Keep supporting the writers and thinkers, and maybe the audience will find us when they're ready. Read the work on gender that's already been done. Liberation is a practice, not an event.
This was a great essay and I found myself nodding along to so much. The siren call of "I can work within the system to do good for others," that one will get you. And I hope this doesn't feel like a minor quibble, but in my research, women overwhelmingly did not want to return to the home after the war. The unions forced them out to return the jobs to men. The June Cleaver lie was omni-present in the almost entirely male run media (which makes it different in interesting ways than tradwife content, I think, where the call is coming from inside the house), but the majority of women back then were not taken in. I think maybe it's more insidious now when you see folks like Ballerina Farm occupying that weird middle ground of having agency and then using that agency to promote giving it up? It makes the argument more persuasive maybe, coming from another woman where she is the content creator.
I’ve always read that women wanted to stay in those jobs and I believe it - and believe the unions strong armed them out (one of many times when the labor movement has prioritized male jobs, just saying) but I also think the housewife was doing some Ballerina Farm fantasy work - the original version of this essay had a lot more elaboration of that moment that in hindsight I should’ve kept because it’s honestly SO illuminating (also the fact that women were able to work those jobs because of free childcare, what a concept!!)
I think a lot about the number of women who were forced out of line functions in the labor market and back into the home (even if they did some work outside to get by) that sought their own ways to escape, through benzos or alcohol or other numbing, etc. Just a generation self obliterating to get through the day.
Thank you for this essay, AHP. What a rich topic with complex layers and nuance to it. I don't usually leave comments, but I feel moved to do so on this one.
As a transmasc nonbinary person, I don't know where I fit in the quadrant. I grew up socialized as female; I'm now transitioning, still fighting back against patriarchal systems and toxic masculinity, while also being repeatedly told that I'm betraying women by being transmasc.
"Sometimes, that means embracing a reactionary stance that disavows feminism altogether...but it also manifests as a rejection of the norms that 'good girl' feminists understood as the only way forward. What if we didn't value career above all else? What if we make heteronormativity weird? What if we don't just say tings like 'gender is a prison' but act as if it were the case?" Out of everything, this resonates the most. That third quadrant. As I entered my 20s, then my 30s, I came into my queerness, my transness. I ditched monogamy and embraced a polyamorous identity. I questioned every cultural dominant narrative because so many of them can limit possibility. But even so, in reading through the quadrants and this essay altogether, I felt slightly alienated as a transmasc person. I firmly believe this was not AHP's intent. I do think this is another flaw of feminism and how it has historically prioritized a certain segment of the population. Which ...
Someone else mentioned this already: feminism is actually white feminism. First-wave feminism and the early suffragettes excluded and erased Black women (I believe this goes as far back as the mid-1800s). The will and wants of white cis women have been prioritized over Black, brown, Indigenous and trans women, over and over. It was never a movement for all women.
I remember the height of the girlboss era and so much merch with phrases like, Slay the patriarchy, when, really, all that was happening--at a large scale--was more women occupying the patriarchy and upholding the status quo. To borrow from Hamilton, it was about being in the room where it happened, but then not choosing or not being able to make meaningful, systemic change while in that room. Speaking as a white person, we were so focused on equality, we left equity behind.
This is complicated, right? It's both/and. I am beyond grateful for the individuals and communities who fought for things like women being able to open their own bank account and access to birth control. I am NOT saying feminism hasn't done anything for women. I do think it has prioritized white cis women and hasn't gone far enough.
Ultimately I don't think feminism is the savior that 14-year-old me believed it to be. I think its roots are deeply racist and transphobic and self-protective. Perhaps it's time to imagine a new way forward. New language, new experiments, new structures. I think this is already happening. It's always been happening within Black and Indigenous communities. Especially QTPOC communities. More and more, I truly believe we need to look to queer, Black and Indigenous spaces on how to build inclusive, intersectional, resilient, and radically imaginative ways forward.
I really appreciate this comment. The fact that there seems to be so little space for a transmasc person in this contemporary iteration of feminism speaks to its exhaustion and lack of utility.
THIS!! --> "Perhaps it's time to imagine a new way forward. New language, new experiments, new structures. I think this is already happening. It's always been happening within Black and Indigenous communities. Especially QTPOC communities. More and more, I truly believe we need to look to queer, Black and Indigenous spaces on how to build inclusive, intersectional, resilient, and radically imaginative ways forward."
Totally agree. I find trans hate baffling. I look at folks who have left the binaries behind and I see visionaries who only have things to teach me (boring white cis-het lady), not anything I have to fear or feel threatened by. Take these systems! Smash 'em! Not like they're serving me, jfc.
In the past year or so I think I’ve really started to notice and feel, in very vivid ways in my life, what it means for feminism to be a project that is only by and for women. Men are still wholly uncommitted to the ideas of women’s liberation and respecting women for the complex and capable people we are. I’ve been called a “fucking bitch” more times than I can count: for biking down my own alley, for biking near another man, for driving near my city’s Puerto Rican Day parade, while exiting my local train station. I’ve been referred to as “your wife” by a guy who knows my name while I was standing right there. It has been suggested(by other men) that my not looking forward to my husband doing the “punishment” for his fantasy league was me creating “a hostile environment”. One of the men in our local friend group keeps making “grill daddy” comments for every barbecue even though the women in this group are the primary grill masters and chefs of our households. Just the other day I was catcalled by a bunch of youths hanging out the side of a car in traffic, like the song Scrubs came to life!
I think it was always going to be an uphill battle because men benefit from patriarchy, but I really do feel that the more men can be a part of the movement, and in particular participate in changing the culture within their own ranks, the better our world will be. In almost all of the situations above, other men were present and said or did nothing. I don’t need a man to save me, but I definitely think it would make a huge difference to other men to hear a boundary from one of their own. When I do it, I’m being a fucking bitch, but when another man does it, it will be level setting. I think we(as a society) need to find a way to build resilience in men to the idea that the opinion of other men is the priority, because not all men need to have a good opinion of all other men! The bar is currently set in hell amongst them, and they are too insecure(because of patriarchal ideas!) to consider engaging in the friction that would raise that bar.
Surely this is not the only answer, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot as all this horrible stuff stuff happening to me, to the point that it’s quite pedestrian.
While I can relate to parts of all these groups, I'm definitely in 3. I even had a conversation with my stepmom where I told her I didn't want my life to look like hers (much more polite in context). She worked so much and had no time for herself. Her life revolved around taking care of the kids, trying to please my awful sexist dad, and working often more than fulltime.
I wish I had answers. One of my disillusionments was being very involved in a reproductive justice campaign just to watch abortion rights be steadily chipped away at and then Dobbs happening. Easy way to become exhausted. I've been spending a lot of energy trying to figure out answers for "what's next?" All my answers have focused on local things that feel more in control, which on one hand feels like a cop out and on the other is maybe what we need more of? I think the professionalization of activism fits in here somewhere and that what we need is more actual grassroots organizing and not national organizations that set an agenda then seek out volunteers to enact that agenda.
Please have Koa Beck on the Culture Study Podcast.
One of the main reasons why feminism is and has failed before is because of society’s focus on self and not collective action. Even some of the most well-meaning podcasts that I listen to always conclude episodes with an answer to what can I do, not what can we do? That push to wrap up something in a neat bow is a human tendency to want to fix and move on, instead of sitting in the uncertainty that’s needed to make progress.
Because society doesn’t want to sit in that uncertainty, I think we are having a moment in pop culture of celebrating glimmers of hope, community, and solace because that’s all that feels practical right now. Sinners and Kpop Demon Hunters: two hugely popular pop culture phenomena that are importantly original stories that focus on colonialism, race, family, music etc. are great examples. They have strong female leads who serve as the voice of reason and examine duality in women. These characters are also catalysts to the glimmers mentioned above.
(It’s always refreshing to see the duality of women in film. We’ve of course seen this duality in Shondaland productions too.)
What’s interesting is that neither piece offers an easy solution to the bigger problems, but rather celebrates those glimmers I mentioned above.
