“My own definition is a feminist is a man or a woman who says, yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it, we must do better. All of us, women and men, must do better.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Many months ago, I was driving home from one sports practice or another with my four school-aged kids in the car. For context, the older three are boys and my youngest is a girl. The boys were being loud and ribbing on each other, particularly their younger sister, and at some point or another I made one of those angry mom faces in the rearview mirror.
Particularly sensitive to any intervention I do on behalf of their sister, the boys let out frustrated groans. “You’re always sticking up for her,” one of them remarked irritably.
“Yeah,” said another. “Is it because you don’t even like boys?”
My stomach clenched. “What makes you ask that?” I replied, trying to stay neutral and curious despite the emotion I was feeling.
“Well, you think girls are better, right? I mean, your whole company is about girls and how great they are.”
“Oh, baby,” I said, sincerely. “No. I don’t think that they are better. Girls and women just face some specific challenges sometimes. But I can see where you might wonder about that knowing that’s what a lot of my work is about.”
The two middle schoolers looked at me incredulously, eyebrows raised and with a slight eyeroll. I’m not sure if I could have expected much else, given that their faces were almost permanently contorted like this lately. But I felt terrible.
I knew this was going to need to be a more extensive conversation than I could have while not even able to look at them from the front seat, and I told them I wanted to talk more about this later that night. I was probably met with some sort of “whatever,” but made a commitment to discussing it at bedtime.
As we continued our drive home, I felt this gnawing sense of guilt and grief for how my sons were feeling. It was hard to tell how much they’d been genuinely believing that their mom carried this bias against their gender versus struggling with the way their younger sister seemed to be catered to. I suspected both were at play, and could one be unconsciously influencing the other? How were my own biases – unconscious ones – impacting my parenting?
I sat wondering too – what had my women’s health focused work communicated to my sons? Was it telling them that their concerns weren’t as important in the world? That they didn’t need support in the same way that girls and women did? This of course wasn’t my intention, but was it the impact?
Because I certainly didn’t think boys, writ large, were doing okay. Reading Ruth Whippman’s BoyMom and my interview with her illuminated that clearly as it spelled out the heaps of data showing boys have fallen behind in educational attainment, mental health, and transitions to adulthood. No one could argue that the male gender was thriving, and I definitely wasn’t making that case either.
But was my focus on women’s mental health an example of what so many of the (mostly male) political pundits were saying? The most extreme of these were claiming that we’d helped women enough and that continuing to pour into girls and women was actually discriminatory given the data on boys’ functioning.
It was of course the same argument against any kind of equity-based programming or resources, the basis for the radical dismantling of everything from corporate DEI programs to the Women’s Center at my alma mater, where I had spent my last two years of college working.
Hearing the Joe Rogans and the politicians who shall not be named talk about these issues was honestly easy for me to dismiss. It was such thinly veiled sexism, racism, capitalism, and extremism. But sitting with my own little boys as they genuinely tried to make sense of it all slowed me down. I wanted to make sure I was making sense of it too.
I wanted to make sure I wasn’t doing what I claimed to reject in others: failing to think critically about these nuanced issues. I wanted to stay curious and contemplative to the complexity of it all. There were just so many questions.
Can we still call ourselves feminists?
I’ll warn you that there may be no real answers in this particular essay. I in fact won’t even begin to cover this topic in the fullness it deserves. I’ll point you to some other writers and thinkers who are wrestling with it, though. And you’ll get a glimpse into my own thinking process. It may not be all that satisfying, but I hope it will spark curiosity as we collectively navigate this era.
I know I’m not alone with trying to sort through some of this, though. Elena Bridgers, writer of the popular Substack, Motherhood Until Yesterday, recently conducted an admittedly unscientific poll of her mostly liberal feminist-identifying female readers. Of the 6,000 or so responses to her poll, almost two-thirds of the women agreed with the idea that “feminism has had unintended negative consequences for society.” What those consequences have been, in readers’ views, were wide-ranging, and their endorsement of that statement doesn’t necessarily indicate what they think the value of feminism is (i.e. What social movement in history has not had unintended consequences?). That said, it feels at baseline clear that that even feminist-identifying people are aware of the imperfection of feminism itself. In my view, that’s a good thing. Let’s be awake to the challenges of our social movements.
