Is Feminism Self-Defeating?
Reading the recent work of two feminist scholars who think so
Feminism is supposed to put women first. Feminism fails because women always put something else first. I am paraphrasing Feminism Beyond Left And Right, a short, yet satisfying book by philosophy professor Holly Lawford-Smith, who asks why some gender critical feminists refuse to work with the right.
Lawford-Smith takes us through a study of the history of leftist feminism and concludes that leftist feminists are signaling an empty moral virtue, putting leftist men ahead of other women — again. Leftist women have done it before, consistently, whenever asked to choose between the liberation of women and whatever it is that leftist men want.
Lawford-Smith recalls Andrea Dworkin and the second wave feminist project, a political movement of women concerned exclusively with women. She calls her book “an intervention on the frequent dust-ups inside feminism that happen whenever there is what a leftist might perceive as a ‘right wing threat’, and to the claims routinely made in those flare-ups.”
Lawford-Smith uses just three of the many controversies in gender critical feminism as examples: the 2019 Heritage Foundation panel that featured three radical feminists and a detransitioner; the 2023 expulsion of MP Moira Deeming from the Liberal Party for co-hosting a Let Women Speak event that uninvited neo-Nazis showed up to salute; and the social media ostracism of ‘Aja’, a feminist of color in the UK, for attending a Tommy Robinson event.
Although Lawford-Smith does not emphasize the point, it is notable that each controversy centered on women working with, or being perceived to work with, or endorse, men. Women always fight women over men in a mistaken belief that their solidarity against other women will ever be returned by leftist men.
Whenever feminists object to alliances of convenience with feminists who hold different opinions about feminism, their actions “may be based on delusions about the standing we have to lose” with men, Lawford-Smith argues. ‘Left’ and ‘right’ serve only to divide women against women, making their politics into the domain of leftist men.
How did a philosophy that once sought liberation for women become about inclusion for men? This is the question Kate Phelan, a philosopher and lecturer of feminism at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, poses and answers in her new book, Feminism Defeated.
Phelan traces the rise of so-called third-wave, or intersectional, feminism in the academy, and shows how its logic leads to depoliticization and ultimately, the defeat of feminism. Female academics write to please leftist male academics, give up on the difficult work of liberating the female sex class, and use the language of academia to sound intelligent while they sell out feminism.
Roxy Tickle, the man who has pursued Sal Grover relentlessly in Australian courts for four years to punish her for knowing that he is a man, arrived to the most recent kangaroo courtroom verdict flanked by women, most of them appearing to be actual women. Ask those women in the picture whether they are feminists, and likely all of them will say yes. Their feminism has defeated the feminist project.