I think this is society trying to grapple with the monstrosity of historic precedent and a shifting to focusing on providing moments of solace/happiness—like making music in community, because we’ve finally realized there is no one solution or one answer to the feminist problem posed above (and other systemic problems as well).
Is this pop culture finally reaching its end because we don’t know what to do and now we are just trying to make the best of every day life? Or is this reflecting a need for pop culture to really pause and shift to sit in that uncertainty that’s needed to make progress?
i think this is so important. i've been deep in the work and papers of adrienne rich lately and she insists on several things that were key to her lively, lived feminism.
1. solidarity. feminism is a practice of thinking about all women. including childbearing and nonchildbearing, even though motherhood was a key framing and radicalizing concept in her thinking. it's like motherhood entangled her more deeply with the struggle of women in general.
2. humility. she was learning from women of color all the time.
3. collectivity/structural change. it is nice if some families can get a more equal gender balance of labor, but what matters is whether womens and mens domestic labor and bodies and health and thriving is valued differently by the economy and the state.
4. PLEASURE. rich located her feminism in her LOVE OF WOMEN. lesbianism and feminism went hand in hand for her. and/but, she told her oldest friend that much of what she learned about how to love women she learned from that friendship, which was not sexual. her feminism comes from sensual, personal love.
5. community. ideas were moving around between so many people. adrienne corresponded with all these small womens presses and activist groups around the country. when people asked her for speaking engagements, she often referred them to her local grassroots contacts so local community could deepen into mutual action (see also #2.)
for me, the key to moving from the status quadrant to something closer to fuckit feminism, was reading rich, becoming a mother, but especially learning about materialist feminism, which shares a lot in common with her approach.
I’ve always identified as feminist, but one of the things that’s made this difficult for me has been with the ways our idea of gender has been broadening. During the pandemic, my cousin came out as a trans woman (and her spouse came out as non-binary), and one of my dearest friends (who was AMAB) transitioned from non-binary to female presenting. My issues with the feminism of my formative years is twofold: feminism feels very binary/not very accessible to those who might not identify as women, and the constant attacks on trans women by TERFs/conservatives/the media. I want my trans friends to be healthy and safe, but I also want access to reproductive care and education and to not be sexually harassed at work.
Yup this! I left a reply upthread, about how the spaces and conversations where I notice true inclusion and community care most these days are queer. Feminist issues are queer issues, with a lot more flexibility to the gender and sexuality binaries (and also sometimes monogamy too tbh). Sometimes I wonder if the panic attack about trans people is a (coincidental/convenient, this isn't a conspiracy) way to split feminists and queers from each other, cuz if we were to actually get on the same page, we'd realize (as many Black queer femmes have pointed out for decades) that many of our issues are one and the same at their heart.
this is a great point that i talk about with my queer family of choice all the time (even as a cis/het woman)--our liberation(s) are intertwined, and bodily autonomy is just one of many issues where we are waging a similar fight to be trusted as experts on what works for us. ive learned so much from them and i unequivocally get more support/care/affirmation/validation from them than i do from any traditional spaces/structures. we are a family to each other in every way that matters.
i am also part of tumblr and other online communities that are less explicitly queer (though our fandom discord skews very bi/ace/aro) but again, it is an uplifting and open space in a way that someone upthread gestured at with great eloquence.
Thank you for the nod to monogamy as one of the restricting binaries -- as a queer polyamorous person, I see more and more that it's another way the emphasis on hetero-partnership just keeps me out of (and truly uninterested in, a lot of the time) the primary discourse. And my primary partner IS a man! I partner with men! But the constant discussion of MAN + WOMAN and the very few options offered outside of that just involves so much narrow grim jaw-clenching (and lack of a pleasure-focused ethos, FWIW, though that's a bit of a separate point).
Yup, totally! If we don’t assume a two-person marital partnership as the center of life, it opens the doors for so many relational models through which we can care for each other - longtime domestic partners who aren’t married; triads and polycules; friendships, roommates, etc.
This is where the vaporization of feminism that AHP comes into play, I think, because what I think of as feminism is about bodily autonomy and gender equity—which can and should apply to trans and cis women equally, as well to every other gender. My right to reproductive care and not to be sexually harassed at work is intimately bound up with a trans woman’s right to her healthcare. The same people who want to end access to one want to end access to the other, because patriarchy and fascism seeks to control bodies and enforce rigid gender roles across the board.
When media and TERFs and the “lean in” crew started watering down feminism to make it about “feminism is whatever you choose!” and vibes instead of grounding it in concrete goals like bodily autonomy, that’s when the movement started getting derailed, imo. For some that means feminism isn’t useful anymore because its meaning is unclear; I’d rather reclaim it personally, because we obviously haven’t met most of those goals yet!
Totally feel this on the frustration with vibes vs concrete calls to action. And also, I absolutely get the feeling AHP articulates here of feeling like, wow, I don’t f#%ing know what the calls to action should or can be in this moment.
It’s hard to know what to focus on when there is so much coming from so many directions, yeah. But it helps me to remember that that has always been true. There are so many fronts and so many fights. Which is why it’s important, imo, to not let people water down what we’re actually fighting and get caught up trying to make our tent so big it includes people actually obstructing what we’re fighting for. If the person fighting for abortion access is a TERF simultaneously fighting to legally restrict GAC for trans people, they are not fighting my fight. I’m not being a purist by drawing that line, either. They are not for bodily autonomy for everyone and thus they are not actually fighting what I am fighting. This is why so much of white feminism and pro-capitalism boss feminism isn’t even feminism. It’s just a bunch of supposedly pro-women bullshit that only supports a certain kind of woman (and not even really them). (And I know exclusionary white feminism has always been tied up with the history of the feminist movement. Idk maybe we need to change the name or the terminology and get a rebrand. I don’t really care, I just want bodily autonomy and gender equality however we get there.)
At the risk of saying something completely banal and obvious, I think one’s relationship with feminism is profoundly shaped by one’s life circumstances. I’m almost 40 and grew up with a lot of low key feminist vibes in my family (grandma was a second wave feminist, mom always worked outside the home, my first concert was Lilith Fair) and have always, always identified as a feminist and think it’s kind of weird when other women don’t.
I’m going through a very unexpected divorce (having been married to a “good guy” known in our community for doing things like organizing for reproductive rights!) that is shattering all of the (pretty bleak and meager to begin with) illusions I had about my marriage representing a form of feminist security despite being in a patriarchal society. I thought I was married to one of the “good ones” and it turns out he wanted to blow it up. And I hate to say it but this divorce has 100% reactivated my latent misandry because of how I was blindsided.
In some ways I am profoundly grateful that being a feminist is my oldest identity because it feels like a self protection auto immune response right now. And I have to say that since this divorce has me questioning so much about my own relationship patterns and other very personal things and returning to a life of being single for the first time since my twenties, it’s also at the same time revealing to me how deeply heteronormative and couple oriented American feminist discourse is, when almost half of the country is single.
If feminism is always anchored in discussions around the things that partnered people face (especially things that partnered hetero couples face), then feminist discourse is always going to have an air of navel gazing for the many millions of people who are navigating life, whether by choice or by circumstances, without a partner.
"If feminism is always anchored in discussions around the things that partnered people face (especially things that partnered hetero couples face), then feminist discourse is always going to have an air of navel gazing for the many millions of people who are navigating life." THIS RIGHT HERE. Thank you for your incredibly generous and reflective comment, Eira — I'm so glad you're here.
"In some ways I am profoundly grateful that being a feminist is my oldest identity because it feels like a self protection auto immune response right now." I love this analogy. Strength, sister.
Your comment brought up so much for me, especially what you said about feminist discourse orbiting around partnership. It really made me reflect on how many feminist conversations I’ve been part of that focus on how to survive relationships, rather than how to fully live outside of them.
Even the empowerment narratives often still hinge on “getting the right man” or “making the relationship more equitable.” And you’re right, half the country is single. I’m 42, and honestly, the majority of my female friends are single!
Thank you for sharing this. These are the kinds of strong, necessary conversations that move us forward...and you gave me something to really sit with. 🙏
Solidarity in going through an unexpected divorce after being married to a "good guy." I'm surprised by how much it has affected my identity. I feel like outsider now as a single woman and single mom. Which is was unexpected because so many people in the baby boomer generation of my family are divorced!
