A Word Looking for the Exit

The best possible outcome for the word "feminism" is that it becomes redundant. Not because the project failed, but because it succeeded so completely that the category has nothing left to do. Women have equal rights in every domain of life, and the word quietly dissolves. That’s the finish line. That’s what winning looks like.

What makes me uneasy is how many people seem to want the opposite—want the struggle itself to be permanent, the category to stay warm, the enemy to remain in view. There’s a version of this that’s less about equality and more about maintaining an ideological identity, and those are not the same thing. The loudest voices online calcified their positions a long time ago, and the debate has mostly been the same argument on repeat ever since.

So what’s more interesting to me is what the word sounds like to someone who hasn’t been pre-loaded with a stance. The YouTube channel Cut Video asked girls and women between the ages of 5 and 50 what they associate with feminism. The younger the respondent, the more unguarded the answer. A five-year-old doesn’t have a discourse to perform—she just has an instinct. Those instincts are more honest than anything you’ll read in a think piece.

Maybe that’s the clearest data point we have on what the word actually means to people before anyone tells them what it should mean.