The Rise of the 'Womanosphere': on Woman Hating Women

On the rise of a new brand of antifeminism, and how women work to keep other women compliance and complicit with the patriarchy.

Andrea Dworkin. I drew upon her Woman Hating and a few recent articles/news stories for this piece.

Let’s talk about the elephant-in-the-room that is feminism: the women who work against it. These are the women who express hate toward women like me. I know because I get at least one of them in the comments or notes a daily (delete then block works well on Substack, by the way). These are the anti-feminists, the women who intrinsically believe in feminine inferiority. They would take down a woman who doesn’t agree. And further, openly, I’m sure they’d say arrogantly, doesn’t want to conform. When I write anti-feminists, I mean that it goes beyond mere neutrality to feminism, but actively works against feminism, and/or to behave in sexist ways toward women categorically.

The title of this essay takes from a book by one of my radical feminist favorites, Andrea Dworkin’s Woman Hating.. Her use of language, the strong rhetoric style…there’s no one I know of who wrote like her. This book is, she wrote, “an action, a political action where revolution is the goal”, and an early second-wave feminist polemic. One of its claims is ending male dominance, but the book relates example after example how women are complicit in the oppression of women.

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Online Anti-Feminism

After I wrote the title and introductory quote, I stumbled upon an article in The Guardian titled Now comes the ‘womanosphere’: the anti-feminist media telling women to be thin, fertile and Republican. The article described the second-fastest growing YouTube account in Q1 of 2025: the anti-feminist influencer Brett Cooper, and the growing influence of influencers like her, especially for Gen-Z. Brett Cooper’s Spotify audience is about 60% female.

The alternative vision these influencers are proposing is scarily retrograde and would strip women of their freedom and economic independence. “You want to go back and sit in a cubicle when you could have this, like, beautiful amazing child that you’ve created with the love of your life?” Cooper asked rhetorically on a recent podcast appearance.

Actually, Cooper, I would rather…sit at a laptop or in a conference room. I believe I should be able to make that choice.

The book and the article were written fifty-one years apart. The phenomenon persists.

Dworkin’s Woman Hating

There have also been, always individual feminists — women who violated the strictures of the female role, who challenged male supremacy, who fought for the right to work, or sexual freedom, or release from the bondage of the marriage contract. Those individuals were often eloquent when they spoke of the oppression they suffered as women in their own lives, but other women, properly trained to their roles, did not listen¹.

Some women don’t listen. Others do and act against. For example, 2016 study found that women were more likely to use misogynistic language than men (52% versus 48%)². Today, we have some options, and some women work to curtail those options for other women.

The phenomenon of women’s active complicity in the oppression of other women extends back through human history. Dworkin estimates that nine million women³ were executed throughout the Europe (Northern Europe) for witchcraft. An example of feminine complicity in this can be seen through the Salem witch trials. The core group of accusers were young women. In ancient India⁴, women weren’t burned at the stake, but they were sometimes burned alive on their dead husband’s funeral bier. The practice wasn’t widespread, but if a widow didn’t comply, she was often socially ostracized and neglected. Dworkin’s book goes into detail about feet-binding in ancient China. The origins of the practice were rooted in marriageability, compliance with sexual attractiveness to men, and class distinctions. After all, only a wealthy man could afford a wife whose mobility was restricted, unable to walk far or do manual labor, in the ways that severe foot-binding restricted mobility. The practice of breaking the bones, binding the feet, and forcing girl-children into smaller and smaller shoes was carried out by their mothers.

One could argue that the women of earlier centuries were simply “properly trained to their roles”, too properly to resist, too worried about their futures or their daughter’s futures to not comply, too restricted by patriarchy to have much choice. I have sneaking sympathy for those earlier generations women: their options in life were so curtailed. And for me, it is easy to look and the cruelest practices of previous generations and wonder at the high rates of compliance.

It never ceases to amaze me how social pressures, fear of consequences, and self-interest combine to keep people not only silent, but obedient to norms. Yet, if I had a daughter, I could not imagine breaking the bones of her feet myself. Nor if I were some great-great-great-grandmotherly relative of my own, encouraging a young widow to immolate herself. Most of all, I couldn’t imagine randomly accusing other women who were a bit different of something that would lead to their deaths.

