I’m a bad feminist - and proud
On International Women’s Day, why are so many women pulling other women apart? So much for sisterhood, says Hannah Betts
Over the last week, not one but two cardcarrying feminist heroines – Woman’s Hour veteran Jenni Murray and actress Emma Watson – have had their credentials called in; the former for arguing that trans women are not “real women”, the latter for exposing her breasts. The jury is still out on whether Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – author of the essay “We Should All be Feminists” – qualifies as a “bad feminist” for modelling for Boots No7 and lending her slogan to Dior.
Meanwhile, ahead of International Women’s Day today, the Women’s Equality Party has been distributing publicity declaring: “It’s coming… Feminism 5.0 #5thwave”. It is a move that prompted more than one of my feminist allies to sigh: “Oh, God, that means at least two waves have passed me by. It feels like not having done your homework – something you have to do ‘right’, or be condemned for being pathetically wrong. It’s official: I’m a bad feminist.”
Well, welcome to the club, sisters. As a child of the Seventies, feminism is my life’s most beloved and fundamental cause. Yet, over my 45 years, I have been informed that I’m a “bad feminist” for such innocuous activities as enjoying clothes and make-up, sporting heels and cleavage, “looking like a doll”, not having children, and having “too many” male friends. This despite the fact that, 20 years ago, I used to teach feminist theory to Oxford undergraduates.
A London feminist academic, who asks to remain anonymous, chokes when I tell her I will be addressing this subject. “Christ, I would not want to be writing that. You’ll be crucified. Today, you’re almost a bad feminist by being a straight, cisgender [biologically born] woman.” Few may talk this way outside academia, yet one finds “being heterosexual, married, and a mother puts you on the wrong side of so many debates because you’re viewed as being hopelessly heteronormative. I’m so bored by all the internal conflict that I’d probably agree with former feminists who say they now hardly identify as feminist at all. Legions of other feminists would claim I wasn’t one, and that’s with my PhD in gender.”
How has it come to pass, this ostracism from the movement that felt like our most cherished birthright, this self-censorship in which one chooses silence over engaging with so many lacerating Twitter trolls? On Sunday, I was informed by a man on social media that Murray was a bad feminist and should resign. I disagree, but such micro-aggressions exhaust me into muteness in a way that mere chauvinism never achieved.
The feminism I grew up with was, by definition, an inclusive movement: a mutually supportive space for women to fight for equality by standing up against the patriarchal system – many voices uniting in one cause. It was not this hectoring, savagely gladiatorial arena in which other feminists are targeted with more vigour than the forces that continue to oppress us.
For this vicious infighting only serves the interests of the Neanderthals who dismiss us as carping feminazis, and stereotype the entire movement as a case of libtard v libtard. No less does it alienate the young women whom we might otherwise be encouraging to rally to the cause; girls who look at Watson’s mauling and think: “Hold on, isn’t feminism about doing what we want, with our breasts not least?”
When these young people do find a representative – Beyoncé, say, or Lena Dunham – then they must witness these women being trashed by those who style themselves purer sisters. Fellow writer Polly Vernon was brutally attacked by Twitter’s self- appointed feminist mafia following the publication of her book Hot Feminist.
“A couple of critics were particularly savage, and this sort of weaponised Twitter. I received hundreds of tweets from women who called themselves feminist, detailing how stupid I am, how dangerous, how wrong. Added to which, a lot of my detractors explained they hadn’t actually read my book because they knew it would be dire.
“The mid-term consequences were pretty devastating. I got incredibly anxious, stopped eating, sleeping, started twitching. Almost two years on, I’m still burned by the experience. One of the things I’d wanted to achieve was this sense that there is no right way to be a feminist; that you find your own way, and don’t let other people tell you you’re doing it wrong.”
The results have been alienation from the cause that Vernon had considered herself part of since childhood. “I don’t easily describe myself as feminist any more. I think of myself as someone who wants certain things for women – but also, actually, certain things for men. I am as concerned by men’s appalling mental health record as I am by Irish women’s lack of abortion rights. And I am routinely annoyed by Twitter feminism’s endlessly repeated rhetoric that women should be themselves! Be brave, loud and proud, and speak out! Because when I tried to do that, I was shut down.”
“Shut down” feels like the right phrase. I will always identify as a feminist and would find it impossible not to. However, many – like Vernon and my academic friend – feel increasingly disengaged from a movement that manifests as tortured, neurotic, and self-flagellating.
Did we make a religion of feminism that heretics have to be so severely censored? How did this come to pass in a politics that purported to celebrate difference? And how ironic that we are condemning our fellow travellers to the same speechlessness that women were condemned to under patriarchy.
American cultural critic Roxane Gay, in her 2014 collection of essays Bad Feminist, remarked: “So much responsibility keeps getting piled on the shoulders of a movement whose primary purpose is to achieve equality, in all realms, between men and women. I keep reading these articles and getting angry and tired because they tell me that there’s no way for women to ever get it right.
“They make it seem like there is, in fact, a right way to be a woman and a wrong way to be a woman. And the standard appears to be ever-changing and unachievable. Feminism can, at times, feel rigid and not accepting of women as we actually live our lives.”
Were this sentiment to become widespread, this would be a tragedy – and an insult to the countless women who devoted their lives to the cause. Never more so than on International Women’s Day, we owe it to these women – as to the women of the future – to preserve feminism in all its inclusive glory. And we need to work on this together, now.
If there’s one advantage to the p––––grabber-in-chief lording it over the free world, it may be to act as a unifying force.