"The Future is Female"

Away from the individualistic, toward community and movement-building.

Audre Lorde, by JEB/ Joan E. Biren

It’s a cliché at this point: to begin an essay about “feminism” by writing about how difficult it is to be a feminist. I think I’ve read far too many anecdotes about how the author was called a feminist, but that was a thinly veiled insult. Something akin to being called a slut. They’re similar because both are about unacceptable femininity. They’re also different, because feminist implies nearly the opposite: a prude, transgressive, radical politics, maybe even that worst of womanly sins: unattractive to the conventional heterosexual male gaze. It’s so hard, there are so many enemies, and still, the author persists.

Except, you know, that’s not been the case for at least a few decades now. Perhaps it is in extremely conservative circles. So don’t hang out with them, or talk about other things if you must. There will always be people who disagree with you, no matter what you think or do. The rare exception being maybe Dolly Parton. Everyone loves Dolly.

As for liberal, leftist, progressive folks, feminist is a badge of honor. It’s worn lightly as an identity, a cloak of morality shielding that the user even before they do any real work to help womankind as a whole. It’s a label that helps people find the like-minded, the people who share our values. Feminists are now mainstream, let’s stop pretending we’re bravely facing the hordes for calling ourselves feminist.

That’s what this essay is about: the state of feminism. It’s about how both the meaning of the term and the movements against the gender-based oppression and domination of women have been diluted and weakened. It’s a request to turn away from personal when discussing feminism and to get back to looking at the bigger picture.

Do you remember the sweatshirts? The ones that declared “We Should All Be Feminists” and “The Future is Female”. Or “phenomenal woman” or sometimes just “feminist” in big, bold letters. They were so popular just before the pandemic. The first slogan is came from a talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who’s politics I do not agree with. It’s from an essay that hits many clichés. The third is from a poem by Maya Angelou, whose work I appreciate much more greatly.

It’s the second I’m most interested in. It was everywhere circa 2017-2018. Post 2017 Woman’s March on Washington D.C. Most girls and women who wore the sweatshirt probably didn’t realize where the slogan came from. It was from Labyris Books, a lesbian-feminist bookstore in New York City. They used it on their t-shirts, bookmarks, bags. Have you seen the old lesbian pride flag (scroll down to see)? It was a deep purple, with a black-and-white image of a labrys against an inverted triangle background on it. The triangle was the badge of shame that the LGBTQI+ people were forced to wear by the Nazis. The labrys is the double-sided ax of Amazonian woman warriors. It was used as a symbol of lesbian strength and individualism by the community.

The store wasn’t warm and inclusive: if you walked to their door and rang their doorbell, they’d check you out before deciding whether or not to let you in. It was run by lesbian separatists — “political lesbianism”. It’s the idea that women should separate themselves as fully as possible from men, which equates to rejecting heterosexuality to liberate oneself from a patriarchal society.

The slogan first became popular when artist Lisa Cowin took a photo of her musician-activist girlfriend, Alix Dobkin, wearing a white t-shirt with it printed in blue on the front. Cowin said:

“If we are to have a future, it must be female, because the rule of men — patriarchy — has just about devastated life on this beautiful little planet.”

Old lesbian labrys flag

I can’t imagine the many heterosexual women who wore the slogan on the front agreed with the philosophy of separatism behind it.

There’s a lot in Cowin’s idea outside of separatism though. Matriarchy: the idea that women in roles of leadership and governance. There’s research that backs up Cowin; we know today that women in leadership roles do more for the community as a whole. Team collaboration improves with feminine leadership. Data from Pew Research shows that most people think women are more honest, outgoing, intelligent, and far more creative and compassionate. The majority of people believe women are more fair as leaders. Sexual harassment and assault not only go down with women leadership, but when they happen, they’re usually handled better because women tend to believe victims. We know from hunter-gatherer societies around the world — which are more matriarchal and have greater equality — that rape is less frequent and it carries more shame for the rapist than it does in our patriarchal cultures.

And I’ll ask you to again take a look at the original t-shirt: it also had a design on the back. The labrys, a symbol of power from a matriarchal, women-led society. In 1977 — the year the bookstore shut down, it only lasted five years — the owners put out a statement in a newspaper:

More than just a feminist bookstore, Labyris functioned as a radical feminist ideological space. It provided emotional support for women in times of need and confirmed our anger, strength and love.

