Now onto reads….

1) Taliban law legitimises child marriage

A new divorce law in Afghanistan legitimises child marriage, according to activists. As The Guardian reports:

There is no ban on child marriage in Afghanistan under the Taliban, but a new law on divorce approved last week appears to suggest that a girl who later says she was married against her will would not be permitted a divorce if her husband disagrees.

The new law also appears to suggest that a woman cannot divorce her husband solely on the grounds of his absence or failure to provide financial support.

Since the Taliban retook power in 2021, they introduced dozens of decrees removing women and girls from public life, including a ban on education. As Unesco put it last year, on the fourth anniversary of the Taliban takeover, “Afghanistan stands out tragically as the only country in the world where secondary and higher education is strictly forbidden to girls and women. Nearly 2.2 million of them are now barred from attending school beyond the primary level due to this regressive decision.”

The ban on girls’ education is thought to have led to a rise in child marriage:

One informal estimate suggested that since the Taliban had barred them from education about 70% had been pushed into early or forced marriage and that 66% of these marriages involved girls under the age of 18.

The piece mentions a recent case involving a young girl killed in an abusive marriage:

Earlier this month, a 15-year girl in Daikundi province, central Afghanistan, died after enduring months of domestic violence, including severe beatings by her husband. Her father said his daughter had married her cousin eight months ago, but the violence began only two months into the marriage. After each beating, he said, local Afghan elders intervened and persuaded her to remain in the marriage.

There have been reports of brave protesters demonstrating against the divorce law in Kabul.

2) A very British bathroom ban

This week, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) published updated guidance following the Supreme Court ruling last April on the meaning of sex under the Equality Act—a ruling hailed as a victory for so-called gender-critical feminists.

According to the EHRC’s new code of practice, trans men and women must be excluded from single-sex toilets and changing rooms, and businesses have to offer alternatives for people who do not wish to use facilities based on their biological sex. The guidance itself seems fairly confusing and hard to enforce (see the Bluesky thread below). The whole saga also begs the question: what is all of this for?

When I started this newsletter (all the way back in 2022! Oh how the world has changed, etc, etc), I wrote about whether the so-called trans rights debate was in some way a victim of the broader backlash against women’s rights:

Could it be that the reason fear and misinformation around transgender people has grown so extreme in parts of the women’s movement is that, amid the backlash to feminist progress, women are looking around at how far they have come and how much further there is to go? Maybe they are looking for something to blame.

This theory doesn’t necessarily apply to the more religiously based transphobia on, eg, the American right. But in British feminism, could it be that the fixation on the supposed threat from trans women (people seem far less concerned about trans men…); the idea that trans women physically threaten women who aren’t trans and that they are are trying to take away women’s rights and spaces; that they propogate sexist stereotypes; that their transness and gender dysphoria is little more than a kink—could it be that this focus on the alleged misogyny of trans womanhood is in fact a refraction of the sheer enormity, the pervasiveness, of men’s hatred of, and violence against, women and girls?

Maybe it’s because I’m a Jewish woman, but I can’t help but see parallels in antisemitism and in the scapegoating of Jews, in paranoia about a Jewish lobby, and so on, in how transgender people are being targeted. If a similar policy, pushed by an activist movement, targeted another minority because of the so-called danger they posed, however truly felt their fears, would we not see this clearly as a form of prejudicial generalisation? Of collective punishment? I realise that for the women who might describe themselves as gender critical, what I’ve written here will likely read as wilfull blindness, or even gaslighting. But even genuinely fearing a thing doesn’t give you a free pass to prejudice (and I don’t see how any of this makes a dent in the violence and inequality women and girls live with).

PS Some news from a decade ago has been doing the rounds since the EHRC guidance was released last week. In 2016, the UK issued a travel advisory for LGBT people, warning them about legislation in North Carolina and Mississippi, that “transgender people must use public bathrooms according to the gender on their birth certificates.”

PPS Amnesty has published analysis of the influence of the gender critical feminist movement on media coverage about these issues.

3) The abortion culture war comes to British politics

At the end of April, new legislation came into force in England and Wales that decriminalises abortion. As per the European Medical Journal: “The landmark change, facilitated by amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill, means women will no longer face investigations, criminal charges, or custodial sentences for ending their own pregnancy.”

At the same time as this “landmark change”, Britain’s populist right has increased its focus on abortion. According to ’s investigation, which analysed “almost 80 Reform, Reform-supporting, and far-right X accounts… between April 2024 and April 2026, mentions of abortion increased by 40% compared to the previous two years”:

… nearly half of the selected accounts increased their abortion activity, with overall impressions of posts mentioning abortion almost quadrupling compared with the previous two years. These posts were shared around 153,000 times and received more than 800,000 likes.

What the data shows is a network of influence between anti-abortion groups and individuals and far-right politicians, with Reform-linked accounts reposting extreme far-right influencers, and vice versa, as well as anti-abortion organisations and activists posting support for Reform.

And also….

4) “Repeal the 19th”

My new podcast obsession, In Bed With the Right, has an excellent episode on the figures on the American right who are calling to repeal women’s right to vote. It’s an extreme position worth watching, given that members of the Trump administration are thought to be sympathetic to it.

wrote a cover feature for the Atlantic on this issue recently, too, placing it within a broader trend of “masculinism” as a response to the “feminisation” of society. Here is a snippet:

How popular are masculinist ideas? Last year, research by King’s College London and Ipsos found that Gen Z men in 30 nations were far more likely than male Baby Boomers to say that the fight for women’s equality had gone so far that men were now disadvantaged. They were also more than twice as likely to say that a father who stayed home with his children was “less of a man.” Meanwhile, 83 percent of Republican men younger than 50 think society is too feminized, according to a survey by the conservative Manhattan Institute. Intriguingly, this survey did not replicate the usual trope of working-class men revolting against snooty female elites: It found that “college-educated Republicans are more likely than their non-college counterparts to endorse the view that society has become too feminine.”

And also:

This is a movement with real policy goals: the rollback of no-fault divorce. Tax breaks to reward male breadwinners and female homemakers. An end to anything with a whiff of DEI, even leadership programs for women in the military, like one cut by Hegseth. A return to the workplace culture of the 1970s, where sexual harassment was normalized. An open preference for male employees in hiring, promotion, and pay awards—in other words, affirmative action for men.

Yet masculinism also functions as a perpetual-motion machine of grievance, an inarticulate howl of anguish at the status quo—whatever that currently is. Masculinism is both serious and silly, sometimes camp and sometimes chilling, an attention-grabbing performance and a genuine proposition. No wonder it has become the cornerstone of Trumpism.

5) Do I control… myself???

Apropos masculinism… has written a very interesting essay on how obsession with female power on the manosphere slides easily into antisemitic conspiracy theory. He writes:

In the conspiratorial imagination, female autonomy cannot simply emerge from social change, economic independence or shifting norms. It must have been engineered. And once a movement begins searching for hidden engineers – those who corrupt tradition, weaken men, control media, finance institutions and dissolve natural hierarchies – it is only a short walk into older and darker territory. The manosphere frequently rediscovers, in updated slang and meme form, the classic architecture of antisemitism. Women become marionettes, controlled by dark forces pulling the strings behind the scenes. Jews provide an answer to the question: who designed this system? The manosphere sells wounded men a fantasy of restored power while antisemitism supplies the villain who stole it.

And also:

… the structure of manosphere misogyny is analogous to antisemitism. Women, like Jews in the conspiratorial imagination, are portrayed through contradiction: simultaneously inferior and superior; weak yet all-powerful; irrational yet cunning; contemptible yet somehow dominant.

This is all very confusing for a Jewish woman. Do I control the world more than the average woman? Do I control… myself???

Bonus: Married at First Sight rape allegations (tw) | Evie Magazine’s sex issue | Godmothers of AI |Help a family in Gaza

Thank you for reading. See you next time.

Now to the reads…

1) #EndEyeCheck

Since the Gisèle Pelicot trial, it’s become clear that abuse of women by their partners while they are unconscious is not that rare. In March, CNN published an investigation into what the outlet dubbed a “global ‘rape academy’”, where men from around the world talk to each other about drugging their wives or girlfriends, raping them, and monetising footage of the abuse. CNN reported that:

One porn site, Motherless.com, is home to more than 20,000 videos of so-called “sleep” content uploaded by users, with hundreds of thousands of views.

The website, which had around 62 million visits in February alone and whose core audience is in the United States, describes itself as a “moral free file host where anything legal is hosted forever.”

After this came out, there was a lot of focus on the 62 million visits figure mentioned above being misleading, because it doesn’t represent unique views (ie those aren’t 62 million individuals per se). Here is a great rebuttal of that focus, which breaks down just how much traffic is going to the website mentioned above, how many searches there are for “sleep” abuse content, etc. Let’s just say it’s far too many for comfort. (And I would argue that even a one-person website engaging in such abuse would be one too many!)

This week in the UK, Zoe Watts and Amanda Stanhope, two survivors of such abuse who CNN interviewed for the investigation, launched a campaign called #EndEyeCheck. It is “a survivor-led campaign targeting the legal loopholes they say allow men to drug, rape and film their partners - and to share that material online, in networks where such abuse is not just hidden, but glorified, promoted and traded”, ITV reports. Why “eye check”?

Central to the campaign is a term most people will never have encountered: the “eye check.” It describes a specific act - deliberate and filmed - in which a perpetrator pulls back the eyelid of a victim who is unconscious or incapacitated.

It is a way of confirming their complete helplessness.

It has become a recognised feature of a category of abuse material shared in online communities where men exchange advice, techniques and recordings linked to drug-facilitated sexual assault - communities that, the women say, currently operate with no legal deterrent.

Meanwhile, in a relatedly horrifying story, the BBC reports that women are being filmed in secret by men wearing smartglasses. They are then asked to pay in order to remove humiliating, covertly filmed content from the internet. Welcome to the future.

2) TikTok is bad for feminism

Researchers at UCL “worked in-depth with seven women aged 23-27 through a focus group; these young women identified with feminist values and were regular users of TikTok”, in order to find out how content on the platform related to feminism and/or femininity impacts women and girls. The researchers found that:

As TikTok promotes trends that encourage self-categorisation into shallow, aesthetic groups, participants noted an increasing hyper-awareness of appearance, where the self becomes a project or a product.

Participants noted the “isolating” nature of TikTok interactions; rather than creating community through shared interests, the platform cultivates a culture of digital self-fashioning and self-surveillance.

As beauty standards contract and shift on the platform, the female body is still situated as the primary site of resistance, rather than structural political spaces.

When entangled with the algorithm, the researchers argue that feminist discourse becomes diluted, digestible and depoliticised, eroding any potential for genuine political engagement, activism, or critical consciousness on the platform.