It’s important to consider that that data is drawn from people who mostly identify as feminists. But many women don’t use that label. There’s no evidence of a decline in women using the term for themselves, but it’s interesting to note that how surveys ask the question matters a lot. When asked about whether you are a feminist and including the definition of “someone who advocates and supports equal opportunities for women,” 61% of American women agree. When asked only about using the term feminist, the number drops sharply to 29%. This seems to suggest that most women agree with the tenants, while possibly not using the term in practice.
This alone begs the question, why does such a large portion of women who believe in the tenants of feminism not self-label that way? This could be the subject of its own book, but I suspect it has to do with everything from the “ball-buster” stereotype that so many 90s girlies (and beyond) got to valid concerns about the way that popular feminism has failed on issues of intersectionality and had unintended (but not unanticipated?) consequences.
As I mentioned, we aren’t seeing a downturn – yet – in the use of the term feminist, but I believe we will in the next few years. And it will be because of a stew of these reasons, not the least of which will be a spotlight on the way boys and men are suffering.
And again, there is no doubt that boys and men are suffering. If you are skeptical of this, I offer this data: Boys are struggling to make it through the educational system and are almost twice as likely to drop out. Boys are profoundly lonely, with 25% of male youth describing themselves that way and 15% saying they have no close friends. The social disconnection only intensifies their mental health concerns, and men are twice as likely to engage in drug and alcohol misuse and twice as likely to die from an overdose. They are up to four times more likely to die by suicide.
So while some debate the very notion that boys are flailing in modern society, I don’t. That’s not my question (though I don’t mind others debating this in reasoned ways). For me, the question is instead whether the fact of their struggling makes feminism either to blame or obsolete.
Laid out more fully, what I’m asking myself, the data, and the world are these questions:
Has gender equity reached a point where we can comfortably say that gender-specific resources are no longer needed and/or actually harmful to the other genders or the collective?
Simplified: Are we post-feminism?
If yes, can we actually trust that assessment given the proliferation of misogyny that is potentially driving that narrative?
Simplified: Is the patriarchy trying to destroy feminism from the inside?
Let’s start with whether feminism is to blame.
Did feminism cause the way that boys and men are struggling?
I think it’s first important to differentiate between feminism as a philosophy (per Britannica, “the belief in social, economic, and political equality of the sexes”) and feminism as a system of resources – things like special programs, tailored approaches, scholarships, new policies, and so on. We often conflate the two, but I think it’s worth acknowledging that they are different. In all philosophies and social movements we can observe ways in which the ideals get skewed or have those unintended consequences when they are translated to action.
That said, it’s a good and valid question to ask whether the programs and policies implemented to support the “equality of the sexes” over the last few decades have been the source of the decline in male achievement, stability, and health.
Those who suggest that the answer is yes primarily point to the resource allocation that has gone to girls and women over the last few decades. It’s based on a zero-sum idea. If we go with that, indeed, initiatives like Title IX, women’s leadership programs, and gender-based scholarships could be thought to be taking a set pot of (primarily financial) resources and allocating more to women than men. This is based on the fundamental notion of equity, and is intended to acknowledge the historical and structural under-allocation to that point. Some have a baseline problem with the notion of equity, and arguing that basic notion here would require too many words and a likely be a waste of time, so I won’t go there.
The actual question is whether taking more from the pot to address women’s needs harmed men’s needs. Importantly, we’re not talking about whether men have had proportional gains to women’s gains as a result of these programs. That was never the point given that we were trying to bring women up from a severe disadvantage. We’re talking about whether it made things worse for men.
As I review the literature, it’s hard to find any evidence to suggest that programs and resources have harmed men directly. In fact, some causal studies on initiatives like Title IX actually show that both boys and girls benefited from increasing opportunities for girls, albeit in different ways.
