To close out Pride month, have an essay based on a paper I wrote for my MA in gender studies, titled - Beyond “About a Girl”: Gender Governance, Institutional Recognition, and Topa’s Embodied Knowledge in The Orville

Science fiction is at its best when it takes a real-world horror, puts it in space, adds prosthetic foreheads, and then politely asks the audience: “Now that you are no longer defensive, can we talk about what this actually is?”

That is one of the things The Orville does surprisingly well. Yes, it is Seth MacFarlane’s loving, occasionally goofy, very obvious homage to Star Trek. Yes, sometimes the show is silly. Yes, sometimes the jokes make you feel like the writers’ room was briefly hijacked by someone’s divorced uncle. But when The Orville decides to go serious, it can go very serious. The Moclan arc, especially Topa’s story, is one of the clearest examples.

On the surface, Topa’s story is about gender. More specifically, it is about a child born female in a society that insists it is entirely male. But the story becomes much more than a “prejudice is bad” episode, or even a straightforward trans allegory, though that reading is present and clearly part of the writers’ intent. What makes the arc interesting is that The Orville does not leave gender in the realm of personal identity. It drags medicine, law, family, culture, diplomacy, military alliances, and state violence into the room and says: everyone show your hands.

And everyone’s hands are filthy.

Topa is the child of Bortus and Klyden, a Moclan couple serving aboard the USS Orville.

The Moclans are one of the Planetary Union’s most important military allies, supposedly a single gender society, but actually built around denying that female births are less rare than they claim. When Bortus and Klyden’s child is born female in the episode “About a Girl,” the question immediately becomes whether the baby should undergo a procedure to be surgically altered to male according to Moclan custom.

Already, we are in nightmare territory. But the show is not just asking, “Should this happen?” It is asking, “Who gets to decide what this child is?” Parents? Doctors? Courts? Culture? The state? The military alliance that depends on Moclan weapons? The answer, apparently, is “all of the above,” which is precisely the problem.

The line that really gives the whole game away comes early, when Bortus explains that he and Klyden want the procedure performed “to conform our child.”

Not heal. Not protect. Not treat.

Conform.

That word is doing the kind of work graduate students usually need three theorists and a stress migraine to explain. Because “conform” is not medical language. It is social language. It tells us that the problem is not Topa’s body. The problem is that Topa’s body does not fit the world Moclan society has built.

This is where the show moves from “space gender episode” into “oh good, the institutions are here to ruin everything.” Dr. Claire Finn refuses to perform the procedure because Topa is a healthy newborn. From Finn’s perspective, there is no illness to treat. But Moclan society has already defined femaleness itself as the problem. Medicine becomes the first battleground, but it is not the only one. When Dr. Finn refuses, the conflict moves to law.

And law, as usual, arrives wearing a serious outfit and pretending it is neutral.

The Moclan tribunal is one of the most important parts of “About a Girl” because it makes the social threat explicit. The argument for the procedure is not only that femaleness is considered biologically undesirable. It is that Topa will be condemned to social exclusion if she remains female. The prosecutor makes it clear that a female Moclan child would face shame, disgust, and isolation. In other words, Moclan society will make her life unlivable, and then uses that unlivability as the argument for surgery.

That is the entire patriarchal scam in one elegant little courtroom package.

The violence of the procedure is disguised as protection from the violence of the society demanding it.

This is why Topa’s story is not just about individual prejudice. It is about governance. Gender is not simply something Moclan society believes. It is something Moclan society administers. It has doctors. It has courts. It has family rituals. It has cultural myths. It has state secrecy. It has diplomatic consequences. It has, because science fiction refuses to be subtle when it is really cooking, black sites.

The first episode frames female Moclan birth as rare, almost a biological fluke. That matters. If Topa is an exception, then Moclan society does not have to interrogate itself. Exceptions can be corrected. Exceptions can be explained away. Exceptions do not threaten the structure.

But then “Sanctuary” happens.

In “Sanctuary,” the Orville crew discovers a hidden colony of female Moclans. Suddenly, the official story collapses. Female Moclans are not nearly as rare as Moclan society claims. They have been hidden, altered, exiled, or erased. Topa is no longer just an exception. Topa is evidence.