3) Epstein’s blue eye obsession

For Coda, Isobel Cockerell has dug deep on Jeffrey Epstein’s interests in eugenics, race science and transhumanism. For one thing he seemed to think people with blue eyes were somehow genetically superior (he happened to have blue eyes himself):

It starts with a simple search term in the Department of Justice’s Epstein Library. “Blue eyes.” Hundreds of results. Jeffrey Epstein’s international trafficking agents send him pictures and descriptions of blue-eyed young girls: potential victims to be dispatched to his various homes. “I spotted two skinny blond blue eyes 21 years old ladies in Monaco last weekend and asked them for CVs,” one agent, whose name has been redacted, wrote. “Trying her best to move from her small town to Moscow; English isn’t great. Could be fun for Paris, blue eyes,” wrote another. “Can’t understand if her breast is real. Otherwise very pretty and sweet…Very blue eyes as we like.”

Misogyny and abuse are, of course, part of the story of Epstein’s “scientific” interests. Virginia Giuffre wrote in her posthumously published memoir about Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell trying to recruit her for a project “to seed the world with his DNA — and reportedly have 20 women impregnated at a time at Zorro ranch, his New Mexico property.” As Cockerell writes:

He “fantasized about improving the human race by fathering children who carried his superior genes,” [Giuffre] recounted in her memoir, published posthumously late last year. “He’d talk about using his Zorro ranch as a literal breeding ground to propagate babies.” When Giuffre was 18 years old, she recalled, Epstein asked if she would carry his child and hand over all legal rights to it – “like a modern-day handmaid.”

And also this (my apologies in advance):

In the [Epstein] files, women appear either as victims, as objects, or as vessels for genetic engineering experiments. They are an inconvenient reality, people to be controlled and re-booted. Epstein wrote a 2013 email implying that women “are like shrimp. You throw away the head and keep the body.”

4) “Proactive submission”

Christian women influencers in the US are charging other women for classes on how to be good wives, and the Guardian has a feature on it. Thank you to for sharing this story with me. Here’s a snippet:

Even as they cozy into their diminished role, wives must subtly guide their husbands into their God-given “leadership role”. Dillehay quotes Ephesians – “for the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church” – and calls a wife’s deference to him “proactive submission”. Part of Wife School’s “homework” involves a worksheet instructing wives to ask for their husbands’ permission on nearly every decision: “Is it all right if I go out with the ladies on Saturday?” “Is it OK with you if I budget $300 for a new chair?” “Can I have your blessing to sign up for the women’s retreat committee?”

When Christian wives are taught that there is power in accepting an inferior position at home, “that feels very comforting, because there’s this sense of autonomy in that choice”, Wellman said.

The piece also cites a recent study, which is apparently the first into men’s attitudes on tradwives. The results are unsettling:

In March, Rachael D Robnett, a psychology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, published the first study on men’s opinions of the tradwife movement. (Her research borrowed its definition from the British Australian influencer Alena Kate Pettitt’s description: “Submitting to my husband like it’s 1959”.) Robnett expected to see men with positive feelings toward the movement espouse “benevolent sexism”: sexism with a positive veneer, such as an interest in chivalry or believing that women need protection from men. Instead, she found these men were “overt, explicit and hostile” in their sexism. They believed stay-at-home wives had easier lives and felt that husbands in “breadwinning roles” were exploited.

Still, they relied on women for “the physical and emotional intimacy”, Robnett said, simultaneously resenting them while expecting them to bend to every whim. “Clearly, the element of submission that’s present for tradwives is a really major draw for men who have negative attitudes toward women,” she said.

5) AI is silencing women in public life

The Persistent has spoken to the researchers behind a UN Women study on how AI is exacerbating abuse of women in public life. According to the report “more than one in 10 has experienced the non-consensual sharing of personal images, including intimate or sexual content, while nearly one in three has received unsolicited sexual advances through digital messaging”. Here’s more:

We have moved from raising the alarm about the chilling effect of online violence on women journalists to a point where this threat has spilled into offline harm. It has also imperiled women in public life more broadly — from politicians and activists to human rights defenders and climate scientists.

Generative AI is supercharging these threats, with the latest manifestations of online violence including ‘nudification’ at scale, and deepfake ‘virtual rape.’ Perpetrators have never been able to humiliate, harass, and endanger their targets more easily, cheaply or quickly.

P.S. Some of you may remember my friend Sama, an Arabic teacher and mother-of-five who lives in Gaza City. The Iran war drove up the price of basic goods in Gaza and life in Gaza was difficult and expensive as it was. If you are able to donate to support her family, whether with a one-off payment or a regular monthly contribution via Chuffed, here is a link. Sama and her family are supported as part of the Gaza Support Network, an NGO founded by Israeli women which helps dozens of other families in Gaza through monthly donations. Aside from this financial support, Sama also makes her living from teaching Arabic online. She is a wonderful teacher, and you can get in touch about her availability and prices at that link.

Thank you so much for reading. See you next time.

The Backlash is back to normal after the previous edition’s Epstein files special. But first, I wanted to share a backlash-relevant piece I published over the weekend, and which is out in the upcoming issue of .

Last year, I met (twice) with Juliet Mitchell, the second wave feminist who challenged her peers on Freud and went on to become a psychoanalyst herself. With two of her landmark feminist books reissued by Verso, we talked about the second wave and its luminaries, and how she has always managed to see ahead of the curve. At 85, she still notices the things others don’t.

It is “the minutiae, the relationships between people, that tell you so much about the bigger things”, she told me. Read my interview with Mitchell to find out why second-wave feminists so hated Freud, how Mitchell changed the way we think about siblings, and one of the nicest things about growing old.

And now for the reads….

1) Masks off

Danny Kruger, the MP who defected from the more mainstream British Conservative party to hard-right upstart Reform, has given a very revealing interview to Sienna Rodgers at The House magazine. The interview is like a greatest hits of the new right’s preoccupations with women’s bodies and freedoms. Kruger, a Christian since his twenties and a social conservative, tells Rodgers his thoughts on, for instance, the “unregulated sexual economy”:

In Kruger’s 2023 book Covenant, which outlines his conservative communitarian philosophy, he describes sex as being a private act done almost in public, when it should really be a public act done in private. What role does he believe a political party can have in undoing the sexual revolution, or resetting our sexual culture?

“A limited but important one,” he replies. He is clear that every government policy is “critically important to the way families form” and confirms that Reform UK is looking at switching our tax system to be based on households rather than individuals.

“Marriage traditionally was the means by which sexual relations between men and women were regulated, and I think we are suffering from having a totally unregulated sexual economy,” he says.

“I’m not interested in your love life, or anything about your personal life – that is your business. But I am interested in the framework in which you make your decisions, and I’d like the framework to be more pro-social. If you want – most people do want – to settle down with one person to have children, we should make that easier.”

Kruger also says he is against no-fault divorce because it “basically means that your vows don’t matter” (though he doesn’t say he would try to overturn it in the UK). And on the recent decriminalisation of abortion at all stages of pregnancy here, he says “it has sent a very, very strong signal that it is acceptable to abort a viable baby at nine months”. (No, reader, it hasn’t!)

The Kruger interview follows the surfacing of a video from 2024 in which Matthew Goodwin, the former academic recently also of Reform, says women need a “biological reality” check given they are all having babies too late. That story followed a report that, the previous year, Goodwin floated the idea of introducing a “negative child benefit tax” for “those who don’t have offspring”. The Independent, which has covered this excellently, has a useful round-up of what senior Reform figures have said about marriage, abortion, fertility and women in the workplace.

What we are seeing in the UK is, of course, part of a global trend. In Foreign Affairs, none other than Hillary Rodham Clinton writes about the ways in which the authoritarianism rising worldwide is linked to curtailment of women’s rights, and all along similar lines to the issues Kruger touches on in that interview. It’s a worthwhile read on why women’s rights are essential for democracy to truly function. Here she is on arch-patriarch Putin (with a semi-juicy bit right at the end):

The most prominent practitioner and propagandist of this patriarchal approach to authoritarianism is Russian President Vladimir Putin. He is the leader of an illiberal, misogynist, xenophobic international movement that wants to roll back women’s rights, expel migrants, disrupt democratic alliances, and undermine the rules-based international order. He portrays women primarily as mothers and caregivers, not equal citizens, while undermining gender equality initiatives and fostering a culture of impunity by decriminalizing domestic violence. He frames these moves as protecting the “traditional values” of family, religion, and masculine authority, in contrast to the liberalism of the West. Media stunts reinforce the image of a manly, moral, and powerful nationalist; photographs of Putin riding shirtless on horseback, winning judo matches, and racing Formula One cars are all meant to cast him as the hero protecting traditionalism from an increasingly open, diverse, and liberal world.

I can say from personal experience that Putin is threatened by strong women. [Who you calling a strong woman, Hillary? -ed] He is also adept at exploiting men’s fears about losing social status, in part because he himself is deeply afraid.

Here is a link to another recent Foreign Affairs essay by Saskia Brechenmacher, which also explores the connection between democracy and women’s rights.

Last but not least… for Ms Magazine, has read through the Heritage Foundation’s new policy blueprint, entitled “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years” so we don’t have to:

I am not exaggerating when I say that the forces of the New Right want to use the full force of the state to impose a national patriarchy. I read through the Heritage Foundation’s plan to save America by saving marriage. Here is the plan, in Heritage’s own words, with a little translation from me.

They are explicit: Have fewer women go to college; push women to marry and start having babies when they’re very young; ban same-sex marriage; ban IVF; limit contraception access; strip basic rights even to physical safety from children; penalize single mothers; and impose conservative Christianity as a national religion.

2) Fifteen and online

This anonymous op-ed by a 15-year-old girl about the misogyny she encounters on social media is one of the most depressing things I have read in a while. So much of what she describes echoes attitudes boys had towards girls when I was a teenager, but now it’s there, all the time, whenever a child picks up their phone. Here she writes how this misogynistic bullying (for isn’t that exactly what it is?) affects her:

If I spend even 10 minutes on an app such as Instagram, I will close it, feeling disheartened and unhappy about being a girl. When nearly every comments section on a video of a girl my age is filled with disgusting and objectifying comments about her body from boys, it causes me to feel deeply uncomfortable in my own body, and compare myself to her; especially if she is beautiful and still being deemed unattractive. Endless emphasis on beauty as worth and all kinds of videos criticising specific features, some of which I possess, have made me start to loathe my own face, as difficult as that is to admit. But the worst thing is knowing how much hate there is from men and boys for all women and girls, including me.

3) Gisele Pelicot, feminist icon, and family

Amid the release of Gisele Pelicot’s memoir, the New Yorker’s inimitable Rachel Aviv has written a piece that gets inside a family ripped apart by the worst revelations imaginable. In her deeply empathic style, Aviv looks at the toll that Gisele becoming a global, feminist icon, has taken, including the split in the family over photographs of Gisele’s daughter, Caroline Darian, asleep in underwear, which were discovered on her father’s computer.