More subtle and harder to measure is the impact of messaging of gender-based programs on boys and men. Some critics have raised concern that the way that support for women is framed can convey a sense of disposibility to boys and men. If we frame boys and men as perpetual perpetrators in our discourse, for instance, they internalize these ideas of how they are perceived and who they are. If we dismiss boys’ and men’s issues as being irrelevant or distracting to the cause, we send a clear message. I think here about the well-intended refrain “The future is female!” – a phrase I used to use liberally until I thought about its implication. I knew I wasn’t implying we would eradicate all that is male, but I figured there had to be a more ways to represent a more inclusive future.
Given the increase in initiatives – both formally through policies and informally through “girlboss” marketing – over the last couple of decades, it’s tempting to attribute everything from the male loneliness epidemic to educational deficits to feminism, but this just doesn’t hold up. Much more robust research suggests that the rise of social media and digital childhoods are to blame. Boys spending incredible amounts of time indoors, away from real humans, and lasered in on dopamine-pumping video games has been highly correlated with the social and mental health challenges that we are seeing.
Even if it’s not hurting boys and men, is feminism really needed anymore?
You might not think that I would stop and consider this question, but I assure you I did. I wanted to not just take my knee-jerk reaction to the question of whether women continue to face systemic barriers or my own attachment to the movement, but to make sure I deeply considered it.
Where I landed was that I do see women thriving. There is no question as to whether women are in a more equitable place politically, socially, and economically than 100 or 50 or even 20 years ago. We now have equal voting rights, birth control, no-fault divorce, and much more robust policies against sexual harassment. And, as I write that list without even intending to make this point, we can see it as a checklist of the things that many are trying to strip women of this year.
Women are thriving – some might say in ways that men are not right now. But that thriving is incredibly and increasingly vulnerable to changes that remain in the disproportionate hands of men (e.g. 26% of U.S. Senators are women; 28% of Congresspeople are women).
And women are decidedly not thriving in other ways. It would be almost impossible to list out the various ways women continue to face systemic barriers, but I’ll offer just a few:
The World Economic Forum predicts it will take another 123 years to reach gender parity in pay.
Women continue to bear greater caregiving responsibilities and do more unpaid labor at home, contributing to lower promotion rates, greater workforce dropout, and greater dissatisfaction.
Women are disproportionately excluded from biomedical, health, and safety research.
25% of women experience intimate partner violence.
I’ll stop there, but I hope the point is clear. There are still long ways to go to address the myriad social, economic, and other disparities that women face.
I can’t help but think of the famous quote by Marie Shear back in the 80s which said, “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.” Feminism does not suggest that people of other genders are not people, but for some reason this concept is hard. We saw the same (often intentional) misrepresentation happen with the assertion that Black Lives Matter.
To the question of feminism specifically, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie might say it best in her book-length essay, We Should All Be Feminists:
“Some people ask: “Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?” Because that would be dishonest. Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general—but to choose to use the vague expression human rights is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women.”
Let’s Wrap
If you’ve been able to bear with me this long, well… thank you. I still think we have about 80,000 more words to go on this topic, but I’ll commit to wrapping this up.
If I had to draw some conclusions, they would be tentative ones. But I would suggest that we are far from a post-feminist world. I’d suggest that feminism has (long) been misunderstood and misrepresented, leading to an attribution as the source of male suffering that’s just not just not justified by the data.
That’s not to say that the way that we implement feminist ideology hasn’t created unintended harm. It’s not to say that we can implement policy without regard for the downstream implications on boys, men, and people of all genders. In fact, if we didn’t, that would be pretty anti-feminist.
When I talked to one of my sons while putting him into bed the night of the car talk, I found myself telling him more about why I’d started my practice with a focus on supporting the mental health of girls and women. I told him about some of the ways that girls have been treated in schools, in workplaces, on the street. He was surprised, particularly, he said, because his current teacher seemed to really like the girls in the class better than the boys.
“And how does that feel for you?” I asked.
“It’s not fair,” he replied. “I feel like she should listen to our ideas and not act different if we are a boy or a girl.”
“That’s what feminism is actually all about,” I explained. “Not judging people based on their gender.”
“Oh, well that’s cool,” he remarked, seemingly genuine for a middle schooler.
“Maybe you’re a feminist?” I asked tentatively.
He laid his head on my shoulder and I could smell the shampoo he’d been using since he was a small boy splashing in the tub. “Yeah, maybe I am.”
