Thread by @JillFilipovic

A huge anti-feminist backlash is underway, and abortion rights are only one part of it. The backlash is coming from the right and the left. And it shows no signs of abating.

jill.substack.com/p/welcome-to-t…

Backlashes are just as cultural as they are political -- the cultural moments set up the political ones. And since 2016, a cultural backlash has been underway in response to women's increasingly obvious desires for power and freedom. Few things are as unsettling as female desire.

Anti-feminist political gains are to the credit of a right wing that has played the long game and used a variety of tactics, from elevating far-right law students into far-right judges no matter how paltry their qualifications or their intellect, to embracing extreme violence.

But the increasing cultural hostility to feminism, and to women who are power-seeking or ambitious or successful and want to be equal participants in public life, is not a partisan effort and spans the political spectrum. This is the backlash.

Part of the backlash has been the sneering at feminist earnestness. Women being excited about the prospect of a woman in the White House? How uncool. How simple-minded. How typically female, to vote with your vagina and not your brain.

Feminists really are emotionally attached to our cause. We are earnest in our dedication to it. The anti-feminist backlash has come alongside a rising cynicism, a sense that being too invested is girlish, vaguely embarrassing, like donning a pink pussy hat to a lady-march.

This only scaled up as women made more demands and accrued more power. The middle-aged #resistance hysterics were responsible for a bunch of midterm wins, but who cared? These are women who are definitionally uncool: Too old, too boring, too mom-ish, too earnest.

The women doing the work of feminist politics often weren't very good at performative cynicism or edgy jokes or cruel mockery of their opponents, which are among the most valuable currencies in the social media ecosystems political reporters and Very Online activists live in.

Instead, the women working for women's rights - or working for progressive politics, or for Democratic wins - are either wholly invisible or easy objects of mockery from the cynical men who have deemed them unfuckable (or, sometimes, find them very fuckable and hate them for it)

A successful feminist movement = women get more power, more would be demanded of men, and men would not be the presumed leaders or winners of anything. And a bunch of the women doing well wouldn’t be cool or hot or young, or otherwise deemed worthy of public participation.

Feminists did not break down male-dominated power structures, nor disabuse anyone of the notion that a woman’s value rests in her desirability & men’s approval of her. Male approval remains the metric by which women are judged, and women understand that gaining it pays dividends.

With the men at the top of various power structures and subcultures now far less reticent to express their distaste for feminists and women who seek power / success / recognition, feminism became far less appealing, even to women who generally agree with the movement’s aims.

At the same time that there was a broad disparagement of women’s political participation — particularly when that participation was focused on getting more women into office — there was a parallel rejection of women’s professional ambitions.

What started out as legitimate critiques of women who claimed feminist principles only to badly mistreat their female employees became a wholesale crusade against so-called “girlbosses” — a term that came to mean any woman who was professionally successful or ambitious.

Female ambition and accomplishment became signs of both feminine moral failing and bad politics. You cannot be a person who is both dedicated to feminist and progressive causes and also be a woman who desires some modicum of personal and professional success.

In progressive spaces, there is now a broad rejection of any feminism or female behavior that is seen as individualistic, while there is no parallel rejection of male individualism.

There is a push on the left for a less individualistic & more interdependent culture. That's good. But it comes without recognition that the demands of interdependence are not made of men and fall mostly on women, who make up the class of people who are and will be depended-upon.

At the same time as all of that, the right has embraced the antifeminist products of feminism who “have it all” — the Amy Coney Barretts of the world, who are professionally successful (thanks in part to the right-wing legal ladder) and who are also traditional-minded mothers.

Others insist that the tradwife isn’t a racist antifeminist throwback; she’s simply a rejection of neoliberal capitalism, and who can blame her? The tradwife, the woman who has it all — see? Women don’t want feminism. Women can choose whatever they wish, no liberation necessary.

The rollback of abortion rights has long been building. But it’s coming at a time when US culture has grown much more hostile to women in public life, and when women are destabilized, self-conscious, and exhausted. This is an America particularly receptive to setting women back.

You can read the whole piece here:

jill.substack.com/p/welcome-to-t…