Phew, yes. You nailed it.
YES THIS. I was single (like, perpetually single) until fairly recently. I definitely went through periods of feeling overlooked and resentful -- both by my married friends, and by the discourse around feminism.
Over the past several years, there has been so much attention paid to Fair Play and emotional labor and learned helplessness; a tidal wave of women calling out husbands who are not pulling their weight. And that's a big deal, and it's warranted, especially by women who are drowning trying to raise their kids.
AND/BUT...those women still have the immense privilege of a partner in a society that is explicitly designed around married couples. My women friends who don't have a partner to be their emergency contact, save up for a mortgage (or split the skyrocketing cost of rent), provide a financial safety net if they get laid off, etc. etc. etc. are struggling too, and yet I don't see feminist rallying cries around their needs.
I think there is this insidious cultural/patriarchal stigma that a woman who doesn't attract a man is less-than. She needs to solve that problem for herself, and then "feminism" will have her back. I hate it.
I, elder millenial, have had this thought floating around for a long time, and it is something I think is both small (because it relies on individualism to understand it and change) and half-formed, but in a couple of sentences, it's this:
So many of my college-educated, hetero- and cis- female friends married 'feminist' men and now find themselves cracking the sad jokes about their 'third child' (oh hi, buyer's remorse). When we were growing up, all of us being brought up by feminist or just in the workplace mothers, boys and girls, heard the messaging that girls can be anything and can be a man's boss and it doesn't make her bossy and girls can be at the table, too! And we all embraced it. All of my friends' partners are absolutely fine with their wives working and often out-earning them. They have women bosses and never make a weird noise about it. But there wasn't a model that also showed the boys, *and that will mean you will be a caregiver and homemaker and responsible for your family beyond a paycheck and grilling the meat*. We somehow didn't all get hook's message that feminism was for everyone - and that radical restructuring was needed of all gender norms, not just the norms around women's roles in society. So these men don't see their own responsibility in making the home function, because as far as many are concerned, they are absolutely feminists (voted for Hillary, clearly happy to have a woman as boss!) and they just magically don't see dirt and clutter and birthday invitations.
I'm the mother of a male child and I have a male partner who was raised by a single, working mother (who would never call herself a feminist) but who was just expected to be part of making the house run because there were no options. My son sees what I think is a pretty good role model for someone who runs the house and our lives just as much as I do, and yet... where are my blind spots? What am I missing in this conversation? What am I missing in making sure my child is raised to know he must also be able to look at a full laundry hamper and understand the myriad tasks related to doing laundry without someone else telling him it must be done? How much is an individual problem and where does that intersect with whole societal changes?
I'm a young millennial, and I'm seeing very much the same underlying trends at a different life stage. It does feel like feminism sort of left men behind -- not in a *poor men* way, but in a way where they were not invited/encouraged to re-imagine their place in society as part of the feminist project of our youth. I and most of my friends are at the stage of trying to find a partner, and it does feel like there's an essential lack of compatibility between women who think SO MUCH about gender and norms and domestic labor and wrestle with it daily, in any quadrant, and men who have never thought about it beyond being like, "and I'm fine with that," about their woman boss and getting a gold star for it. Even acquaintances who are maybe in between the "fuck feminism" and "status quo buyer's remorse" quadrants are in some way wrestling with it daily -- do I succumb to the concept of preventative botox or is that actually anti-feminist of me, etc. And then you get these dudes who have NEVER thought about it, which feels impossible when I would love to STOP worrying about it for one literal second, and I have no idea how to bridge that gap into anything resembling genuine partnership.
I was part of conversations about helping men understand how feminism would help them, too, but I think we truly never articulated the specifics and that yes, they might have to do a bit more. We wanted to make it so it went down too easy.
THANK YOU. I love this. So true. I've raised two young men (in their mid-20s) and I hope they are not these guys but I don't know. I do know I was in your shoes at your age, having thought about it endlessly, and no, none of the guys ever thought it was their problem.
Just wanted to say how insightful/helpful I found this — thank you!
Terry Real’s writing helped me appreciate how harmful to men patriarchy is. In the past, when I thought about patriarchy, I was primarily thinking about it as it affected me as a woman. It’s incredibly harmful for men and emotionally unhealthy. I’ve definitely gotten more in touch with that over time.
I love your thoughts. I hope there's men reading this today who see this comment!
I just started reading Another World Is Possible by Natasha Hakimi Zapata, and she has a chapter on parental leave in Norway that talks about the policies that strongly encourage dads to be home with their kids solo (time that cannot be transferred to their partner but is use it or lose it), which generated a lot of the shift you are talking about: non-primary-parents recognizing what the day-to-day physical and emotional labor looks and feels like, and kids seeing equity in their parents' involvement in household life. In my house, I married someone seven years older, who already had a career teaching high school when we met, whereas I was barely out of college, and he has always worked more hours (during the school year) and made more money than me BUT he takes every summer off while I continue working, and so for two months of every year, he is scheduling and managing kids activities and cooking meals and doing laundry and taking on the majority of the house work and teaching our boys by example that caring for our home and family is a responsibility we all share to the extent we are able. It's an imperfect system, and most people don't have the luxury of a partner being off work for two months a year, but I can say that if we figured out a way to get our partners home doing these things for significant amounts of time, it has a huge impact on their understanding.
I find myself returning to this point so often — I believe I first read about it in Darcy Lockman's ALL THE RAGE. That the only reliable way to create a more equitable distribution of labor in the household is to have men stay home *by themselves* with the kids. When I've brought it up (here or elsewhere) people often say that if a man has paternity leave, they want to share that leave *with him* so they can be together *as a family,* which I understand.....but think about the downstream effects!!!
I’m just now reading Father Time by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy—she cites studies showing that anyone who serves as a primary caregiver over a long period has brain changes that make them more nurturing and aware of a baby’s needs, whether they are men, women, bio parents or not bio. Feels like some solo primary care for both parents would be so beneficial for everyone.
I have had this book on my shelf for the past year and I think it's finally time to read, thank you for the nudge!
Agree, my husband had more parental leave than I did and that alone time with the babies made such a difference for him being a completely competent, enthusiastic, and confident parent.
In Norway, it seems like they intentionally have ALL of the buckets, so there's time parents can be home together and time that can only be done apart. Both have value!
I just had a baby and our initial plan was to take leave one after the other to save daycare costs, but my husband's company required him to start within 60 days. The result was 2 months me alone, 2 months of overlap, and now 2 months of him on his own. I agree with you: both options have had such value - in the memories we made and then building confidence in parenting/better sharing of household roles. If only scenarios like it (and for much longer!) could be more accessible to families, particularly in the US.
I once asked my husband how my cousin and her wife in Norway could have 3 kids when I’m overwhelmed by one and he replied, “Because they have amazing parental leave.” I was like, damn, he’s right.
That's just to start. They also have very low cost (~$200/month), guaranteed early childhood care starting at age 1, and a closer-knit, community-based culture that continues to offer the "village" support we all express nostalgia/longing for.
Growing up, my dad was the SAHD & ran his own consulting business on the side, while my mom worked full-time. He did an amazing job at it and was in charge of the house, our schedules, carpooling to school + endless swim practices/swim meets, appointments, etc. He was the only SAHD in our majority white, middle class community...I think a lot of my peers' moms didn't understand it and didn't know how to interact with him. He was deeply involved with our PTAs and swim club board, but was constantly facing resistance and manufactured drama from the moms.
Now that my brothers and I are older, we're seeing all those long-term, downstream effects of seeing our dad be our main caregiver in how we're approaching our own relationships, expectations within our friend groups, etc. As far as I can tell, my brothers are much more home/cooking capable vs their peers. One brother recently told me that his dream is to be a SAHD himself
Yes imagine a world where it’s not only women that take parental leave, where it’s assumed that both men and women will take extended leave at some point! Imagine the opportunities in the workplace that arise from men taking extended periods of leave or negotiating job share arrangements! I feel it would reduce the discrimination women experience in the workplace by a lot.
