Angry, Joyless, and Completely Right
Drag yourself to one of those self-congratulatory blogger conferences and you’re immediately sorted into one of four conversations: fashion, politics, tech, or feminism. At the fashion panels I stand in the corner nursing a glass of champagne, contributing nothing because I genuinely don’t know what Karl Lagerfeld did this season and have no desire to find out. With politics I drift instinctively left. With tech I make my annual atonement by buying a new iPhone. But feminist panels—feminist panels do something specific to me. I get angry and bored simultaneously, a combination so physiologically unpleasant that I want to set a chair on fire.
I grew up surrounded by competent, confident, formidable women. In kindergarten, in school, at work, in every friend group I’ve ever had. The idea that someone somewhere was genuinely, seriously arguing that women deserved fewer rights or fewer chances—I couldn’t process it as a real position. It felt like something an RTL producer had written for a talk show villain. Guys on television saying they’d only fuck virgins, that the kitchen was the appropriate destination for women, that regular slaps kept things orderly at home. I didn’t take any of it seriously. It seemed too cartoonishly remote to land.
Sexism belongs in my head in the same category as racism, classism, or frankly cannibalism: artifacts from some dim, almost mythological past when rich men kept slaves and sea captains got eaten. So far outside modern reality that I can’t generate a proportionate response to it. I know that’s a position of privilege. I also think it’s not entirely wrong.
My genuine respect goes to every woman who ever put her safety or her career or her relationships on the line to fight gender discrimination—in the large historic sense and in the small, daily, unacknowledged one. The ones who gave things up, who got hurt, who pushed anyway.
And yet. Every time I sit through a feminist panel or read a feminist publication, something goes wrong. The mixture of irritation and tedium rises in me like a reflex. Not because the goals are wrong—I agree with the goals. But because the people pursuing them are, with alarming frequency, angry, humorless, and boring.
They want to rename salt shakers to something gender-neutral and mean it seriously. They push for mandatory gender quotas that ironically reinforce the same sex-based categorization they claim to oppose. They go on SlutWalks. They pathologize human sexuality. They treat Alice Schwarzer as an authority. All of this with the relentless, tight-lipped gravity of people who have never once found their own cause funny.
Nike van Dinther described it better than I could: when you simply say the word feminism, a gigantic bomb goes off in many people’s heads
—assembled from stereotypes, armpit hair, Peaches strapping on a plastic penis on stage, unattractive politicians, Alice Schwarzer, and man-hating as ideology. She also made the reasonable point that labels exist for a reason: to find common ground, to locate like-minded people quickly. Fair enough.
In principle, every intelligent and reasonably informed person should be a feminist—should care about equal rights, oppose discrimination, push for fairness. But when the movement pursuing those exact goals presents itself as this uninspiring, this disconnected from how actual people live, the distance it creates is its own doing.
This would be a much easier cause to defend—and it would have many more male defenders—if it matched the modernity of its demands with something like modern presentation. Less of the suffocating seriousness. Fewer of the clichés it keeps performing despite itself. Different vocabulary. Different icons. No quotas. No linguistic contortions that alienate the very people you need on your side. A version of feminism I could sit down in front of without wanting to set a chair on fire.