Feminism Names a Problem

Toward a better debate

Feminism Names a Problem

Esther Berry

In his lesser-known academic work Studies in Words, C.S. Lewis laments that modernity has been robbing words of their meaning, collapsing diverse shades of signification into simply “good” or “bad.” “Awesome” used to mean something that filled the one who witnessed it with awe. Now it means “good.” “Fantastic” used to mean something that was unbelievable, as if dreamed-up. Now it means “good.” “Dreadful” used to mean something that filled the soul with that indescribable feeling we call dread. Now it means “bad.” And so on.

Critiques of modernity, particularly from a classical or Christian perspective such as Lewis had, frequently complain that words are being used to mean just about anything, and that no one believes in right or wrong anymore—that our language has grown vague and our ethics have become relative. But Lewis is arguing just the opposite. As he sees it, words suffer in our day not from semantic overload but from semantic underload; the rich and layered world of the poets has been flattened into a set of shrill, emotive declarations of morality. The modern world has not been stripped of moral imperatives but of everything except them, and all our dictionaries have thus become thesauruses—and catechisms. No more awe, no more dread; only good and bad, right and wrong, chad and virgin.

This variety of linguistic rot, having successfully converted most common adjectives into homogeneous moral goo, has now set its sights on more complex and abstract ideas. This plays nicely into political polarization: liberals can in good conscience boycott Chick-fil-A because it is “fascist,” while conservatives may boycott Target because it is “leftist.” Although I have no strong love for fast food or fast fashion, attributing either fascism or leftism to chain stores seems to me to be fantastical nonsense. Similarly, owing to my long-standing preferences for local businesses and beer that tastes good, I do not buy much Bud Light. But I draw the line at arguing that Bud Light itself is gay. It’s a beer.

In many conservative circles, the word “feminism” has been hollowed out in precisely this manner to simply mean “bad.” This usage is common in all echelons of conservative media, showing up in the words of social media influencers, celebrity pastors, think tank scholars, and authors alike.

This was the heart of Helen Roy’s critique of conservative Catholic author Carrie Gress’s recent book, Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused with Christianity. As Roy explains, “Gress advises her readers to embrace patriarchy as interchangeable with ecclesial hierarchy, the same way she advises them to reject feminism as interchangeable with the occult.” Roy argues persuasively that Gress’s dismissal of traditional definitions of feminism and patriarchy results in a violent, even nominalist way of treating a movement that is exactly as multifaceted and contradictory as any other. Leah Libresco Sargent explored one consequence of this problem: that it leaves Gress’s readers unprepared to engage fruitfully with those who hold opposing views. What are they supposed to do when they meet someone who identifies as a feminist but isn’t an occultist?

Far from clarifying the moral stakes of the question, this kind of deliberate stripping of language badly obscures relevant arguments. I deal in this essay with Gress by no means because she is the most egregious anti-feminist, but because her work is an especially clear example of this problem. By rejecting commonly held definitions of feminism and embracing the equation of feminism with evil, she weakens her own argument rather than strengthening it.

Anyone interested in a fruitful conversation about the benefits and risks of feminism—including its skeptics and enemies—should begin by resisting egregious oversimplification.

Defining Feminism

One historical example of this sort of linguistic catastrophe was the liberal under-definition of feminism: the effort to make it mean, simply, “good.” The unreflective and aggressive optimism of this project, most purely encapsulated by the popular early-2000s-T-shirt-slogan “feminism is the radical belief that women are people,” left in its wake a trail of understandable cynicism. If feminism is nothing other than the radical belief that women are people, you’d have to be a pretty rough sort of fellow not to identify as a feminist. Who doesn’t want to be part of a group whose defining characteristic is the possession of basic decency and reasonability?

This explicit under-determination of the feminist cause would not have wreaked so much havoc, except that it was combined with an implicit over-determination. It turned out that being a feminist meant signing onto other propositions somewhat more contentious than the ascription of women to the human race. This invited a brutal sort of syllogism—e.g., “abortion is a feminist interest, feminism is the radical notion that women are people, and so if you oppose expanded access to abortion, you must think that women are literally not people.” The seemingly all-inclusive definition of feminism was a sort of bait-and-switch: you sign up to believe that women are human beings and then suddenly you’re on the mailing list for a bunch of causes you’re not so sure about.

