The negative feminism trap (and four other stories)

Five reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism to end your week.

Is it grey where you are? It is in London, where summer seems to have officially disappeared. I hope you enjoy this week’s reads as much as I am enjoying drinking my coffee while watching the rain.

Here they are….

1) A negative feminism

I’m a bit late to this fantastic piece in New Left Review’s Sidecar blog, which asks whether feminism today is anachronistic in its reliance on, and idolisation of, second-wave thinkers, and reductive in its focus on pain as a common denominator of women’s experiences (and on writing as the main vehicle for feminism). As Caitlin Doherty puts it:

It cannot be overstated how deeply boring all this is. How unthrilling, how inessential, to how few urgent questions this seems to contain the seeds of any possible answers. As Dworkin said of porn (after her friend said it of heroin): ‘The worst thing about it all is the endless repetition.’ We’ve been here before, of course, in the past few years’ debate over Afropessimism. Similar risks adhere to a negative feminism: if the aim is to move from a biological conception of gender, as of race, to one that is socially constructed but no less real for it in its consequences, might it not behoove us to arrive at a category definition that does not condemn all those who fall within it to limitless amounts of pain? Feminism has no absolute right to existence. It must describe something about the world accurately for it to make sense as a political-philosophical position. And that description must contain within it verifiable truths about the current situation of women, or else it will be – only – a style.

2) Meanwhile in Afghanistan

For women under Taliban rule, the current situation is extreme oppression and denial of rights. Earlier this month, the Taliban banned beauty salons, saying they contradict Sharia law. According to Kabul Now:

The ban on beauty salons, [which] according to estimates, will leave over 60,000 women unemployed, is one of the over 50 restrictions the Taliban has imposed on women and girls since seizing power in August 2021. Last week, the Taliban violently dispersed a group of women protesting against the ban in Kabul with tasers and gunfires.

One of those 50 restrictions was the ban on women’s education. Last week, a Taliban official reiterated at an event that this measure would remain in place until women “conform to the framework” of the Taliban. As per Kabul Now:

Speaking at an event in Khost on Thursday, Mohammad Yunus Rashid [deputy of youth affairs at the Ministry of Information and Culture], said that women “claim to have the right to wear make ups [sic], go out and joke with strangers. Unless they give up these claims, the Islamic Emirate will never allow them to go to school.”

“Unless women conform to the framework, we will not give them rights,” he said.

“When women accept they are women [as the Taliban defines them], they will be allowed to pursue studies in these four fields: medical science, religious studies, security such as policing, and education to become teachers,” he added.

This week, women’s rights groups in Afghanistan published an open letter to US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, after US officials met with the Taliban in Qatar, saying the US has ignored the demands of the country’s citizens. They wrote:

We would like to remind the US and all other flagbearers of women’s right [sic] and democracy that Afghanistan has changed.

3) The pensions gender gap

The Common Wealth think tank has a new report out on what’s wrong with UK pensions. They found that the system is unbalanced, unequal, and insecure. Among the inequalities is a gender gap: “median pension wealth for men in the UK is just over £3,600, for women it’s 9x less, at just £400”.

4) Francis Fukuyama on how technology shifted inequality

In this generally very interesting Q&A on AI and biotechnology (which Mr. End of History says worries him more than AI taking over. Yikes!), Francis Fukuyama has the following to say when asked how social media, the internet and technology have impacted democracy (hat tip to

Will Lloyd

for finding this):

…one consequence that I don't think people have recognized sufficiently is a massive decrease in inequality that was brought about by the transition from an industrial to a post-industrial economy, and that concerns gender relations. The replacement of physical labor by machines and the shift in the nature of work from an industrial economy to a post-industrial one—in which most people instead of working in factories or lifting heavy objects, are sitting in front of computer screens all day in a service industry—has had an enormous impact on the role of women in the economy. Beginning in the late 1960s, virtually every advanced society began to see significant increases in female labor force participation. Now, some people might say this was an ideological or a cultural change, that there was a movement for women's equality that appeared at that time. This is one of those areas where I think cause and effect are very hard to disentangle. It is certainly the case that you could not have had the degree of female empowerment if you didn't have occupations for women where they could earn salaries, support families, and be independent of their husbands. And this began to happen as tens, hundreds of millions of women all over the world entered the workplace in the late 20th century.

5) Backlash corner

This week, I came across a few reminders that the backlash to the changes Fukuyama outlines above is very much alive and kicking. Exhibit A is the upcoming book by Britain’s apparent pre-eminent public intellectual David Baddiel. For those not familiar, Baddiel is/was a comedian identified with 90s lad culture, but is now writing rather serious books and making serious documentaries about topics like anti-Semitism, religion, and social media. Baddiel’s next book, about manhood, is called The Male Gaze. According to an interview with him in The Times:

The Male Gaze’s starting point would be the proposition Baddiel articulated to Beth Rigby on her Sky News chat show in January, that men can both objectify women’s bodies and respect their minds. “That single thought about the male gaze is something I’ve always deeply believed,” he says, “which is why I’ve always been quite open about using pornography.”

I include Baddiel’s book because the premise — I can both turn women into sex objects and take them seriously as CEOs and high-court judges — smacks of a system aching to justify its continued existence. But maybe that’s just me.

Exhibit B is slightly more obvious and extreme. The US right-wing, Catholic commentator Matt Walsh (of “What is a Woman” fame) has been tweeting some of his bold claims about feminism recently to his 2.4million followers on X/Twitter. It’s useful to remember that this stuff is out there and influential. For example:

60 million dead babies thanks to feminism. That’s just in the United States. Hundreds of millions worldwide. And we haven’t talked about how feminism has been working for a century to destroy the family unit.

Yes it’s the most destructive. Very few close competitors.

And also:

This is a good time to remember that feminism has killed far more people than the atomic bomb. It is perhaps the most destructive force in human history. Trans ideology, its off shoot, is competing for the title.

Okay, just one more. Here is his video explaining how “feminism led to trans ideology”, which seems mostly aimed at the gender-critical feminist Helen Joyce who said she didn’t like his film and that she disagrees with him:

I think that being a man means something and it means more than just anatomy. And being a woman means something and it means more than just anatomy. See what you don’t understand is that your rejection of this principle, your claim that a whole bunch of things don’t follow from being a man or a woman, that being a man or a woman has essentially no significance aside from differences in sex organs, means that you and your ideology are to blame for exactly the thing you pretend to be fighting against. You made this. You did it.

Meanwhile, in the UK, the broadcaster Andrew Neil has declared in the Mail Online (for clicks? because he means it?): “Why I'm proud to be a 'TERF' and join JK Rowling on the front line in the gender wars”. Thanks, Andrew, for stoking those divisions.

And thanks to you for reading. See you next time.