Many Moms Are Frustrated With Feminism
They’re just afraid to say so
A quick post-publication note: a lot of women in my community felt misrepresented by this piece because I used a very badly-designed leading survey question in order to collect the information that fueled the debate. I am genuinely sorry for that. The article is an accurate representation of my own (current, ever-changing) views on the state of feminism but I can’t claim to speak for anyone but myself.
This was not what I was planning on writing about today. I had a whole series of articles lined up on sleep and food prices and women hunting in the Paleolithic (or rather, not so much). Don’t worry, all of that is still in the queue, but I felt compelled to address the topic of FEMINISM because I accidentally stepped on a landmine in my Instagram stories yesterday.
Here’s what happened. I decided I wanted to collect a bit of data on who exactly my followers and readers are, because I was starting to suspect that I was mostly hearing from a vocal minority in the comments (which did not represent my actual reader base). These tend to be folks who live at the extreme tail ends of whatever topic I happen to be writing about. And while sometimes it’s interesting to hear from them, I also think that I end up bending over backwards not to offend these folks when in fact the vast majority of my readers or more in the middle. The survey confirmed this suspicion.
But perhaps the most interesting bit of information that came out of the survey was the fact that–although 75% of my readers identify as “liberal” and a whopping 80% consider themselves “feminists”--the MAJORITY also agreed that “feminism has had unintended negative consequences for society” (52% said “yes,” and 20% said “not sure,” with only 28% saying “no”). Among my paid readers this number was even higher: 65% said yes.
So out of 6000-odd respondents, mostly self-proclaimed liberal feminists, the majority think that feminism has some serious self-examining to do. Later, when I posted the (aggregated, anonymous) results of this survey as a reel, the visible, public comments were almost exclusively bold defenses of feminism. Which is to say: dramatically different from what I was seeing in the survey and in my DMs.
Conclusion: a large portion of moms (because my followers are almost ALL moms) are frustrated with feminism, but most of them don’t dare express themselves lest they be publicly reprimanded.
What are the main complaints? I got more replies that I could ever possibly parse, but having read at least half of them, I’ll try to summarize some of the patterns I am seeing here:
Moms are burned out trying to do it all and be it all. Feminism pushed us into the workforce but didn’t do much to take away any of our other responsibilities in the process. The status quo is not working, and many mothers think feminism is partially to blame.
Mainstream feminism (especially the girl-boss brand that we millennial moms grew up with) was too deeply intertwined with capitalism and patriarchy and too focused on getting women to play by men’s rules in a man’s world. In the process, it contributed to a further devaluation of care work, nurturing and community values.
Feminism–especially the Me Too movement and Cancel Culture–alienated a lot of young men and pushed them towards the Manosphere. Boy Moms are especially frustrated with this phenomenon because now it’s on us to make it right by raising our boys to be “good feminists” even though all they really want to do is hang out at construction sites and play with nerf guns.
Feminism took things too far with the sexual revolution by convincing women that signing up for casual sex was fun and liberating, when the truth is that not very many of us have ever had a truly enjoyable one-night stand.
I think each of these merits an 80,000-word non-fiction book (and in many cases, that book already exists, see Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century regarding Objection 4, or Ruth Whippman’s Boy Mom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity regarding Objection 3, or Elissa Strauss’s When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others regarding Objection 2, and many more).
But I am particularly interested in Objection 1 and Objection 2, which are deeply linked, and occupy a good deal of my brain space since becoming a mother.
The truth is that I agree with the silent majority of my followers. I think feminism has some self-examining to do, and we shouldn't be afraid to do it. In fact, it was one of the FIRST thoughts I had after pushing my son out into the world. There he was, screaming his head off every night for my milk, a job that I could not outsource to ANYONE, even though I was the one that had just been through labor and needed to sleep and heal, and I remember thinking: what the fuck does feminism have to say about THIS?
