glosswatch

Feminism evolves yet the essential format of misogyny remains the same. At least, that’s what I think when reading this piece by Anne Lloyd, entitled Feminism is Dead, Long Live Femininity. Here is an article that ticks all the anti-feminist boxes (great for a drinking game – you’d be off your feminist face in no time). Seek and ye shall find each of the following familiar assertions:

• feminism is too “outdated” and “aggressive”
• women in the West don’t need feminism (compared to, you’ve guessed it, Afghanistan, where they do sexism properly)
• feminism involves a woman “masquerading as a man in a man’s world” (no idea whether this applies to Afghanistan, though – let’s just forget that bit was ever mentioned)
• yes, there are some crappy things happening here (i.e. not in weird places like Afghanistan), but change is already happening in and of itself (“albeit slowly”)
• feminism is making women lose touch with their femininity (“because they have been cultivating a masculine version of power”, whatever the hell that means)
• women need to go back to using the skills that are hard-wired in their nature (“accordingly to Julia Margo, a British authority on female skills, emotional intelligence and communication are far more important than brawn”)
• women are in fact taking over (“today, in the West, we are moving into a woman’s world” – but not thanks to feminism, it would appear)

Blah blah blah blah blah (btw, I haven’t literally been having a drinking game with this – I’m irate enough on camomile tea). I have read this and heard this a million times before and still it gets to me. Indeed, my response is profoundly unfeminine; stupid ideas have a tendency to make me lose sight of those womanly qualities I need to hold dear (“compassion, intuition, multi-tasking, collaboration, receptivity, and creativity”, where are you now?).
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