That shift is huge. “About a Girl” is about one child’s body. “Sanctuary” is about a suppressed population. The issue moves from the surgical table to the state. This is what makes the arc so much stronger than a single “issue episode.” It shows that gender oppression is not simply a matter of bad attitudes. It is infrastructure. Moclan masculinity depends on disappearance. Female life must be made invisible so that the official story can keep pretending it is natural.

This is also where Heveena becomes crucial. Heveena is a female Moclan who survived outside the system and became one of Moclan society’s most respected writers while publishing under a male identity. Which is just painfully on the nose in the way reality often is. Moclan society can admire her words when it believes those words came from a man. Once those same words are attached to a female body, they become dangerous.

The content did not change. The authorized body did.

That is the thing about oppressive systems: they are not just afraid of people existing. They are afraid of what those people reveal. Heveena reveals that female Moclans are not weak, defective, or impossible. The sanctuary colony reveals that female Moclans are not rare anomalies. Topa reveals that surgery does not erase the truth of a person’s embodied life. Their existence makes Moclan “nature” visible as construction.

And constructed systems hate being caught with the scaffolding showing.

The family is another major part of this. Moclan gender ideology does not just live in the court or the clinic. It lives at home. In “Sanctuary,” Topa, who was born female and altered as an infant, has already been taught to repeat Moclan misogyny. She refuses to share with a girl and says her father told her females are weak.

That is devastating. The child harmed by the system is being trained to speak for it.

This is how gender norms survive. They are not only enforced from above. They are repeated at home, at school, in jokes, in bedtime stories, in “traditional values,” in all the small daily rituals that teach children what kind of person they are allowed to become. The state does not need to stand over every child if parents have already learned to reproduce its categories at the breakfast table. Patriarchy, unsurprisingly, has a nursery wing.

Klyden is the most painful version of this. He is awful to Topa. Let’s be clear about that. He says things that truly make him deserve to be launched directly into the sun. But he is not randomly awful. Klyden was also born female and altered as an infant. He is not outside the violence. He is one of its products.

That makes him more complicated, not less responsible.

Klyden has built his life around the belief that what happened to him was necessary. If Topa’s alteration was wrong, then his alteration was wrong too. That possibility is unbearable, so he defends the system that harmed him. He calls the wound salvation because admitting it was a wound would unravel the story he has used to survive.

This is one of the most brutal parts of patriarchal systems. They do not only harm people. They recruit the harmed into enforcement. They teach people to protect the very structures that injured them because the alternative would mean admitting how much was stolen.

Klyden is not simply “bad alien dad in space.” He is what happens when a system harms someone, tells them the harm was love, and then hands them a child to repeat the past on.

And then we get “A Tale of Two Topas.”

This is the episode where the arc becomes something more than the original “About a Girl” setup. Topa is older. She is preparing for the Union Point entrance exam. She wants a future. She wants to serve. She wants to become something. But she also feels incomplete. She knows something is wrong before she knows the history of what was done to her.

That matters. Topa’s knowledge begins in the body. Before she has access to the records, before anyone tells her the truth, before the official archive is opened, she knows something. Not in a neat, institutional, paperwork-approved way. She knows through distress, discomfort, incompleteness, and the sense that the person she is supposed to be does not match the person she is.

This is where Susan Stryker’s work on trans knowledge hums underneath the whole episode. Trans people are often told that their knowledge of themselves is not real knowledge. It is confusion, delusion, immaturity, ideology, influence, attention-seeking, anything except what it actually is: embodied knowledge. Topa’s body has been trying to tell her the truth in a world built to hide it.

When Topa finally learns she was born female and altered as an infant, the issue is not just the surgery. It is the lie. Bortus and Klyden hid her history from her in the name of protection. But protection can become concealment. Love can become control. Parents can become agents of institutional violence not because they hate their child, but because they have accepted the institution’s definition of survival.

And then Topa says the sentence that reverses the whole arc:

“I am female.”

That moment matters because in “About a Girl,” everyone speaks over Topa. Parents, doctors, courts, officers, cultural authorities. Everyone has something to say about what Topa is, what Topa should be, what Topa will suffer, what Topa must become. But Topa is an infant. She cannot speak.