Here to say that my male partner has been the SAHD. In some ways its true as it drastically changed what he does in the house. In other ways not because he wasn’t socialises / just doesn’t care about certain things, e.g., our child having well rounded nutritional meals, bed time routine
My (cis male) partner stayed home with our child after I (a cis woman) went back to work, from the time she was 3.5 months old to 2.5 years. He is much more suited to be a full-time parent than I am, and he and our kid have a special bond. In the rare cases that they're not with me for a night or two, how people sometimes ask if he is able to handle our child for a couple of days (she's 3 now). No one would ever ask him that about me! It makes me sad — so unfair to both of us, and still so entrenched in our culture.
I worked retail when I had my first child. She was in daycare, which was closed on the weekends. I worked every Saturday, and occasionally Sundays too, which meant my husband was weekend childcare once I went back after maternity leave. Boy, did he learn fast. He had to learn her moods, what she needed and how to give it to her. The first month or two, the apartment was a mess, as "the day got away from me", but he eventually got it together. We always say that was the best thing that could have happened for him to really understand what it meant to raise a child. Luckily for him, she was an amazing sleeper and good natured child.
Also consider that US parental leave is very short. And birthing partners usually need support post birth. Both/and.
Yes it’s so true. When I decided to buckle down and finish my PhD - in the US with no child care (still have student loan debt to pay for part time care), my partner cared for the kids alone nearly every weekend for a year while I worked. He had a full time job during the week, then I holed up in my office Friday night to Monday morning. The kids were about 3 and 1. He had cared for them before and also took several weeks parental leave for each, but usually with me around. His confidence and capacity rocketed astronomically when he did this solo care. I’m not saying it made things equal overnight, but it’s the number one most dramatic shift in my experience.
Having to solo care for an extended period - at least from wake up time to bed time - means it’s on you, and that if you decide to be relaxed about food or diaper bag packing or the like, you are also the one to see and deal with the consequences. He also developed his own style and preferences for how to care for them. Not mine but ones that also worked. It was great. Wish we had better US child care
I live in Germany now and two of my friends here talked about their FREE child care following a healthy parental leave, and I honestly felt like crying for all the stress, debt, and career stoppages I suffered at the hands of the patriarchal US state when this other world is possible.
When my AMAB kids were little and I was a SAHM (due to poverty and an acutely feminist value of caretaking as work) with a feminist husband, I was part of a Consciousness Raising group that met monthly for probably 8 or 9 years. I spent much of my time lamenting the fact that while raising boys I desired to “eradicate the patriarchy in a single generation,” but *never could.*
I now have two 20-something children who lack any apparent ambition in a world where they were not included in the notion that The Future is Female and didn’t have a cultural guide similar to Girls can be Anything (except president, but I digress). They’re too anxious - especially having come of age during a global pandemic - and have no vision of themselves in the cultural conversation.
In their early 20s, they *can* cook, but don’t, and *can* clean, but don’t, and are the worst, most depressive roommates (who still say “Love you mom” when we part).
All of which is to say that the cultural narratives and perhaps the language (Sapir Whorf hypothesis?) and the other people in the world (on and off the internet) will be the blind spots that cannot be controlled. It’s the water we swim in.
Godspeed.
I'm not going to convey my gratitude sufficiently in writing, but thank you for being so honest about your experience. I was mentally so ready to have a female child and have been floundering a bit for the last 8 years on how to raise a son. Your honest story gives words to something I've seen (or thought I've seen) in the older male children of friends.
I think you echo/substantiate Ruth Whippman's whole thought process in BoyMom - a read that was as illuminating for as it was dicomfiting to me. I didn't notice what wasn't there in my childhood and young adulthood - updated cultural touchstones for boys that equally work to a better society for everyone. I worried more about what is put in front of girls. It's so hard to wrestle with how little control I and my partner can reasonably exert here (or in many aspects of parenting, I keep learning over and over). You're right, there's a huge behemoth of culture surrounding us that I alone can't plan for the effects of. Godspeed, indeed.
Again, seriously, thank you for responding so genuinely.
100% and I really appreciate AHP for bringing BoyMom to my attention. I do feel like there is a reflexive feminist aversion to any sympathy for men, but that seems at odds with the idea that patriarchy hurts EVERYONE. I don't want to raise my son with the idea that cis straight white men are THE WORST because there's a reasonable chance he will be one (at least white passing, as he is mixed race but doesn't appear to be), and where does that get him? But whence the positive frame in feminism for how men can contribute (other than "sit down and listen to women") and what's at stake for them?
I think Kate Manne's framework is the most useful: Patriarchy is a power system, misogyny is the law enforcement. We smash patriarchy to *protect* our sons as much as our daughters. Men can't live up to the patriarchal ideals either. They will never be strong enough, tall enough, rich enough, white enough, virile enough... It's the patriarchy that teaches my son to distance himself from his nurturing nature, even when his mother and father encourage it at home. He will go out into the world and learn what is the 'right' and 'wrong' way to be a boy.
We need to teach our sons that freedom comes from dismantling the power system, even if they think they're benefitting from it. When the richest guys in the world, when the global political holders of power, are still engaging in body modification to become "more manly looking"--that's a system that's still oppressing the supposed winners. It's about teaching our sons that Andrew Tate isn't offering freedom--he's selling young boys oppression back to them under the guise of power.
Because Kate is the FUCKING BEST
I love this, thank you <3
💯
I'm going to quote it so wrong, but the whole "Yes, smash the patriarchy, but sometimes I want to wrap the patriarchy up in its blankie and give it a cuddle..." from Whippman just really put some of those feelings from early years into context for me. I also had to grapple with my own feminist aversion to sympathy for men (I have long been in the Burn It Down camp) when I became a mother to a son.
I hope we're the change? Maybe the fruits of our efforts won't play out in all the husbands today, but 3 generations down the road? I'd love to see the results, but I will just keep hoping the seeds are there just like we've been the fruit of the seeds planted generations before. Even if, to the main point of this essay, we're all so tired and it's so much and the regression of today is so real. Sigh.
Thank you so much for expressing this - as mom to a 20yo boyman, who is debilitated by anxiety and ADHD - I feel you SO HARD. I have so much worry about how he will launch if I don't push. And who are his role models? I have much I could say but won't about the men in his life...and when you look beyond that...ugh.
Gen X mom of two trans autistic/auDHD 20-somethings who are similarly depressed, anxious, and have no idea how they fit into this world. They are un/underemployed and have no hope for their future. Could not do college. I feel like COVID did something to this generation that I cannot define, but there's more to it than that. I am so exhausted from emotional and logistical support and from teetering along an axis of wondering how much help is too much vs. the harms of not helping them (skipped meds, missed appointments with late fees, overdrawn accounts, etc.).
And I am continually questioning my role in all of this; I've identified as feminist since the '80s but somehow raised three kids and have married a good man and none of them clean up after themselves like someone raised as a woman would. I'm working on undoing that for all of us.
Gurllll… the GAD/AuDHD game is strong here. I think in our life the role models show them that they have no idea how they’ll ever earn a living or change anything about the world or be anything resembling safe. Because precarity is everywhere despite working your whole life for something. But beyond that - good god.
My 20 yo is nonbinary and completely paralyzed by anxiety and cannot find any blueprint for how to move forward.
My 23 yo is equally struggling but differently.
At this point, I feel like the frontal lobe is my last possible hope.
OMG yes I'm holding hope that he just needs more time to mature his brain - and if 27 is avg frontal lobe for typically developing men...are we looking at 30?! will he be living with me FOREVER?! He has a job but can really only do a few hours a week because it requires SO much energy to leave the house - I really do feel for him! It's not easy with his brain wired the way it is from the beginning, and then COVID and parent divorce as a freshman in high school really amplified all the hard stuff.
Jennifer and annakiss - solidarity. My 21 yo son with ADHD and depression is living at home and I don't know what his path forward looks like, or when he'll be ready to live on his own. So many people offer empathy and understanding, which is nice, but it doesn't change that all our systems in society are built for neurotypical kids that can go to college. He's grown up in a house where I'm the primary breadwinner and his dad and I split household stuff pretty equally, so I hope that he sees that and can participate equally in a household at some point (but when?!?)
