Taking Feminism Back From Capitalism
Techno-fascism and choice feminism have emptied the movement when we need it the most.
Women using artificial intelligence tools is actually empowering, one actress says on her Instagram. Using GLP-1 drugs to lose weight is an expression of women's bodily autonomy, a commercial featuring a prominent athlete seems to imply. Feminists made women work, when we were actually supposed to be doing glamourous domestic work edited into quick clips that result in a pleased husband and some brand deals, one influencer's content argues.
Lately, the word "feminism" feels like an optical illusion—the concept is evoked, ostensibly to make some kind of point about gender and freedom, but when I actually engage with it, ask questions about it, it simply disappears in a fog of self-serving justifications for behavior that essentially follows the status quo and re-entrenches patriarchy. In the last ten years, feminism has become many things it was never meant to become: a marketing strategy, an excuse for bad behavior, a scapegoat for the very gender oppression the movement intended to fix. It's a disappointing turn of events that risks rolling back decades of women's rights—but how did we get here?
The spaces we had to discuss feminism—to disagree with each other, to build a politic—no longer exist.