In “A Tale of Two Topas,” she speaks.

That is the turn. Topa moves from being an object of institutional knowledge to being the authority on her own body. She does not step outside power entirely, because no one does. She still needs medical care, legal permission, parental consent, Union protection, all the bureaucratic goblins of institutional life. But she interrupts the system that claimed the right to define her before she could define herself.

And this is why the arc cannot be reduced to a single neat metaphor. Topa’s story is clearly intended, at least in part, as a trans allegory. It is also about intersex medical violence. It is also about misogyny. It is also about reproductive control, cultural nationalism, family secrecy, and state power. Those layers sometimes blur in ways that require careful handling, but no complex metaphor can be perfect. Especially not one trying to carry gender, medicine, family, law, diplomacy, and black-site violence across several seasons of television without collapsing into a pile of prosthetic foreheads and trauma.

But the messiness is also part of why the story is useful. Real gender governance is messy. Real institutions do not harm people in one clean category at a time. They pile on. They medicalize, legalize, moralize, bureaucratize, and then, if necessary, militarize.

Which brings us to “Midnight Blue,” the episode that essentially says: congratulations, you recognized her identity. Now what are you going to do about the institutions that made recognition necessary in the first place?

Because recognition is not safety.

By “Midnight Blue,” Topa has been recognized as female by her family and the crew of the Orville. But Moclan power still treats her existence as a threat. She visits the female Moclan colony, and her presence immediately becomes politically explosive. The colony has “protective status,” but that protection comes with inspections, agreements, surveillance, and the constant shadow of Moclan authority. Protection and control arrive holding hands, because institutions simply cannot help themselves.

Heveena, meanwhile, has restarted an underground network to rescue female Moclan infants from being altered. Morally, she is right about the stakes. The violence has not stopped. Babies are still being surgically “corrected.” Families are still fleeing. The compromise that preserved the colony did not end the system. It merely made survival conditional.

But Heveena also recruits Topa into that work by appealing directly to her trauma. She tells Topa that the story of those infants is her story too.

That is powerful. It is also unfair.

This is where the show becomes more interesting than a simple heroic resistance narrative. Heveena is right to resist Moclan violence. But she is wrong to instrumentalize Topa. Topa is a child, a survivor, and someone who reveres Heveena. Asking her to take on that risk is not just “giving her agency.” It is loading a traumatized child with revolutionary obligation and calling it choice.

History is full of liberation movements with questionable onboarding practices.

When Topa is abducted and tortured at a Moclan black site, the arc reaches its darkest point. Moclan power has moved from surgery, to law, to family secrecy, to population suppression, to state violence. The body once “corrected” by medicine is now punished by the state for revealing what correction failed to erase.

That progression matters. It shows that recognition is necessary but insufficient. Topa can say “I am female,” and that matters. It matters enormously. But her declaration does not dismantle the institutions that made her life precarious in the first place. Being seen is not the same thing as being safe.

The Union also does not get to glide through this arc as the pure liberal savior. Obviously, the Union is better than Moclus. The Union is not the one surgically altering babies because their society has decided women are a design flaw. But the Union repeatedly compromises with Moclus because Moclus is militarily useful. Moclus supplies weapons. Moclus is strategically important. Moclus is politically inconvenient to challenge.

Human rights, apparently, are very important until the weapons supplier gets annoyed.

That is one of the smartest parts of the arc. It shows that liberal recognition can be sincere and still conditional. The Union can recognize that Topa is being harmed and still hesitate because doing the right thing threatens the alliance. That does not make the Union the same as Moclus, but it does expose the limits of institutional morality when ethics runs into military strategy.

Or, to put it less politely: the machinery of justice starts making weird grinding noises the second someone mentions the defense contractor might not like your version of social liberation.

Topa’s body ultimately becomes an archive of institutional violence. It carries the history of the original surgery, the tribunal’s ruling, parental silence, cultural propaganda, hidden records, medical reversal, diplomatic compromise, and state torture. Her body is not just where violence happens. It is where the lie of Moclan naturalness finally breaks.

The arc can be condensed into three moments.

First: “To conform our child.”

Then: “I am female.”