"We somehow didn't all get hook's message that feminism was for everyone - and that radical restructuring was needed of all gender norms, not just the norms around women's roles in society."
YES!! I think about all of this a lot too, as a mom to two boys and with a husband who identifies as a feminist but wasn't trained do do housework/mental labor. It's a big conversation in our house with lots of learning all around.
My sister and I just talked about this. We were raised by a single mother who taught us to use a drill and get a prenup. And guess what? We both ended up with “men” who met us and saw a mommy who could take care of their every need. We’re both divorced.
I’m on the hunt for the unicorn of a man who is emotionally intelligent, responsible, good with money and a high earner, generous, a good cook, but ALSO (and this is new to me!) can do man things like fix a car and chop wood and build things around the house. While also not leveraging any of that physical brawn and skill over me? My god, I’ve come close, but getting that entire package, plus an ability to use “I” statements to talk about his feelings has proven impossible. I’ll keep looking.
Love this, so well said. As a fellow mom of a boy who’s also an only, I’m very aware and careful to make sure he is doing all the things. Fortunately my husband also does all the things, and my son sees us thank each other for getting this or that thing done, and has always known me to be dedicated to my career. But I feel a real responsibility not to enable any learned helplessness in him, that I sadly am seeing in some friends’ sons. I have said to more than one friend still doing their teenagers’ laundry, cleaning the bathroom for them, etc., ‘think of their future partner’. Their intentions are good in that they think they are being kind and taking care of their sons (and often … it’s the sons only, which is a whole other thing) but it does these boys no favors. We have to show care in other ways.
This drifts a little bit from the point of this essay, but one of the best advice I received about having an only is, treat them like you have a whole bunch of kids. I think the same rule applies to the whole family. Even if you can do it, and don’t mind doing it, whatever ‘it’ is, that’s not the point. The point is we’re a team and everyone contributes.
Wow. Treat them like you have a whole bunch of kids. Wow!!! Thank you for commenting that.
Right?? It really stuck with me -16 years later!
I think about this all of the time, as the mom of a boy and a girl. How can I raise them with the same expectations in terms of what it means to be part of a family? Especially because one set of grandparents have such regressive gender roles. Although I will say, the product of that regressive household (my husband) does at least half of the household labor, and while the mental load is still a work in progress, so I know it is possible for people to reject what they were raised with and do better if they are motivated to do so.
Your point about boys absorbing the “girls can do anything” message while never receiving the parallel re-education about their own roles is exactly the part I think many of us are reckoning with now, especially those of us who married the “feminist good guys”.
I love your question, “Where are my blind spots?”. Because I think that’s the very heart of this whole evolution. Not just for our sons, but for us. I'm a boy mom too (2 boys), and I think about what their futures will look like in partnerships...their roles, their responsibilities... and you brought up some really good points, making me reflect on the messages I am not just saying but showing in my actions as well.
Those of us who are raising boys with better models are doing something revolutionary. But as you said, that’s still not enough if the world they step into doesn’t reward or expect the same from them.
I'm loving how detailed and personal and reflective the comments are so far. This is all important and fascinating.
I do think so much of the Great Feminist Exhaustion is rooted in
1. the commodification of EVERYTHING, which is tangled up in the shift of collective movements like the mid-century women's movement into an individually practiced identity / lifestyle increasingly packaged and sold back to people (notice the difference between "I am a feminist" and "I'm joining the women's movement")
(Adrienne Rich made this point beautifully in her later work)
2. relatedly, the fracturing of collectivities in Euroamerican culture (bowling alone and all that), many of which gave us practice in working with people who didn't perfectly align with us (like in community groups, churches, etc.) and the fracturing of an imagination of the common good in the US, especially
3. the acceleration of (1) and (2) by c21 technological developments AND economic developments that make us more atomized, overwhelmed, optimization-oriented, and outraged.
I think sites of resistance/resurgence will be embodied, fiercely nonviolent, humble and open to working with folks who don't entirely line up with us, and counterculturally tender. And they'll often see how the wisdom of intersectionality isn't just about our identities (which we're pressured to perform perfectly/publicly as an end game) but our initiatives (like Kimberlé Crenshaw's original coining of the term intersectionality to talk about class action lawsuits for Black women workers justice, or Anna Julia Cooper, who was a Black liberationist feminist arguing that working for women's liberation shouldn't be in competition with Black men's liberation or Native American liberation, but that all our liberation is bound up together).
Whew Cynthia *all of this,* just spot on
I'm teaching ENG 282, Introduction to Feminist Theory and Literature by Women for the fourth or fifth time this fall and thinking a LOT about how to frame it for a new generation right now, so your essay touched something bright-hot live in me in this morning. Thank you!
So great to see Adrienne Rich’s name come up. I was very lucky to have her as a teacher in the mid-70s and she was amazing and so generous with her time.
Oh, how wonderful, Laura! I never met Rich, but I've studied her as a scholar for 15 years, and I've read so many stories of her public and also more private generosity. <3
Wow I love that framing with intersectionality of initiatives, it feels like a more tangible perspective than intersectionality of identity alone
“counterculturally tender”
This is such a a minor piece of all this, and I'm in conditioned fear that I'll be accused of saying "what about the men", but sometimes it feels like you aren't allowed in quadrant A or B if you don't hate your husband. I've been trying to form a coherent theory lately of why Substack is feeding me so many essays that amount to "you are oppressed if you don't divorce a man in your 40s". It feels like a new version of the shaming in my 20s if I ever tried to talk to friends about supporting my (then boyfriend) with being a messy, flawed human. The attitude was like it's his own responsibility to figure his whole life out and never show it to you because that would be oppressive. I think the idea that every individual man is a stand in for the patriarchy has backed parts of the movement into a corner, and fed some of the TERFy impulses. I don't totally know where I'm going with this, I'm definitely not coming from "not all men" or "not all marriages" but maybe this is one of my (many) access points to realizing how little we let ANYONE of any identity be a flawed and messy human that spills the out of their boxes.
I've thought about this a lot — and I think it's a very warranted over-reaction that's not actually an over-reaction but *feels* like it is, because there's just so much of it in bourgeois publishing spaces right now (and in the Substack universe in particular). I think it's a really powerful testimony for so many women — and a vision of way forward — but I think it curdles when it tries to convince women that if they're partnered they should OBVIOUSLY hate their (cis male) partners.
Thank you for this, I feel very similar. I can have problems with the system and still love my husband and be grateful to be married to him.
Yup!
Thank you for putting this into words! I feel the same.
This was on my mind too - in part because rather than divorcing my husband I chose to encourage therapy for both of us and work through resentments I had held onto. Things are actually getting better because he is able to understand - in his words - that he has been an 'unreliable narrator' about how things in our lives play out. I want us to move towards something that is sustainable for the future where we both feel fulfilled.
One of the places I see the most healthy, useful, and thought-provoking feminist discourse is on tumblr. Tumblr! I know, right?! The circles I'm in there are generally weighted by women, trans, and non-binary people in the 30s, and they are having *deeply* interesting conversations about slippage-toward-TERFdom. why misandry hurts everyone (especially transmascs), how liberation is about liberating everyone from the expectations of a patriarchal capitalist hellscape but also liberating everyone from their internalized allegiances to the same. The feminist project has never been clearer to me than as voiced by this group, with its explicitly pro-trans / trans-centered / understanding-racial-capitalism center. There was just a great thread about marriage as personal v. political, for example - who gets shut out of its benefits; who gets the privilege of saying marriage is about love and family rather than taxes and health care rights; who thinks they're making a singular choice and who understands the state has a vested interested in determining the parameters of marriage as part and parcel of facilitating and withholding access to political power. I really do not see these conversations elsewhere. (But I would also love to know where else they are happening, if they are!)
I wonder if part of this is the queerness of it all. Reading the essay, I was reflecting how a lot of what was promised in feminist spaces previously, I'm now finding in queer spaces and conversations, at least more tangibly. And queerness is feminist (and also hopefully intersectional; see: Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Angela Davis), but it doesn't always go the other way (even if feminism is not pro-TERF, it often assumes cis and hetero identities and positions, as AHP notes). I also notice an emphasis on community, if not the collective, in queer spaces; queer folks will show up for each other in crisis, even if we're late as hell to regularly scheduled plans.