Generally speaking, in proportion as feminism makes itself an “easy sell,” it sacrifices the unity of the movement. Trying to correct for this by sneaking in determinate political platforms only proliferates opportunities for confusion. My mother, who grew up in Washington in the 80s, has fond memories of going with her own mother to women’s rallies and pro-life rallies on back-to-back weekends. Only later did she realize with some dismay that she had been counter-protesting herself. Her mother, my late “Nanama,” remained a staunch feminist until her death in 2016. Nanama’s political vision was quite simple, largely consisting in the remarkably nonpartisan strategy of voting across the board for women. For several decades, she would simply bubble in next to the female names on every ballot, regardless of political affiliation. (Unless they were both women, in which case she’d vote Democrat.)

But if defining feminism so optimistically as to be simply interchangeable with Good and Decent is just as absurd as defining it Evil and Occult, this raises the question: isn’t the broad definition of feminism, as a woman’s civil rights movement, similarly problematic? And doesn’t the same difficulty arise in Leah Libresco Sargent’s definition of embodied feminism more specifically—pursuing justice for women as women? Isn’t that just as reductive as “the radical belief that women are people”?

I do not think so, as long as the contentious implications of these definitions are understood. Feminism understood in this way consists of intellectual and political efforts to pursue justice for women, but it supposes additionally that such efforts are necessary—and that they are wise. Most contentiously, I think, it implies the existence of a problem to which feminism is a solution.

Is There a Problem?

Feminism names a problem. Feminists are united by their belief that there is a problem, and different types of feminists are distinguished by their varying theories about the roots of that problem, its most egregious manifestations, and what solutions to pursue.

On this account, the most natural reason for someone not to be a feminist would be if they believed that the problem feminism purports to solve doesn’t actually exist. One might say, for instance, that feminism was necessary back in the day, but now, due to widespread social equality between men and women (or, alternatively, because women have taken over and it is men who are now the real victims), it is not. Or one might say that in all of history women have never been victims any more than men have, and that it is absurd to have a movement focusing on justice for them specifically. Or one might say that women used to have it good, but now after decades of trying to solve imaginary problems we’ve actually created injustice toward women that would summarily disappear if we only stopped trying to solve that first, imaginary problem.

I do not agree with any of these positions. They strike me as historically and philosophically untenable. That is why I am comfortable identifying as a feminist. But lots of people do hold these beliefs, entirely in good faith. Many people are opposed to feminism not because they doubt that women are people, nor because they think that feminism is nothing other than a cover for Marxist occultism, but because they think it is a pointless and dangerous exercise in jousting at windmills.

Generally speaking, the identification of a persisting, historical problem of systemic injustice toward women is what unites feminists. Denying this problem is what unites anti-feminists. This is implicit even in the broad definition of feminism. We pursue justice for women, because we believe that women are—presently and historically—subject to injustice.

Opponents of feminism might be resistant to this way of defining feminism. But they needn’t be, since such a definition would help clarify their own positions and arguments. Again, consider the example of Carrie Gress. By rejecting the broad definition of feminism, Gress obscures foundational premises in her own arguments. Since she wants to define feminism as simply Bad, as an openly occultist anti-family religion, she struggles to explain why she is so opposed to visions of feminism that purport to be non-Bad. Despite her attempts to indict all feminism as a homogeneous anti-Christian ideology, Gress’s deeper opposition to feminism rests on simpler grounds: she does not think that women need any kind of social movement focused on them as women. Feminism names a problem, and she doesn’t think that problem meaningfully exists—except in ways that have been accidentally produced by feminism.

In one revealing passage toward the end of Something Wicked, Gress lambasts the idea that women “qualify as minorities,” arguing that this is an argument made primarily by “front-row women” in positions of privilege, at the expense of “men and boys, poor women, children, and the unborn.”

Front row feminism feeds on the idea that women qualify as minorities, not realizing that they are now at the top of the heap, economically and educationally. The unblinking spotlight on women’s issues and the much-maligned patriarchy lulls women into believing that they are still not equal, with the mirage of equality always just beyond reach. (158)

I think this is much closer to an honest encapsulation of Gress’s problem with feminism. She is opposed to the idea that women need a women’s rights movement or have ever needed one. A few pages later, she argues that Christians must reject “the ideological notion that women are somehow victims” (167). Similarly, in an interview with Hannah Spier, Gress addressed the frequent question she receives about what we should call a movement advocating for women, if not “feminism.” She says:

You don’t have a name for [a movement for] men like that. You don’t have a name for children like that. Why do we feel this compulsion? We have to have a special name for studying women? My response has finally become, why do we need it? What is it providing us? If it’s not an ideology, if we’re really talking about the truth about human nature, then I don’t think that we need it. We can just use womanhood or women or study women. It doesn’t have to get that complicated.