Finally: the state punishes her for what her existence reveals.

That is the story. Correction, self-knowledge, backlash.

And it is not just science fiction. It is how gender governance works. Institutions decide which bodies are normal, which bodies are suspect, which bodies need correction, which bodies deserve protection, and which bodies can be sacrificed for the greater good. They call it medicine. They call it law. They call it culture. They call it tradition. They call it national security. They call it family values.

They always have a nice name for the cage.

What The Orville does through Topa’s arc is make that cage visible. It shows gender oppression not as a matter of individual cruelty, though there is plenty of that, but as architecture. It has doctors, parents, judges, archives, diplomats, weapons contracts, inspection protocols, and black sites. It is not one bad man saying one bad thing. It is an entire system producing the conditions under which some lives become livable and others become problems to be solved.

Topa survives by speaking back to a system built to speak over her. Her self-knowledge matters not because it magically frees her from power, but because it interrupts the institutions that claimed the right to define her before she could define herself.

That is what makes the Moclan arc so good. Not because it is perfect. It is not. No complex metaphor can carry all of gender, transness, intersex medical violence, misogyny, family trauma, diplomacy, and state violence without wobbling a bit under the weight. But the wobble is worth it, because the arc gets at something true.

Gender norms love pretending they are natural.

Meanwhile, they require clinics, courts, family discipline, propaganda, diplomacy, and apparently black sites to stay upright.

Very natural. Very organic. No scaffolding detected.

And yet, because The Orville apparently wanted to make sure no one escaped this storyline emotionally intact, Klyden comes back.

Not fixed. Not absolved. Not magically transformed into Father of the Year after one heartfelt hallway apology and a tasteful orchestral swell. But changed enough to do the thing he failed to do when it mattered most: see his daughter. He comes back to Topa, apologizes, and chooses her over the system that taught him to hate what she was. And that matters, because repair is not erasure. Klyden hurt her. He defended the violence done to both of them. But his return refuses the bleakest version of this story, the one where everyone harmed by a brutal tradition is doomed to become its permanent little foot soldier.

Citations/Recommended Reading

“Queer Feelings.” In The Cultural Politics of Emotion. - Sara Ahmed

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. - Judith Butler

“Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” - Cathy J. Cohen

The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. - Michel Foucault

“Normalized Transgressions: Legitimizing the Transsexual Body as Productive.” - Dan Irving

Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. - Jasbir K. Puar

“(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies.” - Susan Stryker

“My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” - Susan Stryker

Episodes of The Orville

“About a Girl” Season 1, Episode 3

“Sanctuary” Season 2, Episode 12

“A Tale of Two Topas” Season 3, Episode 5

“Midnight Blue” Season 3, Episode 8

Which is tragic, really. Not for me. I’m fine. I have snacks and a historian’s tolerance for nonsense. But it is unfortunate because Jared accidentally became the perfect case study for the exact thing I wanted to talk about: the way male grievance turns feminism into a catch-all explanation for women making choices men dislike.

Jared is not interesting because he is unique. Jared is interesting because he is immensely ordinary. He is one more specimen in a very crowded jar labeled Men Discover Women Have Interior Lives; Public Reaction Mixed. We are not here because Jared invented anything. We are here because Jared keeps saying the quiet part out loud with the confidence of a man who believes introspection is something that happens to other people.

The larger pattern is simple. A woman makes a choice. A man dislikes the choice. Instead of asking whether she had reasons, whether he misunderstood, whether the relationship failed for ordinary human reasons, whether he might have contributed to the outcome, or whether women are simply allowed to make choices he finds baffling, the conclusion becomes: feminism did this.

That is not political analysis. That is grievance wearing a clip-on tie.

Exhibit One: Feminism as the Universal Villain

Jared first wandered into my mentions by responding to my article about patriarchy training people. My point was not that men are inherently terrible, women are inherently perfect, or every individual man is personally responsible for every injustice on earth. My point was that patriarchy is a social system, and social systems train the people living inside them.

Jared replied:

The thing is, you don’t have to say this. This is a basic premise of popular feminism (not necessarily academic feminism). It’s called the “women are wonderful” paradigm.