That obedience to norms, worried about their futures and their daughters futures is at work in modern-day anti-feminism as well. In her typically extreme way, Andrea Dworkin compared foot-binding to modern-day beauty rituals. For my family, especially my mother, that meant that when I was a teenager, I had to suddenly become feminine, including make up and heels. She told me I couldn’t wear shorts unless I shaved my legs…at the age of ten. These ideas scared and upset me, and were the cause of many arguments and tears (only from me). They also thought that perhaps it was alright that I worked a couple jobs while pursuing college. Maybe college would help me get a better Mrs. degree, maybe a doctor or an engineer.

Today, we further have Evie Magazine, which is a tech-funded magazine that’s sort of like a conservative/trad wife Cosmo or Glamour. It provides sex tips for married women only (and I’m sure, they don’t mean a woman married to a woman, either). A sample title from Evie: What Do JD Vance’s Blue Eyes And Sydney Sweeney’s Curves Have in Common? America Misses Classic Beauty And Wants It Back. The adjacency of classic beauty to whiteness isn’t very subtle to me.

Evie is very in-line with the influencers sending out the same message: eg, conservative Black woman Candace Owens recently started a platform called Club Candace. There are thousands of videos tagged “anti feminist” on TikTok, with women speaking of how proud they are to be anti-feminist, and women all over social media declaring that they support the patriarchy.

A recent piece called Why I Love Being A Hot Mom oscillated between glib declarations like “skinny sex is the best sex” and diatribes from the author about how she despises “mediocre motherhood” and the “lack of self-control, unattractiveness, and state of disease” that results from embracing body positivity. (Disagree with her? You’re probably a “sorry, sad, chronically online gutter goblin”.)⁵

“Though they have different tactics and tones, like their cohorts in the manosphere, they play with the idea that calling women fat or ugly is fun and transgressive – framing it as part of a virtuous quest to rid society of woke, feminist ideals⁶”

I would agree that the mockery might appear light on its face, but the underlying motivations are to rid society of choice for women. We often call what I’m calling choice feminism. The idea is to restrict the number of choices available to women by making some of those choices uncool and tying them to “ugly”.

Under antifeminism, much of a woman’s value lies in her sexual appeal to men. And I wonder if, given that a middle class life feels less attainable to so many, especially gen-z…that if some of the women who watch Brett Cooper and other anti-feminist or trad wife influencers gravitate toward them because of the life of economic security that they show. That perhaps some of them see a steady job as a far less tenable option than marrying a traditional, well-off man.

Quite literally, though human history, to attract and marry the right man was the best mechanism to power available to a woman. And today, if you look at lists of the world’s wealthiest women, that remains true. Much feminine wealth is still inherited (#capitalism) (#pulledthemselvesupbythebootstraps), through a male relative (the four wealthiest) or an ex- or dead husband. Only 17% (according to Wikipedia) of the world’s women-billionaires are self-made. Some are like Rafaela Aponte-Diamant, but in that small numbers are many like the Kardashians: using feminine beauty as the key to their wealth. And online trad wives aren’t billionaires, but their platforms are or lead to very successful businesses.

Pain is an essential part of the grooming process, and that is not accidental. Plucking the eyebrows…learning to walk in high heels—these things hurt. The pain, of course, teaches an important lesson: no price is too great, no process too repulsive, no operation too painful for the woman who would be beautiful. The tolerance of pain and the romantizicization of that tolerance begins here, in preadolescence, in socialization, and serves to prepare women for the lives of childbearing, self-abnegation, and husband-pleasing. The adolescent experience of the pain of being a woman cast the feminine psyche into a masochistic mold and forces the adolescent to conform to a self-image which bases itself on the mutilation of the body, pain happily suffered, and restricted physical mobility⁷.

Abortion & Anti-Choice Women

You know what those ideas of “mutilation of the body, pain happily suffered” remind me of? A bit of Christ sacrificing himself, the equivalent of which for women seems to be child birth. Which is, of course, the ultimate goal for many of the online anti-feminists: to encourage all other women to join them into the painful solidarity of giving birth.

