The Question That Never Gets Old

No argument generates faster, stupider heat than the one about whether feminism is still necessary. Ask in public and within minutes you have three incompatible definitions of the word, two people who’ve clearly never thought about it for more than thirty seconds, and at least one person who just wants to yell. This has been true long enough that you’d hope we’d have gotten better at the conversation by now. We haven’t.

The spectrum of positions runs from "women belong in the kitchen" to "men should be abolished," with every possible shade of defensiveness and conviction in between. What gets lost in the theoretical back-and-forth is the material reality underneath it—the small daily incidents that aren’t dramatic enough to count as a headline but accumulate into something that shapes how people move through the world.

Suzie Grime—German YouTuber, habitual stoner, fashion creature, general chaos presence—decided to go straight at the question and asked a handful of fellow creators to weigh in: Nilam Farooq, actress and online personality; Michael Buchinger; Luna Darko. She wanted their actual experiences, not their theoretical positions. The difference matters. Everyday sexism is much harder to dismiss when someone is describing a specific thing that happened to them in a specific place, rather than constructing an abstract argument about structural inequality.

Whether you buy the word "feminism" or not, the material reality it describes doesn’t disappear because you reject the label. That’s the thing these conversations keep bumping into, and the thing that makes them worth having even when they’re exhausting—which, at this point, they almost always are.