Feminism trains people just as much as the alleged patriarchy is supposed to. It trains women to be distrustful of good men. It trains women to hate masculinity. It trains men to hate themselves and women to hate their natural bodies.

This is a useful starting point because he immediately does the thing the article described. He takes a systemic critique and translates it into a personal grievance. “Patriarchy trains people” becomes “feminism teaches women to hate men.” The argument only works if you assume that criticism of patriarchy must secretly be hatred of men, which tells us rather a lot about how he understands masculinity.

It also quietly concedes the premise. He says feminism trains people “just as much as the alleged patriarchy is supposed to.” Great. Wonderful. We agree that social systems, cultural narratives, and institutions shape how people think and behave. He simply wants feminism to be the sinister puppet master and patriarchy to be imaginary, which is convenient if your politics require centuries of gendered law, labor, religion, medicine, education, and social power to be treated as a collective hallucination.

The funniest part is the claim that feminism “trains women to be distrustful of good men.” Women are not distrustful of good men because a feminist pamphlet bit us in childhood. Women are cautious because women have experience. We know that “good man” is not a title a man awards himself for showing up with clean fingernails and an opinion about consent. It is demonstrated over time. Trust is earned, not granted automatically because someone insists they are one of the nice ones.

Exhibit Two: The Nice Guy Who Thinks Feminism Took His Prize

After that, Jared decided I needed to understand why men dislike feminism. He wrote:

And if you do actually care to understand why guys don’t like feminism, and why we think it’s been destructive, read this. Colin is not a unique case. Nearly every guy either knows somebody who’s been through this or has been through it himself:

The article he linked argued that women claim to want “nice guys” but actually reject them, pathologize them, or choose more toxic men instead. This is a familiar grievance. It is also a very revealing one because it treats romantic disappointment as a political indictment.

Here is the problem. “Women don’t like nice guys” and “women distrust performative niceness” are not the same claim.

Women generally like kindness just fine. What many women distrust is a very specific performance of niceness: the man who announces himself as safe, feminist, emotionally intelligent, or unusually decent before anyone has asked; the man who treats basic respect as an investment portfolio; the man who is patient and generous right up until he realizes sex, romance, forgiveness, or devotion are not being dispensed from the machine.

Women did not invent the “nice guy” problem because we hate kindness. We named it because many of us have met men who use kindness as camouflage.

We know love-bombing when we see it. We know when someone is performing emotional intelligence rather than practicing it. We know when a man seems more invested in being recognized as good than in actually being good. And yes, sometimes women are overcautious, defensive, suspicious, or unfair because experience has taught them that danger often arrives wearing a helpful smile and carrying a vocabulary it learned in therapy.1

We are so very sorry that women’s accumulated experience occasionally makes it harder for men to get laid.

But that is not feminism ruining men’s lives. That is women learning pattern recognition. We’ve always had pattern recognition, we’re just allowed to say no to the men who trigger our fight or flight mechanism now.

Exhibit Three: “I Know Her Better Than She Does”

Then came the divorce post, which is perhaps the crown jewel of the exhibit. Jared wrote:

Having been through the marriage and divorce cycle, I still don’t think marriage itself is the issue. The problem is the modern women who were broken by feminist lies. Even though my ex would tell you she is decidedly not a feminist, make no mistake, she is one. I know her better than she does.2

It’s not enough to merely find a woman who would not call herself a feminist. If she is not firmly anti-feminist, it probably is not going to work out.

There it is. There is the whole worldview, sitting in the open like an Australian possum in a bakery.

His ex-wife says she is not a feminist. Jared informs us that she is. She describes her own beliefs. He corrects her. She offers an account of herself. He replaces it with his interpretation. Then he presents himself as someone who understands what feminism has done to women.

This is the part where a historian quietly puts down her coffee and stares into the middle distance.

Because the issue here is not whether his ex-wife is or is not a feminist. I do not know this woman. For all I know, she spends her evenings reading Phyllis Schlafly by candlelight. The issue is that Jared’s instinct is to treat his interpretation of a woman’s beliefs as more authoritative than her own.

A woman says, “This is who I am.”

A man says, “No, I know better.”

And somehow feminism is the problem.

