On balance, actress Gemma Arterton didn’t choose the best of weeks to tell Woman’s Hour’s Nuala McGovern of her worry that “the word ‘feminist’ excludes men”. One look at the news could have told her that this was hardly the movement’s most pressing concern. 

There’s the general — a new report claiming that nearly 40 per cent of countries are stagnating or backtracking on gender equality — and there’s the more specific — the ex-boyfriend who burned Olympic runner Rebecca Cheptegei to death, or the case of Gisèle Pélicot, drugged by her husband and raped by an alleged 80 members of their own community. If feminists seem a bit angry, it is not without justification. For the movement to continue organising solely on behalf for women and girls seems a fairly minimal expectation.

Yet Arterton sees things differently, claiming to “understand why it had to be that way”, but that now things need to be about “balance and equality and inclusion”. Good luck telling that to the Taliban! Then again, perhaps I am being unfair. A more generous listen to Arterton’s interview suggests that feminism isn’t really being discussed in its entirety. Her actual focus is what gets referred to as “the #MeToo movement” — that is, not so much the campaign against sexual assault originally started by Tarana Burke in 2006, but the hashtag that took off in the late 2010s, especially in media circles. 

According to Arterton, #MeToo brought about a “sea change” in her own industry, with significant improvements in how women are portrayed. One can agree or disagree with this (not least in terms of how much this might apply to those in the older age brackets). Nevertheless, Arterton now feels that in the wake of the progress that has taken place, feminism might be starting to look like an “angry” or “divisive” word. 

As a feminist — and a decidedly male-exclusionary one at that —  I am generally loath to sympathise with such a position. Even so, there is a part of me that wonders whether, when it comes to the remnants of #MeToo activism in a world that still so obviously hates women, Arterton might be right. Feminism should only be for women and girls, but this is not the same as making men — or just certain men in particular — feel terrible. It’s not that feminists need to be nicer (god forbid). It is more that if we are going to piss off men (and how could we fail to do so?), we ought to be doing it for the right reasons. 

The #MeToo “revolution” of the past decade has always seemed to me a little odd. Not exactly wrong in its intentions, but somewhat strange in its emphasis on modern-day women complaining about male sexual entitlement as though previous generations had never thought to do so themselves. As Julie Bindel wrote in her review of Laurie Penny’s 2022 book Sexual Revolution, the author “seems to be blissfully unaware that any feminist activism happened prior to the #MeToo movement […] There had been an active women’s liberation movement for 60 years by [2017]”. “#MeToo,” notes Bindel, “wasn’t a movement, it was merely a moment.” 

It was, moreover, a very particular moment for the industries — film, TV, music, publishing, journalism — in which the hashtag was taking off most of all. As the 2010s progressed, it became increasingly clear that if you were a woman in any of these fields, whatever (limited) freedom you might be gaining in terms of the opportunity to denounce male colleagues, you were losing in terms of the chance to apply any serious feminist analysis to your predicament. To put it bluntly, unless you were very, very successful and very, very secure — unless, say, you’d made millions writing books about a certain boy wizard — you could torpedo your career and wreck your whole livelihood by thinking too hard about the whats and whys of sexism. It’s not that you wouldn’t continue to notice it, but where would that anger now go?

You could be a feminist, yes, but at the same time you couldn’t object to the porn industry; you couldn’t question the right of male colleagues to rent out the bodies of poor women for sex or babies; you couldn’t even disagree with representations of “femaleness” which reduced women to submissive feminine stereotypes. As someone in a right-side-of-history profession, you were obliged to keep your mouth shut as increasingly regressive beliefs about women and girls were promoted as cutting-edge. What, then, were you left with? Secret lists, trial by twitter and random punishments for the kind of men whom it was permissible to hate, while you turned a blind eye to the antics of those whom it wasn’t. Permission to be furious about the men who line up to rape an unconscious woman, but not the industry that sells rape porn, or the ideologies that suggest that this is really what women are there for. 

None of these activities involve making any long-term demands from men as a class

I don’t wish to suggest that no good came from #MeToo. However, there is a side to the feminism that emerged from it which I have come to think of as “busywork feminism”. It is the feminist equivalent of doing some lesser, repetitive, painstaking task because you cannot face the challenging job which brings everything together. You pick something that isn’t fun and might even provoke pushback, whereupon you can persuade yourself that you must be doing the hard thing after all. Only you’re not. Literally anyone can complain about “white cis hetero men”, or drink from a “male tears” mug, or wear a “grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man” t-shirt. Literally anyone can insist “yes, all men” while maintaining a list of personal exceptions. None of these activities involve making any long-term demands from men as a class — or indeed saying anything about men as a class — whatsoever. 

When I look at some of the rhetoric that has emerged from #MeToo, I do worry that it is divisive. It’s not that I don’t want my teenage sons to think about feminism, or to be confronted by things that make them uncomfortable, but recreational man-hating that isn’t underpinned by a solid analysis creates resentment — and why on earth shouldn’t it? Busywork feminism veers towards misandry because it has nothing else left. If you cannot allow yourself to believe that there is a world in which men can give up rape porn, stop paying to abuse women and can share their spaces with trans women without beating them up, you can’t possibly think very highly of them. Instead of envisioning a different, better world, you denigrate and excuse men at one and the same time. 

Feminism does not have to be more centred on male feelings. While some feminists contend that if only men could see that “smashing the gender binary” benefits them, too, they will be on side, I have never really bought this. There are plenty of men who would welcome the opportunity to whinge about the pressures of masculinity without ever sacrificing their Pornhub subscription. 

What I do think, though, is that given that feminism will upset men, it has to do so in a way that is worth it. It has to make sense, to women and to men themselves. Otherwise, any attempts at “analysis” will look like being mean for the sake of it, in a world that is mean enough.