I'll be curious to see if Queer as a radical political identity (allies can count here too) will replace Feminist in the coming years, given how much we need to be very loud right now given the explicit attacks on queer and trans rights. If that happens, will feminism get wrapped up into it, or will there be a bifurcation? I dunno, I'm no social theorist!
I think this is a really astute point all-around
So much this. I feel like I've been mentally adding an asterisk to the word "feminism" for years to actually mean something more expansive and queer, similarly to how those of us gen-x and older might still say "bisexual" but we actually mean pansexual. Maybe it's time for both those older terms to retire, as should be the right of all the exhausted.
arriving late but I'm curious why you think people ought to retire bisexual. If it's around the idea that bisexual suggests only two genders, that's not true and is sort of a biphobic talking point. The way I think about it, as a bisexual person myself, is that the other existing words are "homo-," a prefix typically meaning "the same as" and "hetero-," a prefix typically meaning "different than." So "bi-" in this instance would suggest, to me, attraction to both same and different genders.
I mean, I don't think you're wrong, and I don't think the word is wrong... just like I don't think the word feminism is inherently wrong either.
Rambling parable tangent... I fell in love with bicycling and bicycle activism through Critical Mass. The police fell in love with treating Critical Mass like a terrorist group in many cities. Often in those cities, people do exactly the same type of bike ride in every way, just using a different name, and the same police departments are often supportive of (or at least waaaay less violently harassing of) those identical rides under the new name. I absolutely hate capitulating to that crap, but also recognize that the goals of the riders may sometimes be better served by letting the terminology evolve.
Anyway, I don't think there's a right or wrong answer in any of these cases, just strategy.
Fair enough! I don't personally feel that surrendering the use of a term I identify with serves me in this case, but I can see in your analogy how that could make sense.
I love how you put this. Language does evolve, but it’s often in those fits and spurts, and we need to be ready to let go of old words for new ones (and their impact) to come in.
Omg thiiiiiiis (thank you)
I think this is a really good point!
This is super interesting to consider, especially looking for community that somehow is not open and welcoming in certain feminist spaces. For me, you don't as a marginalised group shit on other marginalised groups.
This —> “…liberation is about liberating everyone from the expectations of a patriarchal capitalist hellscape but also liberating everyone from their internalized allegiances to the same.”
I grew up in a high-control religion thinking feminism meant having choices like a man. Once I left, and made those choices, I thought maybe feminism meant choosing whatever I wanted, even if it looked ‘traditional.’ But only recently (and it feels so late!) have I come to see feminism as just another symptom of patriarchy. It’s not about choices at all! Because there aren’t that many choices, really, when the whole system defines anything feminine-coded as ‘less than.’
I live in heteronormative spaces and am slowly un-learning all that I’ve internalized. This conversation is so helpful and I appreciate it!
Love this and I'd love to read more! Can you share links to some of your favorites spaces?
I will see what I can find! Many of the posts are just one-offs from someone who's sharing, say, photos of Chris Evans the rest of the time, usually blogged into my feed by a mutual. But I will see if I can dig up any that are dedicated to these conversations.
+1 I'm on Tumblr and have enjoyed it lots (same account since 2011 or so), would love to see some more quality conversations on this on my dash
If you are able to find/come across again the thread "about marriage as personal v. political" I would be v v interested in that link pls!
Here's where I saw it - https://www.tumblr.com/sheafrotherdon/787096722181603328/and-look-the-reason-that-marriage-is-imbued-with?source=share (but it has 12,000 notes, so there are a wiiiiiiide variety of opinions in there if you click that!)
That tumblr thread is fantastic. Thanks for finding it.
So appreciate you finding it!! I'll enjoy reading it with my mid morning coffee today (:
I love this whole essay. I’m a young millennial who recognizes myself in the MOM THAT SUCKS category (my mom is a miserable pastor’s wife, who is partially estranged from 2/3 of her kids and is now stuck taking care of a disabled husband who doesn’t like her and whom she doesn’t like), but honestly I’ve been in the FUCK IT LET’S FIGHT category for awhile simply because I grew up in evangelical purity culture and feminism is a huge part of what got me out. Partly because I had so many girl friends who I realized would make fantastic pastors, and yet they weren’t allowed. Partly because I didn’t want to get married (turns out I’m ace lesbian, lol) or have kids and there seemed to be no other path around that except for becoming a missionary (which was my plan initially).
Feminism was freedom to me. I think it always will be, even though I’m so tired now and it feels like the Christian right that I fled like my hair was on fire is now taking over my secular refuge. I thought getting out of the church and rejecting purity culture was the end of having to contort myself to fit the patriarchal norms I lived under for so long. Nope! But I’m not sure I see any other path forward besides digging in my heels. These Christian nationalists aren’t smart enough to tie their own shoelaces, fuck letting them decide feminism’s limits.
“…it feels like the Christian right that I fled like my hair was on fire is now taking over my secular refuge.” — Thank you for saying this! I fled an evangelical religion too and I have this same thought all the time.
Right? I did a lot of work to get away from those guys! Why am I being forced to deal with them again!
As another escapee, I feel the exact same. And knowing how dangerous these people are because WE KNOW WHO THEY ARE while the rest of the political world refuses to take it seriously is terrifying.
I love this framing, and might suggest an overlay of Internet Impact across each quadrant— how has learning/performing/building community/fighting both feminism and femininity online, versus the in person, analog, and 20th century media/culture modes of first and second-wave feminism shaped what you rightly identify as today’s feminist exhaustion?
The relationship between the internet and feminism is like this new heart medicine my dad is on: it helps the majority of people, but a not-small minority experience strong negative side effects that actually exacerbate the underlying symptoms.
On the one hand: infinite knowledge and ability to connect with others, elevating voices, stories, and ideas that wouldn’t have made it past 20th century cultural gatekeepers. The ability to organize and activate at scale and speed. Etc etc.
On the other: the anonymity and depersonalization that feeds trolls, abuse. Digital permanent records that turn IRL learning opportunities into online dogpiling. More modes of performing to learn, all in public. Algorithms that turn diverse communities into tiny bubbled echo chambers. No wonder we’re all exhausted.
I also think the 'all information is available online' assumption has become an interesting infighting tool - women's blind spots or ignorance are now seen as personal failings rather than opportunities for us to help each other learn. Obviously speaking in broad strokes, but there's something about feminist validity being tied to how much of the internet you're aware of that feels particularly exhausting
Ooh yes definitely. And the way the "correct" language/thought patterns can evolve so quickly and people are judged so much for not having kept up with them. Like it was polite to ask for someone's preferred pronouns, and then suddenly it was very rude to have the word "preferred" in there. Someone generally well intentioned but not super online could trip over that easily.
I'm 64 and I do try to keep up with the current correct lingo but YES -- it's hard sometimes. Thank you for pointing this out!
Oh YES this. AHP's essay made me wonder: what's a modern/digital equivalent to a 1970s style consciousness raising group meeting, where people at all different points on a journey with feminism could come together and support one another (yes, I'm picturing that one scene from The Heidi Chronicles)? It feels like that barrier to entry is impossibly high, in part for this dynamic you rightly name.
Yes, exactly! And what's so key about that structure is the containment-- engage deeply with the work, then step back into everyday life. With the internet being everywhere always, the feminist work feels constant and inescapable, which I think is a huge part of the exhaustion talked about by AHP.
Like not only are you supposed to know everything that's happening, but you're supposed to be always engaged with it. There's no natural break or boundary anymore.
I agree with this 💯. Not only are we just automatically supposed to know everything, there is little grace allowed for those who don't, yet. Way too much gatekeeping. Who has time to deal with that!
This is such a great point considering we're now at a point where we have less control than ever over the content we consume thanks to the algos and even Google searches are no longer trustworthy. Exhaustion begins at the very first step of research/education because where do people even go/trust anymore?
We're seeing a precipitous decline in people even going directly to websites because everyone is reading the AI summary at the top of the Google search, and those summaries come from very limited/established sources. Reaching the masses is going to become harder than ever.