To remove the symbol not only makes it palatable to the mainstream, it also changed the original meaning and erases the communal and radical aspects. It also changed it from a lesbian slogan to one that was for heteronormative women and girls.

I imagine you already know which generated more profit.

Feminism Past to Now

The twentieth century brought feminist movements to the mainstream. It gave birth to sophisticated philosophies, the passion and sincerity of women involved gave rise to contentious debates. Lesbian separatists called for women to be “woman-identified women” — forming communities with and aligning with women — instead of “male-identified women”, loyal to men and the patriarchy. Other women, like bell hooks, wrote against separatism and instead called on men to change. Susan Brownmiller wrote about rape and the dangers of Black men. Angela Davis wrote about how Brownmiller’s analysis was harmful to the Black community and exclusionary to Black women.

Not to get too carried away specific. Whichever side of the arguments you land on is up to you. My point was the quality of the work. These writers and philosophers were formulating complex ideas and their rhetorical style with one another formed a sort of great conversation. The back-and-forth exchange of sophisticated ideas — allows options so that the rest of us can form our own personal philosophies of feminism, our style of advocacy and activism. And their activism had real world effects: marital rape was outlawed. Other laws around rape changed. Abortion laws changed. Women could open bank accounts and take out lines of credit without needing their husband or father’s approval. Women made huge strides in education and in the workplace. The social and interpersonal followed.

A combination of factors brought down second-wave feminism. While there were many writers who argued for inclusion and intersectionality, too many second-wave feminist did not. In-fighting, especially between the anti-pornography versus the pro-sexual liberation women. That movements seem cyclical: for a while, people will care about social justice, then they’ll stop, then they’ll start again, ad nauseam.

Whether we’re in the third and fourth wave of feminism is up for debate. That it’s up for debate that lack of clarity is telling. In the twenty-first century, we’ve not only failed to achieve much for women, but some of the previous successes — eg, abortion in the U.S. — are slipping away.

Why is that? I will argue that any definition of feminism has to necessarily be uplifting womankind as a whole. It has to be based in community and movement-building. It has to focus on ending gender-based oppression and domination, and turning the patriarchy into something that’s more balanced.

The problem is that’s not what today’s feminism is focused on. It’s instead addressing the smaller, more individualistic.

So-called feminists, popular here and elsewhere, have turned the crux of philosophy into arguments about interpersonal dynamics. It’s man versus woman. Read nearly any viral essay here or any feminist-influencer posts. They address one of a handful of topics: body positivity, the terribleness of heterosexual dating dynamics for younger women, the unequal division of domestic labor in middle class, two (heterosexual) parent household for the middle aged and those creeping toward it, the new #girlboss of making money and prioritizing that over community.

It’s not that these shouldn’t be discussed or don’t warrant attention: it’s that leading with them isn’t the answer because they’re not universal nor systemic. Those arguments exclude the concerns of working class women, single mothers, childless women, lesbians, many immigrant, women of color, and women of the global majority. This isn’t something I’ve noticed alone, a lot of my readers message me to tell me they’ve thought the same. The worst parts of this are the parts that argue for women to have everything men do, a sort of subversion of capitalism and ideas of equality — for women to aspire to what’s already hurting the men— the masculine lack of emotion connection in exchange for self-centeredness and the pursuit of accolades and money.

It’s become things like Sheryl Sandberg’s outdated Lean In, or this one. For a short time, I had a high paying job with a women investor. She had the second book on a coffee table in our office. She also thought that women who spoke about sexual harassment and sexual assault were “liars” because “women like sex, too” and “women hit on men, too”. She loved Ayn Rand, and didn’t understand why I didn’t. In public though? She called herself a “feminist” and proudly crowed about investing in women founders. She labelled her wealth acquisition feminist. You understand, especially if you’ve read my other essays but probably from this one alone, why that job was short-lived.

In the previous section of this essay, I provide a list of qualities that make women fit for leadership. Community. Compassion. Creativity. The perception of all of these. However, if we continue to push individualism, self-interest, and financial gain onto women, will women retain those qualities? If today’s feminism is about lifting only yourself up, would a woman who follows that philosophy be interested in improving material conditions of all humanity?

