What is anger for?

Last week I had the privilege of speaking at an event run by the Cambridge University Society of Women. The topic was intergenerational feminism and it was fantastic to see a broad mix of ages in attendance. After years of being told feminists like me are “on the wrong side of history”, on course to die out in a generation or two, I take heart from the bravery of young women who aren’t prepared to comply.

Yet what am I even worried about? According to a recent New Statesman article, “a radical new feminism is rising” amongst the young women of Britain. These women, we are told, are so hardcore, they merit comparison to men’s rights extremists. “While the toxic, often hard-right politics of the manosphere has been exhaustively documented,” writes Emily Lawford, “the new generation of female influencers are similarly radical — they are just on the other side of the political spectrum.” Ha! So much for expecting the next batch of feminists to sit back, be quiet and #JustBeKind. 

Only, there’s something about this framing that doesn’t feel quite right. I don’t doubt that the anger is real, or that it is justified, but could it really be equated to the deep-rooted misogyny of men who see women as less-than-human “foids” fit only for sexual abuse or exploitation? And even if polling suggests young men are more well-disposed towards young women than vice-versa, statistics on who is being violent towards whom tell a different story (perhaps it’s easier to be magnanimous when you know you’re not on the losing side). Mistrusting men, to the extent that you might not want them in your life, is hardly the same as wishing to harm them. As a mother of two teenage boys, I hate the idea of young women judging them and their friends just for being male. I don’t, however, worry that young women are gathering on online forums to fantasise about raping or killing them. 

Presenting young women as the new extremists in the battle of the sexes misrepresents the biggest risk posed to young men (as ever, it’s other men). It’s also a gift to anyone who wishes to present feminism as nothing more than man-hating, robbing the movement of any moral legitimacy. As such, it reminds me a little of the “ironic misandry” trend of a decade or so ago, in which women posed with mugs labelled “male tears” and begged to be granted “the confidence of a mediocre white man”. It was meant as a joke — a kind of pre-emptive “you think this about us anyways, so we’ll say it first” — but it fell somewhat flat, granting those who “thought that anyways” an excuse to feel aggrieved without actually demanding anything from them. As Rebecca Traister wrote in 2018’s Good and Mad, “while plenty of men’s rights activists did not see these sentiments as funny or ironic, the exaggerations radiated reassurance: that a truly abrasive challenge to patriarchy wasn’t a real political threat, rather the stuff of screen-printed punch lines”.

Today’s trend isn’t meant to be funny — on the contrary, it’s far more hopeless — but I see in it a similar favouring of presentation over demand. You have a radical posture that will alienate the average man, and boost the self-assurance of those who really are out to rob you of rights, but what are you actually asking for? What concrete demands are you making of men as men? Faced with a misogyny that has been super-charged by the porn age, there is an unwillingness to tug at that thread and see where it actually leads you — in particular, what it tells you about sex and gender. 

In the New Statesman article, we learn of an event in the Feminist Library in Peckham which is “‘free for dolls’ (trans women), cheaper for other trans people, and ‘about a tenner for cis people’. The walls were covered in women’s liberation literature and posters on resisting immigration raids; a pole-dancing class was taking place in the next room”. At the risk of sounding as though I’m missing some very special point that only the cleverest people would get, I’m going to venture that pole dancing and defining women by regressive stereotypes are not indicators of “a radical new feminism” (if they were, the nineties was a feminist utopia). Nor is uncritically supporting parties which, in their support for surrogacy and the sex trade, merely demonstrate Andrea Dworkin’s assertion that “the difference between left-wing and right-wing men when it comes to women is only about where exactly on our necks their boots should be placed”. 

There are plenty of younger women who are justifiably angry and unwilling to accept the world as it is

This is not to say that one shouldn’t vote in line with what one believes to be the lesser of two evils (indeed, I think one should). It’s to say that hating men plus being left-wing does not necessarily equal “being feminist”, even if — for all its supposed radicalism — it is a more socially acceptable way of “being feminist” compared to that of the young women I met in Cambridge. The latter do not tend to be included in popular narratives on the “radicalism” of young women, not least because their beliefs tend to be less generation-specific, focussing on women as a class rather than men — or a politically acceptable subset of men – as an enemy. This might seem a subtle difference, but I think it is crucial to creating a feminism that makes a difference to women’s lives. In the end, centring women will always be more taboo than hating men. The latter position men will either brush off or exploit to further their interests; the former is what really unsettles the “natural” order of things. 

Feminism will not die out with my generation. There are plenty of younger women who are justifiably angry and unwilling to accept the world as it is. Contrary to the hopes of misogynists of both left and right, there are always new witches to replace the ones you’ve burned. It’s important, though, to make your anger count. Far better to be called a man-hater because of your love of women rather than any actual hatred of men. As Mary Daly put it, “I know that I will be punished just as much for being an itty-bitty feminist as for going the whole way. And so I go the whole way”.