Many woman, of course, want children. The majority, I believe. Many do not, or do not want more. Historically, the most common category, of women who sought abortions were women who had a or several children and didn’t want more.

The arguments against abortion prioritize the fetus over life, well-being, and independence of woman carrying the fetus. The involvement of women of childbearing age in the anti-abortion movement is quite effective: they can argue that they would carry the child. They can argue that they would sacrifice themselves. They too often argue that pain, physical and metaphysical, is essential to womanhood.

In 2023, Texan Kate Cox was denied an emergency abortion in her state. Kate Cox’s received a fatal fetal diagnosis and continuing the pregnancy would pose risks to her health and future fertility. She then sought an abortion out of state, because she wanted more children in her future and didn’t want to jeopardize her ability to do so.

Rachel Roth Aldhizer, an anti-abortion activist with a “profoundly disabled” child, wrote:

It’s simply not true that carrying a disabled child will result in health complications for the mother, or will threaten future fertility, as Ms. Cox’s lawyers argued. What carrying a disabled child with or without a most likely fatal diagnosis will do, however, is put parents’ face to face with their own mortality. It is easier to have a physician terminate and dismember a fetus of 20-weeks gestation than let nature take its course, however painful.

As far as I know, Aldhizer isn’t a physician or medical professional, so it’s remarkable that she presents herself as someone whose knowledge supersedes that of Ms. (Kate) Cox’s physicians in Ms. Cox’s specific case. Aldhizer further wrote:

Ms. Cox needs to understand that motherhood is not signing up for just the good stuff—kids that get straight A’s, play sports, paint pictures for the fridge, and make us proud because of their accomplishments. Motherhood goes much deeper.

Are you willing to give your time, resources, and comfort for the sake of another? If not, don’t seek motherhood.⁸

The last sentence of her quote, about “seeking motherhood”, reads ironically pro-choice. Many women who abort do not have the time and resources (especially financial) to have a child.

Kate Cox already had two children at the time she sought an abortion, and wanted more. I’m sure she had a thorough understanding of motherhood, as thorough as Aldizer, who also has four young children. Aldizer’s delegitimizing Cox’s decision, her sneering contempt that another mother wasn’t mother enough, both seem to make Cox out to be “less woman” than Aldizer herself.

And it’s not only pain that these women are arguing for, it’s that they are arguing that sacrificing a woman’s life for childbearing makes her more of a woman, too. It’s the ultimate sacrifice, or it’s god’s choice if the woman in question lives. Of course, if all should be left in the hands of ‘god’, then why should science and medicine exist at all? The argument isn’t logically consistent.

The world these women want to return us to frightens me. In 1979, the New York Times reported that there were 20 million illegal abortions worldwide, and it was a leading cause of death of women of child-bearing age⁹. The thought of forced pregnancy and birth, of unwilling parenthood, and of the possibility of traumatic childhoods resulting frighten me as well.

Leftist Woman-Hating

There should a single word/phrase just for that type of insecurity that focuses itself on getting others on board with one’s choices. Here in San Francisco, I’ve experienced the left wing/hippie version more frequently than the conservative version: for not being polyamorous and not being interested in ENM (“ethical non-monogamy”).

Don’t get me: I think sexual liberation is a generally good thing. People should have the right to have sex with other fully consenting adults of their choice. There’s a beautiful quote from Audre Lorde’s essay Uses of the Erotic of the importance of sexual liberation to feminism and creativity:

But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revolution, nor succumbs to the belief that sensation is enough….The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects—born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony.

Where that goes too far is when it gets into pressuring women into sex. In her essay Ending Female Sexual Oppression bell hooks wrote,

The focus on ‘sexual liberation’ has always carried with it the assumption that the goal of such effort is to make it possible for individuals to engage in more and/or better sexual activity. Yet one aspect of sexual norms that many people find oppressive is the assumption that one ‘should’ be engage sexual activity. The ‘should’ is one expression of sexual coercion¹⁰.