Feminism Appropriated

In an earlier essay about bell hooks’ Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, I wrote:

Too many thought [feminism] meant something it didn’t, or were uncertain of its meaning. hook wrote that if you detailed all the tenets of feminism to a woman, she might agree with them but still hesitate. The movement seemed too radical, today, too tied to leftism, or too far gone or not enough. For other, the conservative woman that Andrea Dworkin wrote about, it was contrary to their self-interest, which was to seek protection from men. For the non-white women, it seemed like a movement that was to benefit only white women. Even for the college-educated, middle class woman of today, feminists like Moira Donegan and Amia Srinivasan, have written of its perception of being “deeply unsexy”.

This is true of radical movements the world over: at first, outcasts and outliers kick off the movement. These are people who grew up working class, they’re Black women, they’re women of color, they’re lesbians. These are the people that feel the weight and agony of the way things are, they’re people who urgently need change. As Andrea Dworkin said:

Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.

These are like: Andrea Dworkin, ridiculed and reviled too often during her lifetime, or Angela Davis, who was literally placed on the FBI’s ‘10 Most Wanted’ list and served jail time.

Then slowly the movement catches on. When it gains traction and has some success — especially when it’s legislative/legal success, as with the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement and 1960s - early 1980s second wave feminism, it goes mainstream. The people who start joining aren’t so “fully conscious” of the agony. They’re joining later because they can do so without the risks to safety or comfort that the early instigators took on. These newcomers can keep their middle class lives. When the profiters — whether through seeking power or money — notice this, they find opportunity to exploit. The movement becomes something the original activists never wanted, their words twisted like the lesbians of Labyris Books and Audre Lorde’s were.

To sell sweatshirts. Or gain followers to do more #-sponsored-posts. These are the types that turn Audre Lorde’s words about “self care” —

"Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare"

into a slogan on social media to sell yoga classes, candles, daily affirmation journals. They miss the context of Lorde’s thought: written after she was diagnosed with cancer, as Lorde thought about how to pace herself so she could continue writing and working despite her illness, and despite the material conditions imposed on her by a racist, misogynistic, classist world.

Lorde’s words about preserving yourself to continue serving movements and community become not only a marketing tool, but an excuse for increasing disconnection from serving community, and self-centeredness.

Feminism Future: Reincarnated

Have you picked up on the structure of this essay? Each section begins with the idea of feminism as something idealistic and radical, and then gets into how it disintegrates. The essay is only vaguely linear, it goes back and forth through time so that I could bring in examples to illustrate my point: that movements die when (1) they turned from community to the individual, and (2) that allows for were appropriation by people who want to make money off of it and to personally benefit from them. It’s the latter stage we’re in now, which is why I said “feminism is dead”. It’s dead because it was commodified.

I’d like to think of this as an opportunity. If the feminism is dead, it frees us to give birth to a new feminism and new movements. A new start, and we can take with us the lessons we learned from the past, what worked and learn to avoid the pitfalls that led to past failures.

That, of course, is easier said than done. Most movements suffer from eventual fatigue. As the Andrea Dworkin quote, it’s agony to be fully aware of the depths of true oppression of women.

The answer to that is in Audre Lorde’s quote: self-care. By which I mean real self care. Building community to hold us when we are weak. Listening to one another in times of trouble instead of “protecting our peace”. Forming a new version of that second-wave classic, the consciousness-raising circle, to better learn about what troubles the members of our community and support each through it. Offsetting unequal domestic and childrearing labor with women through women collectively helping each other. Offsetting the loneliness of modern dating with strong support networks and platonic relationships. Mentorship. Sponsorship. Sharing resources when we have more than we need. Knowing that money is important in meeting our basic needs, but we don’t need to monetize every interaction. Rethinking what it means to be successful, and what it means to be happy. Seeing that different identities offer different strengths. The young inspiring and revitalizing the older, the older offering the wisdom of experience. People of color bringing the strength and experiences borne of lifelong oppression. The working class and the disabled the fight to be seen and heard at all. The lesbians and trans folks showing what it is like to choose to live as outcasts. To paraphrase Audre Lorde, taken together, these differences aren’t to be tolerated; working together, they can spark a creative dialectic.

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