“Right away I knew I was a victim of Dominique Pelicot, too, but I only thought about one thing — my mother — and not myself. My mother was raped, yes, under the influence of drugs, yes. The only difference between my mother and me is that in her case there is proof_,” Caroline said at the Pelicot trial. Aviv reports on the tensions over what happened to Caroline:

Louise Colcombet, a reporter for Le Parisien who has published a graphic novel about the trial, told me, “People started asking, ‘Who is the good victim? Is it Gisèle or Caroline?’ ” In the popular imagination, it seemed that Caroline was unsettling what had become an inspirational narrative about dignity and truth. Colcombet felt that question itself revealed “what incest does to a family.”

4) The Taliban’s new penal code

A new criminal code in Afghanistan, reportedly issued in January, further endangers women, whose rights have already been severely restricted by the Taliban. According to Rawadari, an Afghan human rights organisation, the code legitimises domestic violence:

The Code provides for punishment (of a maximum of 15 days only) for domestic violence only in cases of “excessive beating” resulting in fractures, injury or bruising and does not refer to other forms of physical, psychological, and sexual violence against women and girls thereby effectively legitimising domestic violence. Furthermore, teachers are likewise only liable to punishment for striking a child if that strike lead to broken bones, torn skin torn or visible bruising.

Under Article 4 of the code, husbands and “masters” are authorised to mete out punishments, and under Article 34, “if a woman repeatedly visits her father or other relatives without her husband’s consent, or refuses to return upon his demand, she is liable for a three-month prison sentence. Crucially, this legal liability extends to any family members who have facilitated her stay or prevented her return, thereby criminalizing the act of providing refuge to a female relative.”

You can read more about the code here, here and here.

Bonus: Looksmaxxers and amplification | “The women are all weak and a distraction”

Thank you for reading. See you next time.

Here in London it’s not as cold as it should be for December, but it is generally grey outside. The man in my life, (who writes an excellent newsletter on here, by the way), has released a new single all about the cold. I’m biased, of course, but I think it’s beautiful and hope you’ll all listen to it on repeat like me.

I’ve had a busy month since I last sent The Backlash. In November, I published a longread about the destruction of Gaza’s cities and the idea of urbicide. It was a heavy lift, practically and emotionally. Here is a link. I’ve also worked on another long piece, which is much more Backlash-related. It’s coming in the new year….

One final thing: I’ve been helping Sama Habeeb, a mother of five in Gaza, with donations for her family, through an Israeli group called Gaza Support Network. Sama’s kids have been going to school and kindergarten again with the funds she is getting from a network of donors who give monthly. You will have heard about the storm and flooding in Gaza right now. The family live in a house, luckily, but have had to do lots of fixing to stay warm and dry, given the war damage to their building. If you want to join Sama’s group of donors, take a look at this, or if you want to donate one-off to help them, here is a link. Every little bit helps and is much appreciated.

And now for the reads….

1) Favourite new podcast alert

Not technically a read, but I may have a new favourite podcast. In Bed with the Right, with and , is all about sex, gender and the US right. They have an excellent episode deconstructing the great feminisation theory essay by Helen Andrews (covered last time on this very newsletter), in which they take apart what passes for her argument (that women have ruined the world) with relish. Here is a link.

I also recommend their episode on the Depp v Heard trial as a major low in the MeToo Backlash. For anyone who declared themselves Team Johnny, listen to this and eat your hat.

PS This week we published a very good piece by Toby Buckle about whether “the great feminisation” theory has made it to these shores.

2) The misogyny that is ignored

The philosopher has written about the response in the US to the Epstein files, and what this tells us about the misogyny of the Trump era. Here is a snippet:

What too few say is this: the Epstein files have returned only after more than a decade in which Donald Trump and the movement around him made the degradation of women feel ordinary and unremarkable. The near-erasure of that fact should alarm us.

And also:

This moral numbness shapes the reception of the Epstein files. The sudden outrage on behalf of Epstein’s victims — justified and long overdue — stands in stark contrast to the ongoing indifference toward the women Trump harmed. Why, after nearly a decade of excusing Trump’s violence, is the political class now insisting on justice? Why for Epstein’s victims, and not for Trump’s?

A good accompaniment to this is Sophie Gilbert’s excellent piece in The Atlantic, published following Trump’s “Quiet. Quiet, piggy” moment. It’s all about the dangers of “consequence-free misogyny”.

3) Manzanas del cuidado

Finally, something uplifting (a rarity in this newsletter!). Colombia’s capital Bogotá has pioneered a radical experiment in easing “‘time poverty’— the lack of time for anything beyond the crushing, invisible burden of unpaid care work that falls overwhelmingly on women”. For Vox, Rachel Cohen Booth reports on “manzanas del cuidado”, or care blocks, neighbourhood hubs where caregivers can access childcare and other kinds of help. She writes:

At a care block, a woman can access a variety of services while the person she cares for is looked after by teachers and staff nearby. She can hand off her laundry to an attendant, finish her schooling, meet with a lawyer, consult a psychologist, or learn job skills. The scope of activities is not limited to errands, either: she can also read a novel, catch up with friends, or just get some rest. And the system extends beyond the physical blocks — mobile buses bring comprehensive services to rural areas, and an at-home program targets caregivers who support those with severe disabilities and therefore cannot leave their houses.

Bogotá is trying to do something tricky: elevate both care work and caregivers, while also saying, “You shouldn’t have to be doing this so much — you deserve a full life beyond caring for kids, for aging relatives, for your partner.”

Apparently there might be one in the works in Greater Manchester….

4) The kind of story you’ll wish you could unknow

Glamour Magazine has a report about a form of online image abuse where men ejaculate on photos and videos of women (and sometimes for a fee). As reminders of the pervasiveness (and nastiness) of misogyny go, this is the sort that will give you vertigo. Jess Davies writes:

Once confined to the murkier corners of internet forums, this harmful behaviour has begun creeping into far more mainstream spaces. During this investigation, I turned to TikTok, hoping to find victims who had spoken publicly about their experiences. Instead, I found dozens of videos featuring men ejaculating onto images of celebrities and everyday women. A grim sexual act once confined to fringe forums has seeped onto a mainstream platform synonymous with teenagers, trends and harmless escapism.

This reminded me of Laura Bates’s very good but also dispiriting book, The New Age of Sexism, the first chapter of which is about online image abuse via deepfakes. (I reviewed the book earlier this year and Bates joined us for an episode of the podcast, which I co-host. Trigger warning for that episode).

5) “How women made the global economy”

In this lovely piece, combines the fascinating life story of her grandmother (who, aged 14, left school and sold cherry boot polish in the East End of London) and a lecture by the historian Victoria Bateman about “how women made the global economy”, including her thoughts on tradwives. Josie writes:

I asked Bateman, at the conclusion of her Gresham College lecture, if she could comment on the tradwife movement, or “how women have throughout history also monetized domestic pursuits.” She replied, “the tradwife movement is troubling in so many ways. The tradwife has never been ‘trad,’ as I hope I’ve shown. Women throughout history have been doing all kinds of things — hunting, building pyramids, plumbing in ancient Rome; they were mining coal in the industrial revolution.”

And also: The great shrinking | WI and Girlguiding exclude trans women | rape is still effectively decriminalised

Thank you for reading, see you next time (and if you enjoyed this post, please do share and like it)

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Since I last sent The Backlash I have mostly been listening to Lily Allen’s new album, West End Girl, on repeat. For anyone who isn’t addicted to this particular object of the zeitgeist, it is (in my mind at least!) a masterpiece of the alchemy that is taking heartache and turning it into art.

The release has spawned a million and one think pieces. One genre of these consists of articles by women who have been through a break-up and feel like Allen has captured their pain and the compromises they made to stay in a bad relationship. There is certainly something thrilling and comforting in listening to a female point of view that is so undiluted and unapologetic. But the resonance seems to be about more than the album itself. It is as if people are desperate for something to distract them from the horrors out there in the world, as a friend also listening to it on repeat told me. This album came at just the right time to distract. And it feels not trivial, because it’s about someone’s pain. It helps, of course, that the music is so very good.

Also: after the major wins for the Democrats in the United States yesterday, ’s has a useful run-down of what these victories mean for the right to abortion in the US.

And more thing: I am resharing the link to a donation page for Sama Habeeb, a mother-of-five living in Gaza City. You can make a one-off donation to support the family here or you can donate monthly at the same page, joining a group of monthly donors helping them. Get in touch with me if that’s something you would like to be a part of. Sama teaches Arabic online as well, so if you are looking to practice your Arabic, here is some info.

And now to the reads….

1) The worst thing you can be

In September, conservative American commentator Helen Andrews addressed the National Conservatism Conference in Washington DC with her diagnosis for the biggest problem facing society: “the great feminisation”. In October she wrote an essay based on the talk for Compact, in which she describes what it was like to come across this theory:

…everything you think of as ‘wokeness’ is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization. The explanatory power of this simple thesis was incredible. It really did unlock the secrets of the era we are living in. Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently. How did I not see it before?”

My main takeaway from both the essay and the talk is that women have ruined everything, and also that Andrews hasn’t spent much time with actual women. She argues against increased female representation because when organisations become overwhelmingly female they become feminised and therefore woke. So, as more women become lawyers and judges, upholding the law becomes less about facts and the truth and more about feelings (yes, really). Or, now that psychology is an overwhelmingly female profession, men are put off being psychologists because women are so much less judgmental, and men want to judge others (also yes, really).

Andrews is careful to note that she is a different kind of woman, one who needs a tough, muscular, masculine world in which to thrive. Read the whole thing and weep. The comments under the video are quite something, too, with a number of women writing things along the lines of “finally a woman is telling the truth!” The idea that feminisation is a problem runs through our politics and has echoes in calls for a more “muscular state”. This by Toby Buckle in Liberal Currents is good on the idea that liberalism is “effete”. Don’t forget that the worst thing you can be is a girl.

PS One of Andrews’ policy solutions to the great feminisation is to get rid of the “two-income trap” so people can make different choices. So if fewer women worked, if they stayed home to look after their kids, women would stop running, and therefore ruining, things!

2) Latvian MPs vote to leave Istanbul Convention

Last week, the Latvian parliament voted to leave the 2011 Istanbul Convention, an accord that aims to protect women from violence. Fifty-six lawmakers voted in favour of leaving, 32 voted against, and two abstained. There were protests against the vote in Latvia’s capital, Riga. As this wasn’t a majority of at least two-thirds, Latvia’s president could bring the bill back to parliament. Per the BBC:

The treaty was ratified by the EU in 2023, however ultra-conservative groups have argued that the accord’s focus on gender equality undermines family values and promotes “gender ideology”.