To which Spier responded:

Men don’t have a group where it’s them, where they have been so fragile, so they need a group just for men to further the cause of men. That’s what feminism is.

If I am right that the problem named by feminism is the real bugbear to anti-feminists like Gress, then the contested historical argument of Something Wicked is somewhat incidental to the core of her conviction that a more wholesome, embodied “feminism” would still be a bad idea. Even if feminism was defined, as Helen Roy would have it, simply as a women’s rights movement, Gress would still be opposed to it. For she believes no such movement is necessary, and she believes that any sort of thematic focus on the injustices facing women betrays a “victim” mentality unfounded in reality. Although she acknowledges that women are uniquely vulnerable, and that we should create “a civilization in which vulnerability is considered and cared for and the needs of women met,” she disagrees that we need a movement dedicated to advocating specifically for women.

In her critique of first-wave feminism, it is clear that Gress does not actually think feminism was a response to any real problem in need of solution. Given the position that even first-wave feminist grievances were either fabrications or revolts against something that was good, her alarm at the movement that tried to “solve” these grievances makes a great deal more sense. In one video, Gress cites the “consciousness-raising” meetings of second-wave feminists as evidence that feminists have historically been dedicated to riling women up for no reason. But for no reason is an important premise in this argument! Raising awareness of existing injustice is a commendable project; manufacturing bitterness at fictional injustice is not.

Toward a Better Debate

I have focused on the work of Carrie Gress here, because her body of work presents such a clear instance of the impulse to define down “feminism” until it simply means “bad.” But she is not an outlier. Last year, Mike Pantile described feminism as “the manifestation of hell on earth.” Doug Wilson, the evangelical Christian nationalist pastor endorsed by Pete Hegseth (the head of the United States Department of War) has said that feminism “wants us to be ruled by harridans, termagants, harpies and crones.” Matt Walsh describes feminism as simply “an ugly and bitter ideology.” Pearl Davis succinctly defines feminism as “a hate group that wants to take money away from men.”

When the word “feminism” becomes so semantically impoverished that it is interchangeable either with “good” or “bad,” depending on what side you’re on, fruitful argument about the merits and risks of a women’s rights movement becomes impossible. In either case, the other side is assumed to just be bad, “something wicked,” senseless ideologues impervious to reason. Further, it disposes us to simplistic narratives of history: that all women were miserable, abused, powerless slaves until the twentieth century, or that the time before feminism was a golden age of social contentment and marital bliss. Neither story is accurate; the truth is simply more complicated.

The capacity for childbearing makes women uniquely vulnerable, and finding structures which reliably protect women is a difficult task. In large part this is because rigid family structure is high variance for women: it can be protective and wholesome, and it can be isolating and dangerous. Husbands can be friends, protectors, and advocates; they can also be abusers. In a highly patriarchal society, a woman’s happiness is thus strongly contingent on the character of her husband, from whom she may have precious little recourse if things go awry.

It is hard to appreciate the danger that this arrangement poses to women, simply because most of us do not live in it. In a society so thoroughly reshaped by feminism, it can be easy to forget the very real injustices and sufferings faced by Western women in earlier eras (which are still experienced by women in many areas of the world). When you have never lived in a world characterized by the political, educational, and economic exclusion of women, the contemporary excesses of mainstream feminism feel like a much more immediate threat. And in a time marked by successive technological and social upheavals, of which the women’s movement was only one, it is tempting indeed to find one single movement to blame for our current predicament.

It is the case that anti-feminism is often saturated with misogyny—just as it is true that feminism is prone to misandry. But we should engage intellectually with the best our opponents have to offer, not the worst. Carrie Gress oversimplifies and demonizes feminism, but underneath this veneer lies a perfectly coherent complaint: that there is no problem to which feminism is an answer, and thus any effort to “liberate” women is doomed to make their situation worse.

Unlike many anti-feminist influencers, Gress shares with her feminist opponents a genuine care for women. She simply believes that feminism has exclusively been a source of, rather than a solution to, injustices faced by women. This is a point upon which she and I disagree, but it is an important and interesting point of contention. Exploring this question further might lead to extremely fruitful conversations between feminists and skeptics of feminism. Such good-faith dialogue must be founded, however, on a notion of feminism broad enough to accommodate disagreement from within and narrow enough to accommodate disagreement from without.