This is also where the “divorce came out of nowhere” genre begins to hum ominously in the background. I do not know what happened in his marriage, and I am not pretending to know. But if a man publicly announces that his ex-wife does not understand her own beliefs and that he knows her better than she knows herself, I am not overwhelmed with shock that the relationship encountered turbulence.

The historical pattern here matters. Anti-feminism has long depended on the idea that women are unreliable narrators of their own lives. Women do not know what they want. Women have been misled. Women think they want freedom, but they really want protection. Women think they want education, but they really want marriage. Women think they want careers, but they really want babies. Women think they are not feminists, but Jared is here with a flashlight and a divorce decree to explain the truth.

At some point, concern for women starts looking suspiciously like a refusal to believe them.

Exhibit Four: Respect, Obedience, and the Language of “Owing”

Jared also appears in a discussion about what wives owe husbands. First, in response to another man’s comment about respect, he writes:

The belittling in private thing is huge. So often I see the advice given to women that they should not belittle their husbands in public. Nothing is said of belittling him behind closed doors. That is more destructive, in my experience.

On its own, this is not especially outrageous. Belittling a partner in private is destructive. Belittling a partner in public is destructive. Contempt corrodes relationships. Marriage counselors did not need Jared to descend from the mountain with this tablet.

But placed beside his other comments, the emphasis becomes part of a larger pattern: the recurring belief that women are not sufficiently attentive to men’s emotional injuries, while men’s authority to diagnose women’s failures remains largely unquestioned.

That becomes much clearer in the next screenshot, where Jared writes:

I wrote an article kind of related to this topic near the end of last year, while my marriage was in its death throes. Part of it came out of my consideration of what my marriage should have looked like, and part came from thinking through the duties men have to their wives and what reciprocations would make the most logical sense. It might help move the conversation forward for you. I think what you’re really looking for is to understand what you owe your husband because society can easily enumerate all the things he owes you, but if you ask people what you owe him, all they will tell you is either “nothing,” or they will list superficial and performative things like the examples you gave (eg always let him sit at the head of the table). If we begin by understanding the duties and privileges of husbands and wives as reciprocal, that pushes the conversation forward, and we can start to consider what women owe their husbands universally and look for ways to apply that practically in our own lives.

There is a lot to unpack in “what women owe their husbands universally,” and very little of it smells fresh.

The word “owe” is doing a great deal of work. It transforms marriage from a relationship between two people into a ledger of obligations. More importantly, it frames the cultural problem as an insufficient accounting of what women owe men. Not what partners owe each other in a specific relationship. Not how two people negotiate care, respect, labor, intimacy, repair, and trust. What women owe husbands universally.

That is the kind of language that makes my historian brain start dragging nineteenth-century conduct manuals down from the shelf.

Because “what women owe men” has never been a small question. It has been embedded in law, religion, custom, advice literature, marriage manuals, property regimes, sexual expectations, and domestic labor for centuries. Women have been told they owe men obedience, sex, heirs, emotional management, household labor, moral refinement, forgiveness, admiration, silence, patience, and a properly warm dinner.

The idea that society has been shy about telling wives what they owe husbands is historically hilarious.

The issue is not that relationships require nothing from women. Of course they do. Relationships require something from everyone involved. The issue is that anti-feminist discourse often treats women’s obligations as natural, universal, and morally urgent, while women’s autonomy is treated as selfish, suspicious, or socially destructive.

Exhibit Five: Girls Mature Faster, Therefore Feminists Are Trashing Men

In another thread, Jared responded to a post about the phrase “girls mature faster.” He wrote:

This is interesting because growing up I only ever heard this said by adults who wanted me to think that the girls were intrinsically better than me.

Later in the same thread, he added:

Absolutely. I just get tired of seeing this stuff online. Feminists trashing men, manosphere guys trashing women. Men and women are supposed to love one another!

This is a revealing misreading of the phrase “girls mature faster,” because that phrase is not usually deployed to grant girls power, authority, freedom, or respect. It is much more often used to make girls responsible.

Girls are told they mature faster so they can be expected to sit still sooner, behave better sooner, understand social nuance sooner, manage other people’s emotions sooner, and absorb blame sooner. It is not generally a compliment. It is a burden dressed up as praise, the little satin bow on a box full of unpaid emotional labor.