…One of the main political groups behind the withdrawal is Latvia First, whose leader Ainars Slesers has called on Latvians to choose between a “natural family” and a “gender ideology with multiple sexes”.

And from the AP:

If ratified by President Edgars Rinkēvičs, Latvia would become the first EU member state to withdraw from the convention, which the same parliament ratified in November 2024.

Signed by 45 countries and the European Union as of 2019, the Council of Europe treaty is meant to standardise support for women who are victims of violence, including domestic abuse.

In 2021, Turkey was the first country to withdraw from the treaty.

3) The deepfake ecosystem

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) has published research on the online ecosystem “of users on adult discussion forums, search engines, 4chan and X (formerly Twitter) which promotes and sells access to tools for creating ‘deepfakes’—sexualised or explicit images overwhelmingly of women and, increasingly, minors.” They found that tools are easy to find on internet search engines. And also that:

SIIA [synthetic intimate image abuse] tool hosting sites have proliferated despite legal and social efforts against them. An analysis of 31 unique websites found that they received between 375 and almost 4 million unique visits in May 2025, with a combined traffic of almost 21 million monthly visits.

X is a key platform for distributing and discussing SIIA tools. Between June 2020 and July 2025, there were almost 290,000 mentions of these tools on X. This accounted for 70 percent of all mentions across seven platforms and a range of forums, blogs and review sites.

ISD also notes that:

Prior ISD research places SIIA in a broader context of evolving Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence (TFGBV)…..

TFGBV particularly affects the participation of women in public roles, including in political society. ISD research analysing the behaviour of users on TikTok towards candidates in the 2024 French legislative elections and the 2024 EU parliament elections found that women candidates in both elections faced significant levels of TFGBV, such as calls for violence and cyber harassment. ISD found that TFGBV against women parliamentarians in Europe caused one third of them to feel a reduction in their freedom of expression, and 21 percent did not want to run for re-election as a result.

4) Russian post-feminism

The New Yorker has published an extract of Julia Ioffe’s book Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy, in which the Russian-American journalist reports on a post-feminism in post-Soviet Russia. (As she explains, Russia was a feminism pioneer, with women “given the right to higher education, equal pay, no-fault civil divorce, child support (including for children born out of wedlock), paid maternity leave, and access to free maternity hospitals” in 1918, and the Soviet Union becoming the first country in the world to legalise abortion in 1920). The whole thing is worth a read, but here is a snippet:

The collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991, only accentuated their hardships. Faced with hunger, instability, and salaries that weren’t paid for months, men and women responded differently. Millions of Russian men, unwilling to take on lower-status work, lay down on the couch and took to drink. Women, meanwhile, stepped into the breach. Former school principals scrubbed toilets; physicists became cashiers. As their men fell away—and divorce rates surged—women did whatever they needed to do to feed their families. All of this left many of them dreaming of being a stay-at-home wife supported and protected by a rich and masculine man. As Elena Zdravomyslova, a sociologist and feminist scholar in St. Petersburg, argued, with respect to motherhood and a career, the liberation of women from “the double burden” can “be seen, at least in part, as a liberation of women.”

This new ideal, which Zdravomyslova called “civilized patriarchy,” offered the Russian woman many benefits, the chief one being choice. She could, theoretically, stay at home, or she could work for her own pleasure and self-actualization. She could call the reproductive shots while her husband earned the money, shielding her from the harsh reality of the Russian workplace. A family with one breadwinner is “all people dream of here, because they never had it,” Zdravomyslova said. A hundred years after Kollontai and Lenin railed against traditional, economically motivated marriage, it had become women’s ultimate fantasy.

5) Writing and motherhood

Being a mother and a writer, I am partial to anything that skewers the myth that to become a parent is to choose a life devoid of art. Responding to the responses to a recent piece by the author Sarah Perry on the painful choice not to pursue fertility treatment, has written on what motherhood has given her as a writer. She makes the point that any life experience, including having and raising children, can feed one’s creativity. She writes:

Barbara Hepworth once said, “A woman artist is not deprived by cooking and having children, nor by nursing children with measles (even in triplicate) - one is in fact nourished by this rich life.” I find this very comforting. She had four children - including triplets. There’s so much written about how hard it is to be a mother and write but what about how motherhood can nourish writing? And not just motherhood but any rich life.

Bonus: The Road to Gilead | France adopts consent-based rape law | On break-up albums

Thanks so much for reading. See you next time.

It’s dark outside and I’ve finally managed to write this newsletter. Yesterday, the official death toll in Gaza (likely an undercount) surpassed 58,000. 58,000 people.

Let’s get straight to the reads…..

1) The horrifying story of Adriana Smith

The story of Adriana Smith, the brain dead woman kept alive for months by a hospital in the state of Georgia, lays bare the terrible logic of abortion bans. Pregnant when she was deemed legally dead, the hospital put her on life support, despite her family’s wishes. “According to her family,” writes in a piece that articulates with chilling precision the moral reprehensibility of what was done to Smith, “doctors at Emory hospital… told the family that the state’s abortion ban required them to maintain the regimen that falsely animated their daughter’s corpse so that the fetus inside her could continue to grow.” Here’s more:

Last month, the fetus was cut out of her corpse prematurely; presumably, doctors did not think that the dead body could sustain a pregnancy any longer. Physicians working on Smith’s case told her family that as a result of gestating inside a dead uterus, the resulting child could experience health complications ranging from blindness to the inability to walk. The infant that was extracted from the dead woman, a baby boy, weighs less than 2lbs, and is currently in neonatal intensive care. The family has named him Chance.

2) ICC issues arrest warrants for Taliban leaders

Last week, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against the supreme leader of the Taliban, Haibatullah Akhundzada, and the chief justice of Afghanistan, Abdul Hakim Haqqani. From the ICC’s statement:

Based on evidence presented by the Office, the judges found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that they have committed – by ordering, inducing or soliciting – the crime against humanity of persecution, under article 7(1)(h) of the Rome Statute, on gender grounds, against girls, women and other persons non-conforming with the Taliban’s policy on gender, gender identity or expression; and on political grounds against persons perceived as “allies of girls and women”.

Under the supervision of Deputy Prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan, since the 31 October 2022 decision of the Pre-Trial Chamber to re-authorise the resumption of the Office’s investigation, the Afghanistan Unified Team has been investigating alleged crimes committed against Afghan civilians by the Taliban.

The issuance of the first arrest warrants in the Situation in Afghanistan is an important vindication and acknowledgement of the rights of Afghan women and girls. It also recognises the rights and lived experiences of persons whom the Taliban perceived as not conforming with their ideological expectations of gender identity or expression, such as members of the LGBTQI+ community, and persons whom the Taliban perceived as allies of girls and women.

Through the Taliban’s deprivation of fundamental rights to education, privacy and family life, among others, Afghan women and girls were increasingly erased from public life. The decision of the judges of the ICC affirms that their rights are valuable, and that their plight and voices matter.

3) Russian schoolgirls are being incentivised to have babies

The number of babies born per woman in Russia is below the replacement rate, hundreds of thousands of Russians have fled in recent years, and “the number of Russian soldiers killed in the [Ukraine] war has reached 250,000 by some estimates,” says Jennifer Mathers in a very interesting piece in The Conversation about Russian policy to increase birth rates. She writes:

In some parts of Russia, schoolgirls who become pregnant are being paid more than 100,000 roubles (nearly £900) for giving birth and raising their babies.

This new measure, introduced in the past few months across ten regions, is part of Russia’s new demographic strategy, widening the policy adopted in March 2025 which only applied to adult women. It is designed to address the dramatic decline in the country’s birthrate.

Mathers says that Russians are split on this policy:

Paying teenage girls to have babies while they are still in school is controversial in Russia. According to a recent survey by the Russian Public Opinion Research Centre, 43% of Russians approve of the policy, while 40% are opposed to it. But it indicates the high priority that the state places on increasing the number of children being born.

PS In this feature on declining birth rates, NPR has a noteworthy statistic:

This change in decision-making and behavior appears to be accelerating. New research from the United Nations found that the number of children born to the average woman worldwide has reached the lowest point ever recorded. In nearly every country and culture, women are having fewer children. Worldwide, the number of children born to each woman has dropped from five in 1960 to an average of 2.2, according to the latest United Nations report.

4) New report on rape as a weapon of war on 7th October

The Dinah Project, an Israeli NGO formed after the 7th October attack, has released a new report detailing evidence that Hamas used sexual violence “as a tactical weapon of war” that day and later against hostages held in Gaza. The report builds “on other investigations by international and Israeli rights groups and the United Nations”, AP reports. Here’s more:

The report said it relied on dozens of accounts, including from one survivor of attempted rape at a music festival, 15 returned hostages, 17 witnesses and multiple first responders…

Citing accounts in Israeli and international media, it said 15 former hostages either experienced or witnessed some form of sexual assault which included physical sexual violence, forced nudity, verbal sexual harassment and threats of forced marriage. Two male hostages said they faced forced nudity and physical abuse when naked.

The report said witness accounts indicated at least 15 separate cases of sexual assault, including at least four instances of gang rape. The report said its findings showed patterns in the assaults, including victims found partially or fully naked with their hands tied, evidence of gang rape followed by killing, genital mutilation and public humiliation, indicating they were intentionally used as a weapon of war.

And also:

The report recommended that conflict-related sexual violence should be treated differently from regular sexual crimes to allow for evidence that doesn’t primarily rely on testimony from victims, to account for “the systematic silencing of victims.”

5) Trad wives and the princess treatment

In Rolling Stone, CT Jones writes about the “bare minimum or princess treatment” TikTok trend that highlights the insidiousness of tradwives and subtle and not-so-subtle anti-feminism online:

Enter the “bare minimum vs princess treatment” trend, a challenge where women ask their significant other where a particular task might land for them. The scenarios range from filling up a girlfriend’s gas tank or giving her your jacket when she’s cold to carrying her when her feet hurt or never letting her touch a door handle. Calling something “princess treatment” implies that it’s an over-the-top request. If the girlfriend doesn’t agree with their boyfriend, the men in question get an instant blast of water to the face.

Courtney Palmer, “a housewife and content creator”, shared a video describing a date night with her husband, in which she explained how she prefers him to order food and do the talking for her, while she avoids looking into the eyes of staff at a given restaurant. This, she said, was princess treatment, and there was some backlash in the comments on her video. Jones makes the point that, while people were disparaging Palmer and her arguably disturbing approach to date night, they were missing the far bigger picture:

Palmer’s princess treatment video is simply the final boss of a TikTok practically terraformed by girl content… all predicated on the underlying assumption that women need to be taken care of, protected, and are incapable of deep thought.