SUCH a smart point!!!
Really great point. I've never seen a "tradwife" in real life. I assume she's at home churning butter, not somewhere I could actually interact with her and be influenced by her ideas and pretty dresses outside of the internet.
I think we’re in a moment where the shift from purposeful politically active feminism to surface level performative feminism is finally biting us in the butt.
In Australia our first female PM in the 2010s went on a tear in parliament one day against the male opposition leader at the time. The moment became known as ‘the misogyny speech’. And while her words were powerful and women everywhere loved seeing a woman putting a man in his place, that same week her government cut welfare payments to single parents, the majority of whom are of course women. More than 10 years later that speech is still being celebrated and every time I see it I think of those single mums that were left worse off and no one (including prominent feminists at the time) paid attention to.
I don’t know what we do to fix it but I know shouting online isn’t it. I’m trying to support friends to leave shitty marriages. I’m trying to donate to grassroots organisations where I can. But when a population the size of America votes for Trump twice it feels pretty fucking hopeless.
I'm a literary agent specializing in work that goes deep into the center. I work with Buddhists and radical nuns. I work with investigative journalists reporting on the far right and historians writing about abortion and gender experts deconstructing norms. Since the inauguration--and honestly, it started before that--it's been one of the most challenging periods in my work life. I've had 5 different editors at 5 different publishing houses and imprints all reinforce that in the last 18 months, the only thing people are buying is *escapism*. We can't come up with the comps to prove that the books that could really help us will sell at all. One editor darkly asked "well, if you have any quick fixes, let me know..."
This analysis of exhaustion feels so spot on. Exhaustion and escapism are now hallmarks of the Biden era, and it has proven to be a breeding ground for rightwing radicalization. It's showing up in our consumption (which, as Tressie McMillan Cottom says, is how we perform our citizenship). It's showing up in our content. It's showing up in how we educate ourselves.
The only answer I have is to just keep doing the work. Keep supporting the writers and thinkers, and maybe the audience will find us when they're ready. Read the work on gender that's already been done. Liberation is a practice, not an event.
That last line though! So well said.
This was a great essay and I found myself nodding along to so much. The siren call of "I can work within the system to do good for others," that one will get you. And I hope this doesn't feel like a minor quibble, but in my research, women overwhelmingly did not want to return to the home after the war. The unions forced them out to return the jobs to men. The June Cleaver lie was omni-present in the almost entirely male run media (which makes it different in interesting ways than tradwife content, I think, where the call is coming from inside the house), but the majority of women back then were not taken in. I think maybe it's more insidious now when you see folks like Ballerina Farm occupying that weird middle ground of having agency and then using that agency to promote giving it up? It makes the argument more persuasive maybe, coming from another woman where she is the content creator.
I’ve always read that women wanted to stay in those jobs and I believe it - and believe the unions strong armed them out (one of many times when the labor movement has prioritized male jobs, just saying) but I also think the housewife was doing some Ballerina Farm fantasy work - the original version of this essay had a lot more elaboration of that moment that in hindsight I should’ve kept because it’s honestly SO illuminating (also the fact that women were able to work those jobs because of free childcare, what a concept!!)
would love to read more about that if you want to publish that section sometime!
Seconding this! I think the overlap between the failures of the labor movement and the failures of feminism is not talked about enough!
I think a lot about the number of women who were forced out of line functions in the labor market and back into the home (even if they did some work outside to get by) that sought their own ways to escape, through benzos or alcohol or other numbing, etc. Just a generation self obliterating to get through the day.
Respectfully requesting a comma between "MOM" and "THAT SUCKS" to clarify that these are not mothers who suck
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAH okay yes will do
Lmao YES I was so confused
Thank you for this essay, AHP. What a rich topic with complex layers and nuance to it. I don't usually leave comments, but I feel moved to do so on this one.
As a transmasc nonbinary person, I don't know where I fit in the quadrant. I grew up socialized as female; I'm now transitioning, still fighting back against patriarchal systems and toxic masculinity, while also being repeatedly told that I'm betraying women by being transmasc.
"Sometimes, that means embracing a reactionary stance that disavows feminism altogether...but it also manifests as a rejection of the norms that 'good girl' feminists understood as the only way forward. What if we didn't value career above all else? What if we make heteronormativity weird? What if we don't just say tings like 'gender is a prison' but act as if it were the case?" Out of everything, this resonates the most. That third quadrant. As I entered my 20s, then my 30s, I came into my queerness, my transness. I ditched monogamy and embraced a polyamorous identity. I questioned every cultural dominant narrative because so many of them can limit possibility. But even so, in reading through the quadrants and this essay altogether, I felt slightly alienated as a transmasc person. I firmly believe this was not AHP's intent. I do think this is another flaw of feminism and how it has historically prioritized a certain segment of the population. Which ...
Someone else mentioned this already: feminism is actually white feminism. First-wave feminism and the early suffragettes excluded and erased Black women (I believe this goes as far back as the mid-1800s). The will and wants of white cis women have been prioritized over Black, brown, Indigenous and trans women, over and over. It was never a movement for all women.
I remember the height of the girlboss era and so much merch with phrases like, Slay the patriarchy, when, really, all that was happening--at a large scale--was more women occupying the patriarchy and upholding the status quo. To borrow from Hamilton, it was about being in the room where it happened, but then not choosing or not being able to make meaningful, systemic change while in that room. Speaking as a white person, we were so focused on equality, we left equity behind.
This is complicated, right? It's both/and. I am beyond grateful for the individuals and communities who fought for things like women being able to open their own bank account and access to birth control. I am NOT saying feminism hasn't done anything for women. I do think it has prioritized white cis women and hasn't gone far enough.
Ultimately I don't think feminism is the savior that 14-year-old me believed it to be. I think its roots are deeply racist and transphobic and self-protective. Perhaps it's time to imagine a new way forward. New language, new experiments, new structures. I think this is already happening. It's always been happening within Black and Indigenous communities. Especially QTPOC communities. More and more, I truly believe we need to look to queer, Black and Indigenous spaces on how to build inclusive, intersectional, resilient, and radically imaginative ways forward.
I really appreciate this comment. The fact that there seems to be so little space for a transmasc person in this contemporary iteration of feminism speaks to its exhaustion and lack of utility.
THIS!! --> "Perhaps it's time to imagine a new way forward. New language, new experiments, new structures. I think this is already happening. It's always been happening within Black and Indigenous communities. Especially QTPOC communities. More and more, I truly believe we need to look to queer, Black and Indigenous spaces on how to build inclusive, intersectional, resilient, and radically imaginative ways forward."
Totally agree. I find trans hate baffling. I look at folks who have left the binaries behind and I see visionaries who only have things to teach me (boring white cis-het lady), not anything I have to fear or feel threatened by. Take these systems! Smash 'em! Not like they're serving me, jfc.
In the past year or so I think I’ve really started to notice and feel, in very vivid ways in my life, what it means for feminism to be a project that is only by and for women. Men are still wholly uncommitted to the ideas of women’s liberation and respecting women for the complex and capable people we are. I’ve been called a “fucking bitch” more times than I can count: for biking down my own alley, for biking near another man, for driving near my city’s Puerto Rican Day parade, while exiting my local train station. I’ve been referred to as “your wife” by a guy who knows my name while I was standing right there. It has been suggested(by other men) that my not looking forward to my husband doing the “punishment” for his fantasy league was me creating “a hostile environment”. One of the men in our local friend group keeps making “grill daddy” comments for every barbecue even though the women in this group are the primary grill masters and chefs of our households. Just the other day I was catcalled by a bunch of youths hanging out the side of a car in traffic, like the song Scrubs came to life!
I think it was always going to be an uphill battle because men benefit from patriarchy, but I really do feel that the more men can be a part of the movement, and in particular participate in changing the culture within their own ranks, the better our world will be. In almost all of the situations above, other men were present and said or did nothing. I don’t need a man to save me, but I definitely think it would make a huge difference to other men to hear a boundary from one of their own. When I do it, I’m being a fucking bitch, but when another man does it, it will be level setting. I think we(as a society) need to find a way to build resilience in men to the idea that the opinion of other men is the priority, because not all men need to have a good opinion of all other men! The bar is currently set in hell amongst them, and they are too insecure(because of patriarchal ideas!) to consider engaging in the friction that would raise that bar.