This is the phrase adults use when girls are expected to tolerate boys harassing them because “he probably just likes you.” It is the phrase hovering in the background when girls are dress-coded because boys might be distracted. It is the assumption behind expecting girls to be kinder, quieter, more forgiving, more careful, more emotionally fluent, and more responsible for the atmosphere of every room they enter.

“Girls mature faster” is not the opposite of “boys will be boys.”

It is the other half of it.

“Boys will be boys” excuses boys from responsibility by treating their behavior as natural, inevitable, and developmentally adorable, even when it is harmful. “Girls mature faster” assigns girls responsibility by treating their self-control as natural, inevitable, and morally required, even when they are children. Together, the two phrases create a tidy little system: boys act, girls absorb; boys disrupt, girls regulate; boys are impulses in sneakers, girls are unpaid assistant managers of everyone’s emotional and physical safety.

That is not feminism trashing men.

That is patriarchy training children.

Jared heard the phrase as an insult to boys, and I am not saying it never felt that way to him. Gendered expectations harm boys too. Being told, explicitly or implicitly, that boys are less emotionally capable, less responsible, or naturally more chaotic can do real damage. But the phrase was not created by feminism to crown girls as superior beings and throw boys into the developmental basement. It belongs to a larger gendered script that harms girls by making them responsible too early and harms boys by denying them accountability.

The problem is that Jared interprets this as evidence that feminists are “trashing men,” because in his framework criticism of gendered expectations keeps becoming criticism of men themselves. He recognizes that something felt unfair, but he aims his frustration at feminism rather than at the social system that taught adults to excuse boys and overburden girls in the first place.

Once again, he is describing something patriarchy produces and blaming feminism for noticing it.

Exhibit Seven: The Good Spouse and the Mask

In another marriage discussion, Jared responded to someone saying many people simply lack the skills to create good marriages. He wrote:

Unfortunately the same behaviors, skills, and attitudes that indicate you would be a good spouse also attract people who would seek to take advantage of you, and if you pair up with a good actor or actress, well, you’re screwed when the mask comes off.

There is a recognizable pain here. Plenty of people have had the experience of believing they were loved by someone who later seemed to become a stranger. Plenty of people have found themselves wondering whether the person changed, whether they missed warning signs, or whether they were deceived.

But again, the interpretive pattern matters.

In Jared’s world, being a good spouse appears to make a person vulnerable to exploitation by someone else’s deception. That can happen. It does happen. Yet when this idea is placed beside his other claims, it becomes part of a larger refusal to examine relational failure as mutual, complex, or ordinary. The danger is always the other person’s mask. The woman who misled. The woman who failed to appreciate. The woman broken by lies. The woman who did not know herself.

There is very little room here for the possibility that relationships fail not because one person was a saint and the other was a villain, but because two people brought incompatible wounds, expectations, habits, and failures into the same house and called it marriage.

But that explanation is less satisfying than grievance. Grievance gives you a villain. Self-analysis gives you homework.

Exhibit Eight: “The Women Who Don’t Want a Nice Guy”

Returning to the “nice guy” theme, Jared wrote:

It took a long time, but I realized that the women who don’t want a nice guy (a genuine nice guy, not the kind who flip a switch when they get rejected) are just not worth the heartache. I’d rather be alone for the rest of my life than stuck with a drama queen.

If she doesn’t appreciate all you do for her, move on. She’s not worth it. You shouldn’t even need her to leave. You should learn to recognize when she doesn’t appreciate it and respect yourself enough to end things.

This is where the nice guy discourse folds neatly into male grievance.

On the surface, there is reasonable advice buried in here. If someone does not appreciate you, leave. If a relationship is draining you, leave. If you are being mistreated, leave. Perfectly fine.

But the surrounding framework matters. Jared is not simply saying people should leave bad relationships. He is saying women who do not want a nice guy are not worth the heartache. He is imagining a category of women who reject genuine goodness and therefore deserve dismissal.

That still avoids the central issue: women are allowed to reject nice men.