Bonus: The testosterone business | Jane Lazarre | “For my 70th birthday I hired an escort”

Thank you so much for reading. See you next time.

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The true death toll of Palestinians in Gaza is likely to have reached 100,000, according to a recent report in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper. The official figure reported by the Palestinian health ministry—which is now more than 57,500—is believed by various experts and researchers to understate how many Palestinians have been killed in this war. The 100,000 figure would amount to some 4 percent of Gaza’s population, as it was in October 2023. It is estimated that 56 per cent of those who have been killed are women and children. As per Haaretz:

Data compiled and published by [economist Professor Michael] Spagat indicates that the proportion of women and children killed via a violent death in Gaza is more than double the proportion in almost every other recent conflict, including, for example, the civil wars in Kosovo (20 percent), northern Ethiopia (9 percent), Syria (20 percent), Colombia (21 percent), Iraq (17 percent) and Sudan (23 percent).

And now to the reads.

1) French incel charged for plotting to attack women

An 18-year-old French man has been charged in France’s first suspected terror case linked to incel ideology. Timothy G, the suspect, was reportedly arrested near a high school. As per Le Monde he “was arrested with two knives in his bag and identified himself as a member of the incel, or involuntary celibate, subculture.” Also this:

According to one of the sources close to the case, the 18-year-old, who wanted to become an engineer, was a fan of misogynistic videos on social media platforms, particularly on TikTok. A source close to the case also said that this is the first time the [National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor's Office] has been called upon to investigate a man who exclusively identifies as part of the incel subculture. The involvement of anti-terror prosecutors appears to indicate that French authorities recognize this form of gender-based violence as terrorism. The concept had previously appeared only marginally in at least two cases handled by the anti-terrorism prosecutor's office.

2) The Diddy verdict

The eight-week-long trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs has ended, with the music mogul found guilty of transportation for prostitution but not sex trafficking. He faces up to 10 years in prison and will be sentenced in October. The New York Times reports that there are also 50 civil lawsuits accusing him of sexual abuse (allegations he denies).

The fact that Combs wasn’t found guilty of the more serious charges against him, writes Anna Hart in the Independent, is an indication of how poor the understanding of consent is in the wider public and in the legal system. She writes:

Although Judge Arun Subramanian denied Combs bail on Thursday, citing clear evidence of violence and lawlessness, the jury acquitted Diddy of racketeering and sexual trafficking. The latter acquittal – sex trafficking – means the jury was not convinced that the female witnesses were not consenting sexual partners.

For most women (and many men) who watched video evidence of violent assault and read the testimony of witnesses – describing years of violence, threats, rape and humiliation – this verdict felt like a heartbreaking letdown, and a grim and inevitable one too.

Diddy’s ex-girlfriend, the singer Cassie Ventura, endured testifying about her alleged abuse, painful details being made public, only to not be believed. A reminder that, in the UK at least, conviction rates for rape are so low that the former victims commissioner for England and Wales, Vera Baird, said rape had effectively been decriminalised.

3) What if fathers want to be distant?

The UK is notorious for having some of the lowest maternity and paternity leave provisions in the OECD. Last week, the government announced a review of parental leave and pay. The business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, a father of four himself, said he wanted to see it become more “culturally accepted” for fathers to spend more time with their children. This has been welcomed by the various groups that have long pushed for reform, such as the heroic Pregnant Then Screwed. You might think that one would be hard pushed to find arguments against increasing parental leave for mothers and fathers. But I did come across an interesting column in the Spectator by Arabella Byrne who, based on her own experience of her partner going back to work as soon as their first baby was born, argues against fathers being more involved in those early baby days, and for the “trad dad” (read distant and at work) to return. Here is a snippet:

What if the barriers to paternity leave are not economic? What if fathers don’t want to take paternity leave beyond two weeks because they want to preserve traditional gendered roles in a partnership? What if – and this is truly unfashionable to say – fathers want to care for their children from the relatively distant pulpit of the paterfamilias? Can paternal love still take place if a father observes his offspring sleeping peacefully in the evening as he loosens his tie? Must modern paternal love be predicated on a father singing ‘Wind the Bobbin Up’ at Monkey Music?

Discuss….

PS I read this during a period of rewatching Mad Men, the drama about US ad men in the 60s, where the fathers are as distant as it is possible to be, the women belittled, sexually harassed and isolated. Rewatching the show I was struck by just how much the sexism in it drives the plot. I feel like it didn’t see this so clearly the first time around.

PPS Relatedly, the UK’s education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, has called on young people to have more babies amid declining birth rates.

4) Beauty pageants are still a thing

Last month, Miss England Milla Magee bowed out of the Miss World 2025 final, accusing the organisers of making participants “sit like performing monkeys” (Miss World denied Magee’s allegations), and saying that the competition is “outdated”. In the Observer, writes about the enduring outdatedness of beauty pageants:

Yes, beauty contests have evolved over the decades – Miss World eliminated its swimsuit round in 2014, and (Morley told the Telegraph in 2019) they’d probably accept a size-16 contestant now (though not size 20), and trans women were welcome to enter (“If they’ve had gender reassignment surgery”). Pageants have rebranded themselves as glittering arenas of female empowerment rather than places where boys learn to look at women and girls learn to watch themselves being looked at. But misogyny is baked into this industry (one which Trump had a large stake in for the 19 years he owned the Miss Universe organisation), with countless women, most notably those competing to be Miss World America, reporting exploitation and humiliation. Former titleholder Marisa Butler once said, “Being Miss World America was horrible, I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”

5) Shulamit Firestone’s short stories

In The Dialectics of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, published in 1970 when she was just 25, the radical feminist Shulamit Firestone imagined a utopian future. “She described the biological family as the locus of women’s oppression,” writes Jess Cotton in Jacobin, citing Firestone: “Unless revolution uproots the basic social organization… the biological family — the vinculum through which the psychology of power can always be struggled — the tapeworm of exploitation will never be annihilated.” Less well known than this iconic manifesto (for a world where women would be freed of the yoke of reproduction via artificial wombs) is Firestone’s second book, Airless Places, a collection of short stories. In this essay, Cotton considers what Firestone was saying about the failures of the feminist movement through this book. Here is a snippet:

But feminism, at least as Firestone understood it, was not a project concerned primarily with the personal suffering of individual women — however much #metoo has been important in drawing out the serial logic of harassment, which creates an inexorable sense that masculinity is the meeting point of sexuality and power. The movement was an ambitious attempt to think about how labor could be redistributed and social structures transformed. But in focusing on the feelings of individual women, its power as a collective movement has been limited.

Airless Places, in its attention to the unglamorous aspects of trauma, poverty, numbing states of isolation, and structural power, refuses the consolations of neoliberal feminism. It is, like The Dialectic of Sex, a polemic, which happens to take the form of a collection of short stories, which is a reminder of the exhausting states of care work that are required to provide a sustainable alternative to the bottoming-out of state care provision. The book is dedicated to Lourdes Cintron, a caseworker who campaigned on Firestone’s behalf to provide her with medical care despite not having health insurance. Cintron was the center of a collective of women who over the years met weekly, offering Firestone a fragile network of care, support, and solidarity.

Bonus: Feminist trolls New York? | Reform UK council leader vs transgender-related books

Thanks so much for reading. See you next time.

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Two small things before we dive in to this week’s reads. First of all, the publication I work at, , is now on Substack with an excellent daily email. Please do follow and/or subscribe to us here to get all our latest writing and podcasts.

Speaking of which, on this week’s Prospect Podcast, which I co-host, we spoke with the writer and journalist about his brilliant and very Backlash-relevant new book on the manosphere. You can watch or listen to our conversation.

And now to the reads…

1) The authority gap strikes again

After 7th October, it emerged that young female soldiers at lookout posts on the Gaza border had repeatedly warned that Hamas was planning something. These women had observed unusual behaviour on the other side of the border fence. Their warnings were not heeded, and these young women were among those killed and taken hostage that day. As Mary Ann Sieghart has explained, this looks like what she calls the authority gap, where women are perceived as having less knowledge or expertise than men. And often, as a consequence, they are not listened to. On her new (and highly recommended) newsletter, has written about a more recent example of this phenomenon: when Donald Trump disregarded what Tulsi Gabbard, his national security adviser, had to say about the intel on whether or not Iran was poised to build a nuclear weapon. Setting aside Gabbard’s numerous controversial positions, Trump publicly sidelined and humiliated a very senior member of his government. What are the implications of women being ignored at the highest levels of decision-making? She writes:

I am worried that the fate of my children is in the hands of a group of over-confident, impulsive men who are not driven in any shape or form by compassion or held back by potentially horrific consequences. And so this piece is my act of defiance. The only way I know how to retaliate right now. It is my call for peace, my call for more women to be part of government cabinets and, importantly, for their voices to be listened to, respected and acted upon.

PS Luba wrote an excellent piece on this for New Lines Magazine last year.

2) Everything changes, everything stays the same

Having already been a fan of her former Observer advice column, I have really been enjoying ’s newsletter here. In a recent edition, she recognised in a question she received the signs of a relationship burdened with gender inequality. I wanted to include a link to this because these delicate, often invisible, imbalances, keep so many women in a deeply unequal state. When I was young, I assumed such imbalances would have disappeared by the time I was a grown-up. Oh, how naive I was! I have met women twenty years younger than me doing this invisible labour for a boyfriend. Perry, as ever, has great advice. Here is a section of it:

When a partner declares that their career is the most important thing to them, and seems unwilling to consider yours, it suggests a dynamic where your needs and hopes are not being held in equal regard. You are being asked to live in service of his ambitions, to keep the domestic sphere intact so he can be free in the world. But now that you are feeling the call of your own path, this imbalance has become more apparent. As you say, it’s as if he is gripping the steering wheel and you’re in the passenger seat, with no map and no voice in where you’re going.

The post also includes various quotes from the likes of bell hooks about how living under patriarchy affects both men and women.

3) UK trans rights campaigners appeal to Council of Europe

Following April’s UK Supreme Court decision on gender and biological sex, groups campaigning for transgender rights have written a joint letter to the Council of Europe. They argue that the recent ruling puts trans people in an “‘intermediate zone’, placing the State—once again—in violation of its positive obligations under” the European Convention on Human Rights. They also write: “We note that the situation is urgent and that without intervention, it seems likely to further deteriorate.” Here is the letter:

Ps This week, some “900 trans people and allies descended on Westminster in what was the largest LGBTQIA+ mass lobby in UK history. Yet, if you relied on the national press to know it happened, you’d be forgiven for not having a clue,” writes Lee Hurley on The Trans Agenda.

