The backlash against a feminism that never was

Progress for women is a fragile thing. In her 1991 classic Backlash, Susan Faludi describes the anti-feminist pushback of the late eighties as “set off not by women’s achievements of full equality but by the possibility that they might win it”. It is, she writes, “the pre-emptive strike that stops women long before they reach the finish line”.

We are living through a period of backlash right now. Half a century after women made such “radical” demands as wages for housework, abortion on demand, an end to sexual violence (or even just a day without it), liberation feels very far away. Reproductive rights are under threat globally, while government cuts have led to more, not less, unpaid labour being expected of women. Violence against women and girls is increasing, while the porn industry shapes the very idea of what a woman is: submissive, masochistic, there to take it all. 

Fifteen years ago, I would not have imagined that we would be so much on the back foot. In the midst of what was briefly celebrated as feminism’s “fourth wave”, I’d expected things to get better. Today, with the resurgence of an openly anti-feminist right, the message is very much “that’s your lot, ladies”. As if there was ever any “lot” to start with. 

The thing that gets to me most is this: the retreat started way before this particular moment. The rhetoric of today’s backlash isn’t directed against a feminism that was ever at risk of approaching “the finish line”. It’s against a “feminism” that had already veered off course. Right now, all women are being punished for demands that most of us never made, and “gains” that many of us experienced as losses. The “feminism” for which we are being held accountable — a “feminism” hijacked by porn-soaked academic theories and cool girl posturing — ceased to be ours several years ago.

To take two examples, gender ideology and modern workplace DEI initiatives are both now held up by traditional anti-feminists as examples of social justice overreach. Yet these never benefited the vast majority of women. On the contrary, in many instances they have caused women actual harm, taking away their spaces and restricting their speech. It has often been the most marginalised women — women in prisons and refuges, working-class women, low-paid women, women in violent relationships, lesbians — who have paid the biggest price for an “inclusivity” defined on strictly male terms. There are women I know who would have benefited enormously from policies aimed at making workplaces more accessible to those with multiple caring responsibilities; instead, their experiences of “inclusion” stop and start at being hauled into HR for crimes against male egos. 

One could say that the current, very vocal rejection of these phenomena, most clearly by the Trump administration, is therefore one thing for which true feminists should be grateful. Certainly, I don’t think we should downplay what Trump’s Executive Order could mean for, say, female prisoners. I have always felt uncomfortable with “marginalised women shouldn’t want rights if they’re only getting them via bad actors in bad faith ways”, especially if no other way is being offered by the politically pure. 

At the same time, what we are seeing is also a loss for feminism. By this I mean not the “feminism” of the highly privileged, selling sex denialism and pronoun policing. Theirs was a “feminism” which never cost porn-addled men or big businesses anything whatsoever. It was no feminism at all, but what it did do — for a good ten years — was provide the average “woke” patriarch with a sheen of “progressive” respectability. Now that wokeness is falling out of favour, the same “feminism” provides the more traditional patriarch — who might even be the same person as the “woke” one — with an excuse to throw out the sex equality baby with the gender woo bathwater.

Feminists who held fast to believing sex matters weren’t making a concession to the right

After a decade of governments and businesses gleefully pretending to be inclusive by ordering employees to change their email signatures, we’re now facing a decade of governments and businesses gleefully making none of the structural changes women (and other marginalised groups) need to live better, more secure lives. Because, look, they can tell us, we’ve tried equality, haven’t we? Can’t we all now agree it’s bollocks?

Just as “Progressive Man” loved having a licence to yell at women in the name of “trans rights”, “Conservative Man” now delights in telling women none of this “trans rights” stuff would have happened if feminists hadn’t started harping on about being included in the “male” workplace. He is wrong, of course (a workplace is not like a single-sex toilet, and there has never been an evil feminist plan to lay siege on the gents), but that doesn’t matter to him. He will ignore the fact that none of the meaningful changes real feminists have been asking for — changes which recognise care work, the body and dependency, as opposed to celebrating rampant individualism — were anything to do with the kind of projects which award a man for wearing trousers to work one day, a dress the next. False feminism has given every misogynist — plus every man who nominally believes in equality, but doesn’t want it to cost him anything personally — an alibi that he will not stop using. Worst of all, the women who promoted it will now treat the very existence of the backlash as proof that they have nothing to apologise for.

In a recent Substack lecturing all those daring to relate Trump’s victory to the gaping open goal created by gender ideology, the writer Laurie Penny — who famously responded to the Wii Spa incident by suggesting victims of indecent exposure should be told “it’s rude to stare at other people’s genitals without their permission” — is scathing about the idea that “woke kids with their pronouns and their protests are apparently to blame for provoking this hard-right takeover in the first place”:

“That seems very convenient for the hard right and their apologists, in the same way that when a woman wearing a short skirt is held responsible for provoking sexual violence, it tends to work out well for rapists. Look what we made them do.”

The point I think she is trying to make — beyond “none of this is my fault” — seems to be that now, more than ever, it’s important to hold onto your principles. “What I don’t get,” she writes, “is why I’m expected to change my politics based on who, at any given moment, is flattering my ego.” I’d agree with this. The trouble is, I don’t think Penny did hold onto her feminist principles. When those she criticises claim that Trump and others exploited the bad politics of her side, they don’t mean the “too righteous and feminist and anti-racist and noble” politics of her side. They just mean bad politics.

Feminists who held fast to believing sex matters — along with boundaries and dependency and bodies — weren’t making a concession to the right. They were remaining true to feminist principles. False feminists are not being blamed for the right’s misogyny. They’re being blamed — and they should be — for making the right feel justified in their claims that feminism is based on lies. Because if false feminism was all there was, the anti-feminist right would be absolutely correct.

I suspect an anti-feminist backlash was inevitable, with or without the help of gender ideologues. Certainly, Faludi saw backlash as a “recurring phenomenon”, likening Western women’s progress through history to “a corkscrew tilted slightly to one side, its loops inching closer to the line of freedom with the passage of time — but, like a mathematical curve approaching infinity, never touching its goal”. I can’t help thinking we could have been further along though, had it not been for the enemy within. The women who built careers on false feminism will not be the primary victims of the war against real feminism. We all know this. 

And if it was going to happen anyway, I would have preferred an honest backlash, one in which those who want to keep taking from women were forced to say what they mean. One in which they had to admit that they want to keep freeloading off women’s domestic, reproductive and emotional labour, that they don’t see women as equally valuable, that male violence against women just isn’t their concern. Instead, they can point at a decade of reality-denying, authoritarian nonsense and say “people called that feminism, too”. And what can we say but “yes”. Yes, and “yes, but”.