For me, it was too often women who would make small, contemptuous verbal jabs. It seemed to me a way to enforce that I be as sexually available to men as they had made themselves. Andrea Dworkin goes a few steps further with that phenomenon in leftist/liberal circles:

The pop idea was that fucking was good, so good that the more there was of it, the better. The pop idea was that people should fuck whom they wanted: translated for the girls, this meant that girls should want to be fucked—as close to all the time as was humanly possible¹¹.

Dworkin further argued that men of the left wanted to protect the right to abortion to ensure unfettered access to sex with young women. That women somehow want to align themselves to pressure other women into sex, especially sex with men, as unbelievable as most of the other feminine behaviors I’ve described.

Why Women Categorically Hate Other Women

I find one of the very saddest forms of women-hating-women to be women hating the woman who is sexually harassed and/or sexually assaulted. In discussions with my mentors, we’ve all found that it’s women who are the most cruel to women rape victims, women who side with the abuser. These are women who will go out of their way to have the victim ostracized. Just last week, I spoke to a woman of color who was pushed out of her job after harassment - who spoke of how white women largely sided with the harasser, and this while she was going through tremendous pain in her family life. Part of it is that all too often, it’s the abuser/assaulter that holds power, and so, some women align themselves with power and privilege.

I remember and hear from too many women about how they feel that other women tell them that if the other woman had survived the pain of assault and abuse in silence, so every other woman should also valiantly and silently bear the pain of assault and abuse. It’s reminiscent of the silence with which women expect other women sacrifice themselves for fetuses and unwanted childbirth.

Inevitably, this causes women to take the rage and contempt they feel for the men who actually abuse them, those close to them, and project it onto others, those far away, foreign, or different¹²

I think that quote from Andrea Dworkin actually gets at the true motivation of women who feel angry when other women are raped: that it’s their own misplaced anger. Because what I’ve too often found with those victim-blaming, angry women is that they, too, had been assaulted.

And it makes me wonder, if we wind back through — through history, from childhood and teenager training compliance with “painful” beauty standards, to childbirth, through to sexual assault/abuse — if it’s misplaced rage at the unfairness of the burden placed on so many women, the lack of choice, the restrictions and the dangers and vulnerabilities, that make women want to somehow push other women into carrying the same burdens and the silences.

It’s too simple to say it’s only that, too simple to say “they’re just jealous” or that these behaviors are wholly the fault of men (the patriarchy, which also hurts men, and not men). It also seems to me that some women genuinely believe that complicity and the patriarchy are women’s best options. And then to feel more secure in making the choice they made, they want to force their choices upon other women.

For me, feminism is equality and choice. I want choices to be available to women, I want women to be able to speak up and be heard, and I want those to be as available as possible regardless of class, race, sexuality, caste, religious belief, ethnicity, immigrant status.

1. Dworkin, Andrea. Woman Hating. (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1974. Republished New York: Picador, 2025.) p. 9.

2. The study controlled for “casual” language, eg., “b!tch please” wouldn’t be considered misogynistic.

Laville, Sandra. Half of misogynistic tweets sent by women, study finds. The Guardian. May 26, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/26/half-of-misogynistic-tweets-sent-by-women-study-finds

3. Ibid. p 120.

4. Pre-British conquest.

5. Silman, Anna. Now comes the ‘womanosphere’: the anti-feminist media telling women to be thin, fertile and Republican. The Guardian. April 24, 2025.

6. Ibid.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/24/womanosphere-conservative-women

7. Dworkin, Andrea. Woman Hating. (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1974. Republished New York: Picador, 2025.) p. 105-106.

8. Aldhize, Rachel Roth. Human dignity is threatened in Texas. World. December 11, 2023. https://wng.org/opinions/human-dignity-is-threatened-in-texas-1702296094

9. Dworkin, Andrea. Right Wing Women. (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1983. Republished New York: Picador, 2025.) p 67.

10. bell hooks. Ending Female Oppression.

from ed. Shulman, Alix Kates & Moore, Honor. Women’s Liberation! Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution & Still Can. (New York: Library of America. 2021). p 463-471.

11. Dworkin, Andrea. Right Wing Women. (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1983. Republished New York: Picador, 2025). p 79.

12.