4) It’s been three years since Dobbs

On June 24th 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, opening the door to the rolling back of abortion rights in America. On The Persistent, Josie Cox asks how perspectives on abortion in the US have changed since then. She writes:

This month new research showed, for example, that Arkansas is the only state in America where the balance of public opinion is against abortion by a statistically significant margin. That survey, conducted by the Pew Research Center, found that in 34 U.S. states, as well as in the District of Columbia, more people say that abortion should be legal than say that it should be illegal, in all or most cases.

And also

As well as differing significantly by state, views also vary widely by religious affiliation, race and political ideology. About three-quarters of white evangelical Protestants, for example, said that they think abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. By contrast, 86% of religiously unaffiliated Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, as do 71% of Black Protestants, 64% of white non-evangelical Protestants and 59% of Catholics.

As Cox writes, 13 US states have total abortion bans, while others ban abortion from six weeks. Some 25 states have introduced bills to limit medical abortion.

On , has a piece on the “stats that defined our post-Dobbs world”. Here is a snippet:

…just last week the National Bureau of Economic Research published a new study that showed abortion bans have increased intimate partner violence across the U.S. since Dobbs, linking these laws to 9,000 additional incidents of intimate partner violence. Before that, in 2023, the National Domestic Violence Hotline reported that acts of reproductive coercion reported to their hotline doubled in the first year after Dobbs.

5) Bonnie Blue on feminism

When I read about her proposed “petting zoo” I, like many others I’m sure, felt rather depressed. I find it hard to see this as the act of someone who is free or empowered, but this week, the recently banned-from-OnlyFans creator Bonnie Blue said in an interview that she is “a lady that’s taken full control of the body”. Here is more of what she said:

"I wouldn't say I'm not a feminist," she tells Newsweek over a video interview. "I do believe women should have a voice and they should be in control," she says."A lot of people say I actually bring women back 100 years, but I'm a clear example of a lady that's taken full control of the body." Blue continues. "This is to a certain degree, what feminism has asked for, a woman that can take control. I don't feel intimidated by men. I'm actually paid more than guys in my industry. I have a complete voice and I don't ever feel taken advantage of."

And also:

Addressing the criticism she has faced, Blue told Newsweek: "When you're a sex worker, you get hate, regardless. 'You're disgusting, you're a prostitute, s***, w*****,' you get it all anyway."

Bonus: Feminist collectives on Israel-Iran | the gendered coverage of Bezos and Sanchez

Thanks so much for reading. See you next time.

It’s been a while since I sent this newsletter. This has been due to a combination of personal and work projects and a general feeling of anxiety about world events chipping away at the snatched moments in which I usually write The Backlash. This week, the living nightmare that is Israel’s new war with Iran, alongside the daily mass killings of Palestinians at aid hubs in Gaza, have monopolised my mind. It’s difficult to think (or care!) about much else. It’s hard to forget loved ones under fire. Overnight, the US got involved more fully, striking three Iranian nuclear sites. As throughout the week, Israeli news studios are filled with virtually all-male panels, whose participants hardly question the premise for this war, which is gambling with so much.

Just before Benjamin Netanyahu launched his wet dream of a military operation, pressure had been building, at very long last, against Israel over Gaza. Then, 13th June happened, and that pressure has dissipated, with support for Israel’s actions evident across European leadership. In the meantime, there are virtually daily reports of Palestinians being shot en masse trying to access aid in Gaza, and civilians are losing their lives in Iran and Israel. In Tamra, a Palestinian town in northern Israel, a man lost his wife and two daughters, aged 13 and 20, and another relative, when a missile hit their home. In Bat Yam, central Israel, five members of a Ukrainian family in the country to get medical treatment for a 7-year-old child with blood cancer were killed by an Iranian missile.

On Thursday, Netanyahu visited the site of a hospital in Beer Sheva that had been damaged by a missile from Iran. He told reporters about the personal price every Israeli citizen is paying for this war, including the prime minister himself. "It is the second time,” he said, “that my son Avner... cancels his wedding".

And now to the reads….

1) Netanyahu wants to save Iranian women?

After Israel’s operation against Iran (codename Rising Lion) was launched, Netanyahu released a video message in English aimed at Iranians. Among other things, he said: “As we achieve our objective, we are also clearing the path for you to achieve your freedom. This is your opportunity to stand up and let your voices be heard. Woman, life, freedom – zan, zendegi, azadi.”

Aside from the fact that the Israeli prime minister’s professed concern for Iran’s women is disingenuous at best, in the Guardian, makes the point that such faux concern can put women fighting for their rights in Iran at risk. She writes:

They did not need Netanyahu to fight for their freedom then, nor do they need him now. On the contrary, his attempt to co-opt the courageous uprising is the quickest way to discredit feminism itself – often dismissed as “western” and alien. Wars and invasions harm, not strengthen, revolutions. As an Egyptian, I know all too well that the Egyptian regime tried its hardest to claim our 25 January revolution in 2011 was being masterminded from abroad.

Eltahawy also makes the point that, when the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, after 9/11, the US claimed that the invasion “was to ‘liberate’ women from the Taliban’s misogyny. Twenty years after that reckless invasion, an increasingly disastrous war and occupation, and a criminally chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban once again rule.”

2) “Grooming gangs” and ubiquitous misogyny

A major political event in the UK this week was the publication of a national audit on “group-based sexual exploitation and abuse” (often referred to with the terrible euphemism “grooming gangs”), and the government’s subsequent announcement of a national inquiry. The idea that the scourge of sexual exploitation and abuse of vulnerable girls by networks of grown men had been ignored or hushed up because of a fear of racism had become a major pet cause on the right. (Remember Elon Musk weighing in himself in January?) Had the authorities been too scared of being accused of racism to acknowledge the ethnicity of perpetrators who were of South Asian or Pakistani heritage? Was it true, as many not on the right argued back, that really most perpetrators of child exploitation and abuse are white? On the News Agents podcast, Louise Casey explains how much ethnicity data was missing in such cases. She makes the important point that if good people don’t talk about difficult issues, bad people will make hay with them. And in the meantime the countless victims don’t see justice.

Amid the national focus on these unthinkable crimes, the underlying misogyny, dehumanisation, and sexualisation of teenage girls has been less discussed. For , has written a great piece about this, reflecting on her own experiences as a teenager:

Being a woman can be lonely and frightening. Being a teenage girl can be terrifying. You exist somewhere between childhood and adulthood, where your growing autonomy evokes contempt and your naivety invites blame.

“We need to see children as children,” Casey writes. But when it comes to teenage girls, especially those from poorer backgrounds, that simple principle too often falls away. Misogyny, compounded by racism or class prejudice, overrides our ability to see girls as vulnerable. Instead, their abuse is treated like something they opted into and a reputation they earned.

PS The Guardian has interviewed Natalie Fleet MP, who was groomed by an older man as a teenager and had a baby aged 15, on her personal experience and her work standing up for survivors of rape.

3) Abortion decriminalised in England and Wales

Also in Britain this week, MPs voted to decriminalise abortion in England and Wales. Before Tuesday’s vote, women who terminated pregnancies beyond the legal limit here of 24 weeks were at risk of prosecution. The BBC described this as “the biggest change to abortion laws in England and Wales for nearly 60 years”. has a very good piece explaining why this change was needed. She writes:

Campaigners estimate that more than 100 women have been prosecuted in England and Wales following an unexplained pregnancy loss in the past decade. Between 1967 and 2022, there were three court cases where women faced abortion charges; since 2022, there have been six.

A 15-year-old girl who was arrested in 2021 following a miscarriage, having previously looked at abortion information online, was among those investigated in the past ten years. The stress of the police investigation led to her self-harming, and the case against her was eventually dropped after a coroner concluded natural causes ended the pregnancy.

On the day of the vote itself (NB: there were two other abortion-related amendments up for debate), it was quite something to see a series of male MPs getting up to intervene, with some expressing their fears that decriminalising abortion would enable women to abort full-term pregnancies with impunity. For example:

Since the vote, this idea has shown up in various places. Two examples: On Unherd, Kathleen Stock described the move as “another stunning PR victory for that ever-darkening project popularly known as feminism”; in a stunningly unhinged piece on the demise of Britain in the Telegraph, David Frost lists the decriminalisation of abortion in a list of dark developments in this country. Thirty years ago, he writes, who could have predicted, that “parliament would allow women to kill their unborn baby at any point without committing any crime”.

4) “The feminist case for boosting the birth rate”

Falling birth rates are a long-discussed obsession on the right, but the NYT’s Amanda Taub has written an interesting piece asking whether there is a feminist or non-nationalist argument for tackling population decline. Here’s a snippet:

The work of Nancy Folbre, a feminist economist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, suggests that the problem may be that existing programs are simply too small to make a difference to the real issue: that as countries get richer, it becomes much more expensive to be a parent. That’s not just because out-of-pocket costs rise, though they do. Rather, the bigger issue is the cost of the time parenting requires, which, while unpaid, is not free, and in fact becomes vastly more expensive as economies develop.

“There’s a point at which, if you just keep ratcheting up the price of doing something that’s socially valuable, if you just keep ratcheting up the private costs, eventually people give up,” Dr. Folbre said. Today’s plummeting fertility rates suggest that potential parents are doing just that.

She also (of course) addresses the question of why more control over their own reproduction might mean that women want to have fewer, or even no, babies. Even in the Nordic countries, which famously have great parental leave provision and affordable, high-quality childcare, birth rates are falling:

“That’s how patriarchal societies function. They create really significant incentives for high fertility, in part, by really disempowering women,” Dr. Folbre said. (Those coercive methods are not gone — and some governments, including those of the United States and Poland, have curtailed reproductive freedoms in recent years.)

5) “We have won an astonishing amount”

Last month, I went to see Rebecca Solnit speak about her new book, in an event with . Solnit famously coined the term “mansplaining” through her 2008 essay “Men explain things to me” (the story of which she, rather satisfyingly, recounted at the event I attended). She is probably best known for her writing on climate and feminism, though in recent years she has also become one of the most recognisable voices calling out the US turn to authoritarianism. She is a searing critic of how establishment media such as the New York Times have let down voters in their coverage of Trump and the MAGA right.

With The Backlash in mind, I noted down a few things Solnit said about feminism. The first is that despite the current backsliding on, e.g. abortion rights, in places like the US and elsewhere, and despite the misogyny we see all over the internet (and IRL!), “we have won an astonishing amount”. Solnit spoke about taking a long, historical view on change. “We are just in the middle of a process,” she said of the changes feminists long fought for. She also said that the right-wing obsession with (fear of ??) progressives, environmentalists, feminists is really a back-handed compliment. It’s an acknowledgment that “you have changed the world”.