Surely this is not the only answer, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot as all this horrible stuff stuff happening to me, to the point that it’s quite pedestrian.
While I can relate to parts of all these groups, I'm definitely in 3. I even had a conversation with my stepmom where I told her I didn't want my life to look like hers (much more polite in context). She worked so much and had no time for herself. Her life revolved around taking care of the kids, trying to please my awful sexist dad, and working often more than fulltime.
I wish I had answers. One of my disillusionments was being very involved in a reproductive justice campaign just to watch abortion rights be steadily chipped away at and then Dobbs happening. Easy way to become exhausted. I've been spending a lot of energy trying to figure out answers for "what's next?" All my answers have focused on local things that feel more in control, which on one hand feels like a cop out and on the other is maybe what we need more of? I think the professionalization of activism fits in here somewhere and that what we need is more actual grassroots organizing and not national organizations that set an agenda then seek out volunteers to enact that agenda.
"professionalization of activism"! Haven't heard that phrase before but yes, that captures a lot and definitely rings true!
Please have Koa Beck on the Culture Study Podcast.
One of the main reasons why feminism is and has failed before is because of society’s focus on self and not collective action. Even some of the most well-meaning podcasts that I listen to always conclude episodes with an answer to what can I do, not what can we do? That push to wrap up something in a neat bow is a human tendency to want to fix and move on, instead of sitting in the uncertainty that’s needed to make progress.
Because society doesn’t want to sit in that uncertainty, I think we are having a moment in pop culture of celebrating glimmers of hope, community, and solace because that’s all that feels practical right now. Sinners and Kpop Demon Hunters: two hugely popular pop culture phenomena that are importantly original stories that focus on colonialism, race, family, music etc. are great examples. They have strong female leads who serve as the voice of reason and examine duality in women. These characters are also catalysts to the glimmers mentioned above.
(It’s always refreshing to see the duality of women in film. We’ve of course seen this duality in Shondaland productions too.)
What’s interesting is that neither piece offers an easy solution to the bigger problems, but rather celebrates those glimmers I mentioned above.
I think this is society trying to grapple with the monstrosity of historic precedent and a shifting to focusing on providing moments of solace/happiness—like making music in community, because we’ve finally realized there is no one solution or one answer to the feminist problem posed above (and other systemic problems as well).
Is this pop culture finally reaching its end because we don’t know what to do and now we are just trying to make the best of every day life? Or is this reflecting a need for pop culture to really pause and shift to sit in that uncertainty that’s needed to make progress?
i think this is so important. i've been deep in the work and papers of adrienne rich lately and she insists on several things that were key to her lively, lived feminism.
1. solidarity. feminism is a practice of thinking about all women. including childbearing and nonchildbearing, even though motherhood was a key framing and radicalizing concept in her thinking. it's like motherhood entangled her more deeply with the struggle of women in general.
2. humility. she was learning from women of color all the time.
3. collectivity/structural change. it is nice if some families can get a more equal gender balance of labor, but what matters is whether womens and mens domestic labor and bodies and health and thriving is valued differently by the economy and the state.
4. PLEASURE. rich located her feminism in her LOVE OF WOMEN. lesbianism and feminism went hand in hand for her. and/but, she told her oldest friend that much of what she learned about how to love women she learned from that friendship, which was not sexual. her feminism comes from sensual, personal love.
5. community. ideas were moving around between so many people. adrienne corresponded with all these small womens presses and activist groups around the country. when people asked her for speaking engagements, she often referred them to her local grassroots contacts so local community could deepen into mutual action (see also #2.)
for me, the key to moving from the status quadrant to something closer to fuckit feminism, was reading rich, becoming a mother, but especially learning about materialist feminism, which shares a lot in common with her approach.
I’ve always identified as feminist, but one of the things that’s made this difficult for me has been with the ways our idea of gender has been broadening. During the pandemic, my cousin came out as a trans woman (and her spouse came out as non-binary), and one of my dearest friends (who was AMAB) transitioned from non-binary to female presenting. My issues with the feminism of my formative years is twofold: feminism feels very binary/not very accessible to those who might not identify as women, and the constant attacks on trans women by TERFs/conservatives/the media. I want my trans friends to be healthy and safe, but I also want access to reproductive care and education and to not be sexually harassed at work.
Yup this! I left a reply upthread, about how the spaces and conversations where I notice true inclusion and community care most these days are queer. Feminist issues are queer issues, with a lot more flexibility to the gender and sexuality binaries (and also sometimes monogamy too tbh). Sometimes I wonder if the panic attack about trans people is a (coincidental/convenient, this isn't a conspiracy) way to split feminists and queers from each other, cuz if we were to actually get on the same page, we'd realize (as many Black queer femmes have pointed out for decades) that many of our issues are one and the same at their heart.
this is a great point that i talk about with my queer family of choice all the time (even as a cis/het woman)--our liberation(s) are intertwined, and bodily autonomy is just one of many issues where we are waging a similar fight to be trusted as experts on what works for us. ive learned so much from them and i unequivocally get more support/care/affirmation/validation from them than i do from any traditional spaces/structures. we are a family to each other in every way that matters.
i am also part of tumblr and other online communities that are less explicitly queer (though our fandom discord skews very bi/ace/aro) but again, it is an uplifting and open space in a way that someone upthread gestured at with great eloquence.
Thank you for the nod to monogamy as one of the restricting binaries -- as a queer polyamorous person, I see more and more that it's another way the emphasis on hetero-partnership just keeps me out of (and truly uninterested in, a lot of the time) the primary discourse. And my primary partner IS a man! I partner with men! But the constant discussion of MAN + WOMAN and the very few options offered outside of that just involves so much narrow grim jaw-clenching (and lack of a pleasure-focused ethos, FWIW, though that's a bit of a separate point).
Yup, totally! If we don’t assume a two-person marital partnership as the center of life, it opens the doors for so many relational models through which we can care for each other - longtime domestic partners who aren’t married; triads and polycules; friendships, roommates, etc.
This is where the vaporization of feminism that AHP comes into play, I think, because what I think of as feminism is about bodily autonomy and gender equity—which can and should apply to trans and cis women equally, as well to every other gender. My right to reproductive care and not to be sexually harassed at work is intimately bound up with a trans woman’s right to her healthcare. The same people who want to end access to one want to end access to the other, because patriarchy and fascism seeks to control bodies and enforce rigid gender roles across the board.
When media and TERFs and the “lean in” crew started watering down feminism to make it about “feminism is whatever you choose!” and vibes instead of grounding it in concrete goals like bodily autonomy, that’s when the movement started getting derailed, imo. For some that means feminism isn’t useful anymore because its meaning is unclear; I’d rather reclaim it personally, because we obviously haven’t met most of those goals yet!
Totally feel this on the frustration with vibes vs concrete calls to action. And also, I absolutely get the feeling AHP articulates here of feeling like, wow, I don’t f#%ing know what the calls to action should or can be in this moment.
It’s hard to know what to focus on when there is so much coming from so many directions, yeah. But it helps me to remember that that has always been true. There are so many fronts and so many fights. Which is why it’s important, imo, to not let people water down what we’re actually fighting and get caught up trying to make our tent so big it includes people actually obstructing what we’re fighting for. If the person fighting for abortion access is a TERF simultaneously fighting to legally restrict GAC for trans people, they are not fighting my fight. I’m not being a purist by drawing that line, either. They are not for bodily autonomy for everyone and thus they are not actually fighting what I am fighting. This is why so much of white feminism and pro-capitalism boss feminism isn’t even feminism. It’s just a bunch of supposedly pro-women bullshit that only supports a certain kind of woman (and not even really them). (And I know exclusionary white feminism has always been tied up with the history of the feminist movement. Idk maybe we need to change the name or the terminology and get a rebrand. I don’t really care, I just want bodily autonomy and gender equality however we get there.)
I just want bodily autonomy and gender equality however we get there -- yes, this!