Being cruel to women
“JustBeKindism” conceals the fact that sometimes doing right by women means taking from men
This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
“What about men?” Anyone who runs something solely for women — a women’s centre, a course for female leaders, International Women’s Day — gets used to being asked this question.
In recent years, the spread of trans ideology has strengthened this assumption that anything reserved for women must be a theft from men. Women’s toilets, changing rooms, rape crisis centres, even prison cells: women who want them protected can’t possibly be motivated by concern for women. Their true aim must be to spite men. Why can’t they just be kind?
In this elegant and insightful book, Victoria Smith dubs this mindset JustBeKindism: a “toxic mutation” of an entrenched belief that when women focus their care and attention on other women, they are being big meanies. Womanhood itself is now a good unjustly hoarded: TERFS (trans-exclusionary radical feminists), with their insistence on recognising that men cannot be women, are the epitome of unkind. Even feminism cannot be for women. In the words of American writer Julia Serano, a trans-identifying man: “It is negligent for feminists to focus only on those who are female-bodied.”
In JustBeKindism, Smith points out, men make the best women. Proving her point, since 2013, when the BBC started an annual award for 100 “women of the year”, nearly every list has included at least one trans-identifying man. This year’s is Brigitte Baptiste, a Colombian biologist who “uses a queer lens to analyse landscapes and species” and gave a TedX talk in which he claimed that the Quindío wax palm, Colombia’s national tree, is transsexual. These meagre achievements were deemed more worthy of recognition than anything done in 2024 by 4 billion actual women.
In JustBeKindism, actual women are beneath contempt. Smith quotes Andrea Long Chu, a trans-identifying man and the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Females: A Concern (the title alone merits an award for mansplaining). “Female,” says Chu, means “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another … [The] barest essentials [of femaleness are] an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes.”
As we nasty TERF bitches know, JustBeKindism places women in a double bind. Put women first, and you risk the fate reserved for witches in every generation; put us last, and you lose your sense of self and self-respect. Consider Dylan Mulvaney’s “Days of Girlhood”, a series of daily TikTok videos documenting an American man’s so-called “transition”. They weren’t actually about becoming a “girl” (or a woman: he’s 28) or even about pretending to do so. They were, Smith argues, about mocking female viewers — and challenging them to “say something if you dare”.
One reason so many women have bought into JustBeKindism is that, from the TikTok memes and slogans to the faux profundities of the likes of Judith Butler, it sounds fresh and edgy. Another is that it’s easier than the hard graft of building a better world for women.
A third is that women sense that if they engage in full-fat feminism — the sort that would involve women refusing to act as Virginia Woolf’s looking glass, “possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size” — they will be punished for it. It’s never been men who are expected to budge up to accommodate the desires of others. JustBeKindism is the latest, postmodern, iteration of an age-old pattern.
On top of all that is the problem Smith identified in her earlier book, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women. When women’s worth is measured by their utility to men, young women fear the prospect of ageing and all too easily hate older women, who embody what they will one day become. Positioning them as selfish, dried-up harridans allows young women to be kind, good and above all, different. JustBeKindism offers young women a way to deny their inevitable fate. But it is only temporary.
JustBeKindism conceals the uncomfortable truth that sometimes, doing right by women means taking from men. JustBeKindism promises that everyone can be a winner, and, if they can’t, it’ll be women who lose out but they won’t mind, and if they do mind they won’t be able to say so because the words needed to do so have been taken from them.
Throughout history, sex differences have been used to justify treating women worse than men. JustBeKindism perpetuates this pattern whilst making it impossible to describe. In her conclusion, Smith imagines what would constitute true kindness: mutual support and caring between the sexes and within them, with sex differences accommodated equitably rather than used as an excuse to relegate women to supporting actresses in men’s lives.