One final thing I noted was her answer to a question about trans rights and feminism in Britain. After caveating her answer with the fact that she hasn’t been following developments here, and isn’t really qualified to talk about it, she said the following:

“What's interesting is how fabricated this is. A lot of places were advancing trans rights 10 years ago, and then the right decided this. And it's funny with the US, right? They're really like Golden Retrievers [who] will chase anything. It's like this week, you're going to hate Muslims more than anything, but next week, it's just going to be immigrants in general. The week after that, it's going to be trans women, and then we'll go back to feminazis or whatever.

And the one thing I can really say is I've lived in San Francisco for my entire adult life, which was the great queer city, back in the day when it was a real refuge and a lot of people were fearful to be out in other parts of the world. It has a huge trans population compared to other places…. the anti-trans rhetoric is like, “Oh, if we let when large trans people exist and we let them have rights, then terrible things will happen.” I just always say, I've been in a city where they've existed and had rights, and I'm sure I've shared—I can't believe we have to fucking talk about bathrooms—endless public restrooms with them, as have all my friends. Lots of my friends’ kids have gone to school with kids who are non-binary or trans or whatever, and like you know, nothing to report.

And it's weird what a kind of Hobgoblin imaginary problem… that it's created… it's treated as if [if] one trans woman does a bad thing, then all trans women are bad, which is exactly the same as saying one Jewish person or black person or straight white man.

Bonus: First woman MI6 chief | Pregnant in Palestine | YouTube still profits from Tate | K-dramas and the birth rate |

Thank you so much for reading. See you next time.

I was there for only a few days for work, so didn’t see many people aside from my family. I constantly watched the news, switching between the channels, including Israel’s Fox News equivalent, Channel 14, to try to enter, as far as possible, the state of mind that Israelis are in after so many months of this horror. The contrast between obsessively following what’s happening while in London, and the lack of attention to what actually happens in Gaza within Israel, was jarring. This collective, societal blindness is both willed and an act of survival, because if you actually see what is being done in your name, what would you do then?

Israel felt stuck in time, neglected, frayed at the edges. Outside, with the violence in Gaza relentless, the world barely mentions what happened on 7th October anymore. But inside Israel, that day, and the fact that Israeli soldiers keep dying in this pointless campaign, is everything. Everywhere I looked there were stickers commemorating fallen soldiers or those massacred on 7th October. Everywhere you see posters calling for the hostages to come home, but life continues, as it must I guess, around these background reminders of grief and pain. Meanwhile, Gaza is like a gap in the public consciousness.

What I wondered about women back in December 2022, namely that the new government of extremists would have few women in it, is not totally immaterial. But there are more fundamental matters to consider on that front. In Haaretz, Nadine Quomsieh has written a piece arguing that “feminism that cannot name Gaza is not feminism”. She says:

In Gaza, women are not asking for boardroom seats or missions to Mars. They are asking for bread. For water. For soap. For a sanitary pad. For their children to wake up in the morning. If our feminism cannot hold space for that reality, if it doesn't pause to hear the voices under the rubble, then what are we building, and who is it really for?

In one shelter, a mother tore strips from her daughter's dress to use as menstruation cloths. Another lined her shoes with cardboard, bleeding in silence, so she wouldn't stain the floor. These are not metaphors – they are Tuesday mornings in Gaza. And yet, too often, they go unspoken in the halls of international feminist solidarity.

Now, because I’ve taken a while to send this newsletter, I have a little more in it than usual. So, I’m sending today’s installment in two parts.

Here goes the first…..

1) The no-girls allowed group chat

A story that made some noise recently was Ben Smith’s piece about the group chats where Tech Right discourse is happening. As points out on his Substack, this is perhaps less of a totally new thing and more of a return to the days before the free-for-all of social media. “In the 2010s, discussions like this might have happened on Twitter or other public forums,” he writes, “now, they’re held in the modern-day equivalent of a smoky back room.”

As I read the Ben Smith piece, I noticed the preponderance of men in the story—setting up the group chats, being invited to them, participating. There must be women on there too (some of the chats have—or had, if they are now defunct—hundreds of members), but the story made me wonder about a world where we are returning to these closed door, invite-only discussions, where women are certainly not represented in equal numbers, let alone in the majority, and no one really thinks that’s a problem. Given that the Tech Right has hardly shown itself to be a big believer in gender equality (masculine energy, anyone?) I wondered if, aside from this being a story about big, era-defining conversations happening via group chat, this is also a story about women being sidelined or re-excluded from important fora. And are they being excluded by men who feel, whether consciously or not, that woman have asked for too much, or that they are sick of hearing from them. Or maybe they just aren’t all that interested in what women have to say. I have some experience of being excluded from an all-male group chat in a former job (more on that another time, perhaps), so this doesn’t feel theoretical to me. The Atlantic’s Signal chat scoop (remember that?) got me thinking similar. If anyone knows that this is completely off, and that these group chats are in fact gender-equal utopias, please let me know.

2) The Supreme Court ruling

Since I last sent this email, the UK’s Supreme Court ruled that sex is biological under then 2010 Equality Act. Feminists who might describe themselves as gender critical or sex realist have been celebrating. The most prominent among them, JK Rowling, who funded the legal challenge by For Women Scotland which ultimately resulted in the ruling, posted a picture of herself on X smoking a cigar and drinking whiskey. She wrote: “I love it when a plan comes together”.

The ruling was followed by much confusion about what it actually means for trans people, and for the various organisations providing services that will be affected by the judgment. At Prospect magazine (where, for the benefit of new subscribers, I am an editor), we published an excellent piece by , explaining what politicians seemed to misunderstand about the ruling and what it means for trans people in practice. The UK Equality and Human Rights Commission has released an “interim update” ahead of guidance that is due this summer, and in the meantime, various organisations have announced changes of policy (or not). For instance, the English Football Association has said it will ban trans women from playing women’s football from next season (according to Sky News, the number of trans women currently playing professional football is zero; there are 20 thought to be playing at grassroots level).

But, as Jess explains in the piece, there has been a lot of confusion and disagreement over the significance of the ruling. There have also been various initiatives rejecting the very premise of the legal challenge that led to the ruling. One open letter from non-trans feminist academics had 2556 signatures last time I checked. They write:

Anti-trans campaigners say they want to exclude trans women from women’s spaces in order to protect cis women. We do not need protection from trans people. We need action against sexual harassment, rape, domestic violence and everyday sexism. We need policies that guarantee women get equal pay for their work, affordable childcare and the eradication of childbirth-related deaths. And we need the state to stop the violence that trans people face at the hands of cis men and cis women.

We need to stand together in defence of everyone's bodily autonomy, gender expression, reproductive rights, and individual freedoms. We cannot have a state or society that checks people’s genitals when they go to the toilet, go to work or school, play sports, access healthcare or use facilities.

We unequivocally reject the idea that women can be defined by their biology, a claim which is neither feminist nor scientific. For centuries, women have fought for the right to do, wear and be what they want to be. It is essentialist and patriarchal to assert that body, genes, chromosomes and reproductive capacity make women (or men).

Some people have pointed out that the text of the 88-page judgment itself is far more humane than Trump’s executive orders against “gender ideology” and defending “biological truth”, for instance, and that the Supreme Court took care to clarify that, despite the ruling, trans people will still be protected from discrimination under the Equalities Act. That is true, though it also seems a low bar. Reading the judgment, however, which includes a very detailed overview of how legal protections for trans people developed over the years, and seeing various organisations go through the motions of considering whether or not to exclude trans people from service provision, it seems hard to argue that trans people have not lost rights here. At the very least, the debate itself has been dehumanising. After the 16th April ruling, politicians were once again being asked repeatedly to clarify whether or not trans women are women. As Jess points out in their piece, legally trans women are still women, even after the judgment.

The discourse over trans rights and women’s rights has long been an impasse in British feminism, and a nasty one at that. Both sides accuse each other of bullying and harassment. Seeing the aftermath of the ruling here, it’s seems like a “sensible centre” in the UK is identified with the gender critical argument, as if protecting the rights of a vulnerable group is a fringe position. That is not to downplay the fears of women who are abuse or rape or domestic violence survivors, and who say they want to safeguard, say, shelters for women. But doesn’t excluding an entire group of people on the basis that there might be someone violent among them very clearly amount to discrimination or collective punishment? Wherever you are on this debate, it is worth revisiting “The right to pee is everything” by Grace Byron in The Nation.

I have also been trying to understand where feminism goes from here. To me, the ruling feels like a dead end in terms of feminist progress. If this is a feminist victory—and for some it seems to be the feminist victory—where next? Answers on a postcard please….

3) He wants a “baby boom”

The Trump administration has reportedly been looking into policy ideas to increase birthrates—from $5,000 “baby bonuses", to keeping 30 per cent of Fullbright scholarships for married scholars or those who have children, to funding programmes to educate women about periods partly in order to help people get pregnant. Another proposal, according to the New York Times, is for a “‘National Medal of Motherhood’ for mothers with six or more children” (NB the Nazis introduced such an award in 1938).

On her Substack, the autocracy expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat places these developments in the US in the context of fascist history and developments in Italy and Hungary. She writes:

These pro-natalist measures the Donald Trump administration is considering are part of a larger attempt to use government to re-engineer the American population. Detaining and ejecting immigrants, disparaging “childless” women, privileging motherhood as central to female identity, and incentivizing White Christian births to “natural families” –unions of one man and one woman –are part of this plan.

Great Replacement Theory, or the idea that White Christians are being outperformed demographically by non-Whites, threatening the survival of the race and “civilization,” was central to Fascist ideologies and practices and it is central to anti-immigrant and other racist platforms of far-right parties and governments today.

MAGA is the American hub of this transnational racist project, and the proposals of the Trump administration also reflect the obsession with increasing White Christian birthrates among many prominent Republicans, including Vice President J.D. Vance and unelected co-U.S. leader Elon Musk.

RBG joined the podcast I co-host recently to mark 100 days of Trump. You can listen (obvs) or watch on YouTube.

P.s Last month, the right-wing philosopher Nina Power wrote a dispatch from a pronatalist conference she attended in Hungary. Power reflected that “it is admiration for Hungary’s efforts to buck the trend and create a society that is genuinely family-first that brings the speakers, many of them American, to this excellent city.”

P.p.s There has been some intra-conservative friction over feminism of late. On the Daily Wire, the right-wing commentator/podcaster Matt Walsh (he of the anti-“gender ideology” doc What is a woman?), dedicated a post to a conservative influencer who had shared a video criticising the current popularity of the tradwife lifestyle. The video, writes Walsh, “represents a growing, or at least increasingly evident, problem on the Right. The problem, in a word, is feminism”. He continues:

Feminism is not compatible with any meaningful definition of conservatism. Whatever conservatism is trying to conserve — like marriage, the family, western civilization itself — feminism militates against. And yet many feminists have become mouthpieces in the movement, and are accepted as such, as long as they wear a MAGA hat and say that they don’t like illegal immigration or whatever.

