Post-feminist tribes (and four other stories)

Five reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism

Welcome new subscribers, and welcome back existing ones. This newsletter is a labour of love and most of the time writing it is a joy, depressing reality aside. I found this one hard, however, because there is so much that could go in right now, and I am religiously tied to my format of five reads. What did I miss? Reply to this email to let me know, or tell me in the comments and I’ll include it next time.

And now for the reads….

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1) Trump is not my feminist

On her Substack,

Jill Filipovic

has written about the enthusiasm of some feminists for Donald Trump, in light of his executive orders limiting trans rights (such as healthcare for trans minors and participation in sports). Citing a column in The Times by Janice Turner, in which the writer proclaims Trump a feminist hero for such policies, Filipovic is unflinching: "This is not feminism. Or at least, it’s not the feminism I want to see in the world”.

I found this piece refreshing. It takes un unusually nuanced position on the so-called trans rights culture war. She writes:

Authoritarians tend to go for the weak first; they need scapegoats. Right now, Trump is going after trans people, among many others. I don’t think feminists need to have a singular view of sex vs gender or nurture vs nature or even an unassailable answer to the question “what makes a woman?” (a somewhat silly and facile question, in my opinion) to point our general compass in the right direction. What we do need is a measure of decency. We need to understand that pushing the boundaries of sex and gender is feminist work. We need, at the most basic level, to understand this: Donald Trump is not a friend to feminists, and the gleeful humiliations him and his supporters rain down on trans people? That’s aimed at all of us.

In the New York Times, Elizabeth Zerofsky writes about the obsession of politicians on the right, like Trump and Italy’s Georgia Meloni, with what they term “gender ideology”. As Zerofsky points out, such politicians are against anything that upends gender norms, whether that’s feminism or transitioning, and we would do well to see it for what it is.

P.s. Grace Bryson, a trans journalist in the US, has written an excellent long read in The Nation about why “the right to pee is everything” in the fight for civil rights in general. It’s very good on the assault on trans rights in the states, and why the much-derided bathroom issue actually matters.

P.p.s Yet another example (not that we need it) of how Trump is not good for women.

2) (Possibly) the world’s most gender-equal government

The Kurdish-led Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (Daanes) was established more than 10 years ago, during Syria’s war. “Its brave experiments with power sharing and direct democracy have made it a source of intense inspiration for many socialists and feminists”, Natasha Walter reports. She writes from the Syrian city of Rojava, home of the slogan “women, life, freedom”, which was also adopted by Iranians in their fight for women’s rights:

The slogan “woman, life, freedom” was coined here in Rojava, but these women’s actions go well beyond a slogan. One day, I go to visit Leyla Saroxan, the co-chair of the administration’s local agriculture and economy committee. Her very job title brings one key advance home to me: the administration’s governing structures are based on strictly equal power-sharing between men and women. It has set up complex networks of committees and councils that work from the level of the neighbourhood to the region, and each of these has a male and female co-chair. In other words, the administration has a claim to being the most equal political structure in the world.

3) Post-feminist tribes

For The Point, Grazie Sophia Christie has written a beautiful piece about the various types who embody post-feminism. Here is a snippet:

We are told, with increasing frequency, that we are living in a post-feminist age. As in, after feminism, chronologically. As in, over feminism, abandoning it, philosophically. Undeniably the gold-star celebrity feminists of the 2010s are changing. Writer-activist Lena Dunham dropped out of the discourse she once led, taking to bed with a doctor’s note. Audrey Gelman, founder of The Wing, a suffragette-inspired, girlboss coworking space, opened a homeware store described as “physically” in Brooklyn, but “emotionally … in the countryside.”

… Post-feminism is most commonly associated with Gelman’s new target customer: the tradwife, trading corporate America for 1950s cosplay back home, undoing progress with every stitch she crochets for her Stepford family. She’s been talked to death, but what about her sisters, catalogued likewise online? The chronic sufferer, shopping for detoxes. The she-shaman, ketamine-tripping from medieval hut to modern Tulum. The overgrown “girl”; the nun, vocation questionable, in a cloistered abbey. The outright scammer, convinced she can turn the lemons of misogyny into lemonade for herself. Seemingly unrelated, except for one unifying theme: they all consider themselves the victims, or survivors, of a vast feminist setup.

4) “Political masculinism”

The French newspaper Le Monde has published an interview with the historian Michelle Perrot (who is 96, a fact that has filled me with admiration as I write this) about the backlash to feminism, the Gisèle Pelicot trial, the battles that feminism still faces and why populist nationalists are targeting transgender people, among other things. Here is her answer to that latter question, and how the movement against “gender ideology” is related to feminism:

We are witnessing a real war on transgender people. Masculinism is opposed to contemporary feminism – Trump and Putin see masculinity as the pillar of the world. But it is even more uncomfortable with the blurring of sexual boundaries. Gender confusion provokes a visceral fear. And it goes back a long way. Joan of Arc was burned for many reasons, but also because she usurped men's role as warriors. In the 19^th century, women who wore pants – which the Paris Police Prefecture forbade them to wear – aroused intense hostility.

Conservatives and reactionaries maintain that there is a natural or divine order that should not be altered. In their view, the order of the sexes is the foundation of the order of the world. But human beings are not assigned to a destiny. There is a biological given, but we can be free to choose our gender. If individuals are uncomfortable with this natural assignment, if they are of age or capable of discernment – before maturity, caution is called for – there is no reason to oppose it. This is what those who seek to reconduct male governance cannot stand. Challenging sexual boundaries is part of the feminist commitment.

5) The enigma of Bianca Censori

You may have seen the pictures of Kanye West and Bianca Censori, his wife, at the Grammy’s. The rapper with a penchant for Nazi insignia and antisemitic tirades on X is fully dressed (of course) while Censori is in a transparent dress with no underwear. For all intents and purposes she is standing there next to him naked, watched by the world. The look on her face is at best vacant or neutral. This is not the first time that Censori has appeared in public with West wearing little to no clothing, says Moira Donegan in The Guardian. It could be that the couple is engaged in an elaborate performance, “a critique of gender and celebrity”, but there is something so unsettling about seeing this woman, “a pure mute spectacle of flesh” (as Naomi Fry put it last year in the New Yorker). As Donegan notes, West has been accused of a number of instances of assault and abuse, some of which he has denied, and there are reports that the relationship with Censori has been abusive. Donegan writes:

It would be generous – and easier on our consciences – to imagine Censori and West partaking, together, in a critique of gender and celebrity. In this version of events, what West is doing when he stands behind Censori and watches her undress for paparazzi photographers is not using her degradation and vulnerability as proof of his status, but indicting us, the viewer.

His vampiric consumption of her body becomes ours: the brutal depiction of heterosexuality as a practice of domination and value extraction is shown to be the same as the practice of celebrity and its consumption. But if that critique is contained in West and Censori’s spectacle, it may be we, not them, who puts it there. Censori’s consent and knowingness is not, actually, in evidence here; and even if it was, consent exists, often, even in situations of asymmetry and violence, even in situations where great harm is being done. Critiquing Censori as an artist allows us to see her differently, as something more hopeful and complicated than a victim of brutality. But sometimes things are what they look like.

Bonus: Bridget Jones’s feminism | Javier Milei vs. the woke mind virus | Merz goes Musk | The world is the manosphere

Thank you so much for reading. See you next time