Bonus: “The return of the housewife” | The new indie press championing men

Thank you so much for reading. Look out for Part 2 in your inbox soon, featuring reads on Virginia Giuffre, Kenya, and the hotness gender gap.

Then, by some magic of synchronicity, crowning off this period of varied inputs about women’s rights and feminism, last week I met with Juliet Mitchell, the second-wave feminist and psychoanalyst, now in her 80s. Ahead of our meeting, I read her New Left Review essay from 1966, “Women: The Longest Revolution”, which was the basis of her book Woman’s Estate. It’s an astonishing essay, especially given the fact that Mitchell wrote it before the women’s liberation movement was really underway in Britain. As I read, I kept noting sections with the question “Is this still the case?”, or even just multiple exclamation marks, because so much of what she wrote seems not to have changed much, or at the very least to “rhyme with the present”. Things like this:

The problem of the subordination of women and the need for their liberation was recognized by all the great socialist thinkers in the 19th century. It is part of the classical heritage of the revolutionary movement. Yet today, in the West, the problem has become a subsidiary, if not an invisible element in the preoccupations of socialists. Perhaps no other major issue has been so forgotten.

And also this:

It is the function of ideology to present these given social types as aspects of Nature itself. Both can be exalted paradoxically, as ideals. The ‘true’ woman and the ‘true’ family are images of peace and plenty: in actuality they may both be sites of violence and despair. The apparently natural condition can be made to appear more attractive than the arduous advance of human beings towards culture.

And this!

The social cult of maternity is matched by the real socio-economic powerlessness of the mother.

For now, I list these here by way of recommendation. Now I’ll stop! It’s on to the reads…

1) Adolescence?

Everyone seems to be obsessed with Adolescence, the Netflix series about a 13-year-old boy who murders a girl from his school, given its very current themes of internet radicalisation and online misogyny. Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer met with the show’s creators to discuss the issues it raises and backed a campaign for it to be screened to schoolchildren. Netflix has now made the show free to screen in schools. Starmer even wrote an op-ed reflecting on watching the show with his teenage kids. Adolescence is a harrowing watch and also excellent television. Whether showing it to teenagers is a good strategy for addressing these problems is another matter. As most readers will be painfully aware, this question has ignited much debate (including some railing against “elite anti-Tatism”). Making teenagers watch Adolescence might get conversations going, but as policy solutions go it seems as far-reaching as the government promoting “positive” male role models.

On his newsletter, , who has a book about the manosphere coming out this year, points out that this debate is characterised by an inability to see wood for trees. He writes:

Yet the ‘backlash’ thesis only takes us so far. The rise of the manosphere should probably also be seen as a morbid symptom of the suffusion of market logic into every aspect of life. As is often the case, the clue is in the language. Masculinity gurus refer to a ‘sexual marketplace’ where to succeed men must embody certain characteristics that (coincidentally) also correspond with being the ideal neoliberal subject. Dominance, status, and crippling levels of productivity render a man ‘high value’ (people are frequently made to sound like Ebay collectibles) and audiences of impressionable men are encouraged to view life entirely through the prism of getting rich. Women on the other hand are treated either as ornamental status objects - one of the spoils for a successful performance of masculinity - or as breeding stock for patriarchs.

And also:

This is why the wisdom of putting smartphones in the hands of children is so central to the debate around the manosphere. We tend to explain radicalisation by searching for pre-existing vulnerabilities. This is often the most appropriate approach: radicalisation can feed on inner turmoil and insecurity. Yet such feelings are not always organic: the market can play its own role in their generation. Wealth in a capitalist economy is accumulated through the creation of needs as much as their satisfaction. And smartphones are the vehicle through which masculinity entrepreneurs are able to circumvent other forms of socialisation (parents, teachers, approved role models) in order to cultivate their pied piper-like appeal.

The backlash and market logic, though different things, are not necessarily separate problems, however. One enables or fuels the other. They shape each other. There is room in the dynamics of each for the expression of the other.

2) Women and girls in Gaza’s “endless death loop”

“Gaza is a killing field, and civilians are in an endless death loop,” the UN Secretary General António Guterres said yesterday. Amid continued Israeli bombardment (25 people were killed overnight on Tuesday, including 8 women and children, Palestinian medics said) “aid has dried up [and] the floodgates of horror have re-opened”, Guterres continued. UNRWA reports on one particular gendered impact of these horrors:

…Nearly 1 million women and girls have been displaced, and more than 17,000 have reportedly been killed since the war began…

“The shortage and scarcity of sanitary pads in the local market has a psychological and physical impact on women,” says Maysa, associate protection officer with UNRWA.

Women and girls are forced to resort to home-made, makeshift alternatives negatively impacting their health by putting them at risk of reproductive and urinary tract infections and protection-related risks. In addition, such methods increase their embarrassment, anxiety and insecurity, negatively impacting their psychological wellbeing.

In Gaza there are over 690,000 menstruating women and adolescent girls who require menstrual hygiene products, in addition to access to clean water, toilets and privacy. Unfortunately, UNRWA cannot meet the high demand for hygiene kits as stocks have either totally run out or are at critically low levels.

“The scarcity of this product in the markets has led to increased prices, making it difficult for displaced individuals to afford them,” says UNRWA’s Doctor, Nisreen

3) A second-wave feminist for this moment

In the latest issue of Prospect, Heather Brooke reviews three books by Andrea Dworkin which have recently been reissued by Penguin (see also The Backlash, 10th March 2025). Brooke argues that Dworkin’s is the feminist thought we need in this moment. I so enjoyed this review, which is full of admiration for Dworkin’s writing, that I felt moved to read one of the books. Luckily we had a copy of Right-Wing Women in the office. There is something exhilarating about Dworkin’s deeply thought yet at times fairly unhinged polemic. It really does feel so relevant now. As Brooke writes:

A certain kind of masculine fervour has been with humanity for a very long time. Donald Trump and Andrew Tate are only the latest embodiments. Dworkin set her forensic gaze on this “collective him”: “who he is, what he wants… why he won’t move off you; what it’s going to take to blow him loose. A different kind of blow job. Is he scared? You bet.”

And also

Dworkin comes across on the page as deeply serious but also often funny. She writes with a clear zest to change the world, one mind at a time. She certainly changed mine. Gloria Steinem described Dworkin as an Old Testament prophet raging in the hills. One might carry the Biblical metaphor further and say that, in these reissues, Dworkin has been resurrected. The writer reborn as the fierce feminist prophet we need to counter the masculine Maga madness that’s hurtling us ever-faster towards our own demise.

PS I found a post by with links to PDFs of work by Dworkin, Simone de Beauvoir and many others.

4) “Soft-selling authoritarianism”

Much has been written about the wellness to alt-right pipeline—and I can’t get enough of it. I am particularly fascinated by the phenomenon of how beauty, fashion and wellness influencers are a funnel for women to move to right-wing extremes online. Last month, wrote a great piece about this trend, taking in Trump’s inauguration and the conservative (reportedly Peter Thiel-linked) Evie magazine. Here’s a snippet:

This isn’t the first time right wing white supremacy has tried to hijack feminism. In 2017 during Trump’s first presidency, cultural theorist Flavia Dzodan identified an “alt-feminism” that purported women like Megan Kelly and Ivanka Trump were “advancing feminism” with their careers and work ethics.

But unlike alt-feminism, tradwives aren’t selling another version of Sheryl Sandberg style girlboss liberation at all. Instead, they’re selling you empowerment via your own subjugation. The new face of the Right is insidiously adorable, and seduces you to give up your civil rights with glossy listicles about clean beauty.

Evie magazine—the “conservative Cosmo”, whose coverage includes pieces about why society needs “aspirational beauty”—was profiled by the New York Times last month. This is how the magazine’s editor and co-founder explained its position on feminism:

Femininity does not mean feminism, which Mrs. Hugoboom doesn’t define as equal rights but as a self-hating movement that is anti-family and anti-male — one that shames women who “choose conventional roles.” Despite running two companies, she is particularly critical of what she calls “girlboss feminism.”

Her interpretation of that term — which went from broadly celebrated to roundly dismissed in the 2010s — is that it encourages women to “be just like men” to succeed in corporate fields. Such messaging, she says, has made women anxious, lonely and unfulfilled. Instead, she believes, faith, family and love, not “casual sex, careerism or ideological activism,” supply the greatest satisfaction.

“I think more women want a soft life, a beautiful life, than feeling all this pressure to do all these things,” Mrs. Hugoboom explained.

Ps If you were looking for an object that encapsulates a particularly American right-wing anti-feminism, Evie sells sexy “raw milkmaid” dresses.

5) IVF and the right

Also from the latest issue of Prospect, , co-author of the newsletter, has written a fascinating feature about right-wing interest in IVF, taking Trump’s executive order on IVF as a jumping off point. The piece is about reproductive tech being a tool for eugenics, but also about how this interest is linked to women’s rights. She says:

What happened to US abortion rights offers us clues as to what might happen to IVF. Abortion and IVF are two sides of the same coin, after all. When IVF goes wrong, which it does in more than one in five IVF pregnancies, the procedures and medications used to ensure it goes wrong safely are identical to those used in abortion. The erosion of rights around abortion happened slowly, and then all at once, with the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022. Most likely, says Jones, the founder of the Michigan Fertility Alliance, the same thing will happen to women’s rights around IVF. Karla Torres, senior counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, tells me that US policymakers who are against abortion “will not stop at banning abortion or undermining IVF in their effort to control people’s reproductive choices”.

IVF, like most technology, isn’t bad in itself. But once it becomes a tool of the pronatalist agenda, IVF will cease to offer families who yearn for children that precious, private joy for its own sake. Instead, it will become a mechanism to apply pressure on women: to stay home, to nurture, to procreate.

6) The UK rejects asylum claims by Afghan women

The Taliban in Afghanistan continues its reign of terror against women, which many describe as gender apartheid. And yet, the Guardian reports, the British government is rejecting asylum claims by Afghan women, despite the very real danger they clearly face back home. The newspaper cites the case of one woman who “worked for western government-backed projects and was involved in training and mentoring women across Afghanistan” but has been refused asylum. According to the report:

The Home Office has previously generally accepted protection claims from women like Mina who could be targeted by the Taliban because of their high-profile work empowering women and who have provided evidence of their work with western government projects.

But in the most recent data for the last three months of 2024 immigration statistics show 26 Afghan women had their claims rejected. Overall 2,000 Afghan asylum seekers had their claims refused, an increase from 48 in the same quarter of 2023. The grant rate for Afghan cases has gone down from 98.5% in the last quarter of 2023 to 36% in the last quarter of 2024.

Bonus: The Daily Mail discovers femcels | Trump bullies the Smithsonian over trans people | Chappell Roan “parenthood is hell”-gate

Thank you so much for reading. See you next time.

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