A man can be genuinely kind and still not be the right partner. A man can be decent and still not be desired. A man can be stable, thoughtful, respectful, and emotionally available, and a woman can still say no. That is not proof that she is broken, shallow, damaged, feminist-poisoned, or secretly craving toxicity.3 It is proof that attraction and compatibility are not moral vending machines.

This is one of the places where anti-feminist grievance becomes most revealing. The issue is not that women reject good men. Everyone gets rejected. The issue is the belief that women’s rejection of a good man requires an ideological explanation.

Sometimes the explanation is much simpler.

She did not want him.

That is allowed.

Exhibit Nine: Abortion, Child Support, and the Fantasy of Male Opt-Out

In a discussion about child support, Jared wrote:

I thought the point of bringing this up was to point out the hypocrisy of pro-abortion policies. Women can opt out of motherhood (by killing their child, a heinous and disgusting act), but men may not opt out of fatherhood (by doing the much less heinous act of simply not paying money).

Also, sometimes child support is objectively unfair. I have a friend whose ex is now married to a woman (she left him for that woman and married her as soon as it was legal for her to do so). When it comes to expenses “for the kids,” the court requires them to split costs 50/50. So for instance when there are fees for his son to participate in boy scouts, both parents pay 50/50 on that. They also split custody time 50/50. But, he also has to send money to her personally every month for child support. Why does he have to pay her anything at all?

This is a different issue, but it belongs to the same ecosystem.

Reproductive autonomy is reframed as women getting away with something. Child support is reframed as men being denied an equivalent opt-out. The child becomes almost incidental, which is remarkable in a paragraph that begins by calling abortion “killing their child.”

The broader grievance is familiar: women have too much power, men are trapped, and systems unfairly privilege female choice. This ignores the rather important biological, legal, and material reality that pregnancy happens inside someone’s body, while child support exists after a child exists and is meant to support the child, not reward the mother for being annoying.

The comparison only works if you flatten pregnancy into a financial inconvenience and child support into a punishment men suffer for women’s choices.

Again, the issue is autonomy. Women’s reproductive autonomy is treated as an unfair advantage because it allows women to make a decision men cannot control. The resentment is then translated into the language of equality: if women can opt out, why can’t men?

But bodily autonomy and financial responsibility for an existing child are not the same category. The argument depends on pretending they are.

Exhibit Ten: Wives, Warmth, and the Revolutionary Discovery That Men Like Being Loved

In another post, Jared responded to a quote about a woman improving her marriage by dropping “constant mental criticism” and showing “warmth, appreciation and respect.” He wrote:

I love it when women post how they realized all they had to do in order to be happy in marriage was love their husband instead of hating him. It’s the most obvious thing in the world, yet most women out here act like it’s some grand revelation.

This is the sort of sentence that sounds like common sense until you sit with it for more than three seconds.

Of course affection matters in marriage. Of course warmth matters. Of course contempt is corrosive. Nobody serious is arguing that spouses should spend their evenings hissing at each other across the casserole dish.

The problem is the little phrase “all they had to do.”

Because “all they had to do” quietly removes every other possible factor from the marriage. It erases unequal labor, emotional neglect, sexual entitlement, financial stress, childcare, resentment, weaponized incompetence, loneliness, exhaustion, and the thousand small ways a relationship can become unlivable while still looking perfectly normal from the outside.

In Jared’s framing, the wife’s unhappiness is not a signal that something in the marriage might need examination. It is a failure of attitude. She was mentally critical when she should have been warm. She was insufficiently appreciative. She failed to perform love correctly. Once she stopped “hating” her husband and started loving him, happiness apparently arrived like a casserole from the Lord.

How convenient.

Because what this really suggests is not mutual transformation, but lowered expectations. The wife becomes happy when she stops criticizing, stops expecting, stops noticing, stops asking whether her husband is actually meeting her needs, and simply redirects her energy toward warmth, appreciation, and respect. The husband does not appear in this sentence as someone who changed. He is not asked to become more attentive, more equitable, more emotionally available, more responsible, or more loving. The lesson is for her.

This is where anti-feminist marriage discourse often reveals itself. It presents itself as pro-love, pro-family, and pro-marriage, but what it frequently means is that women should lower their standards until whatever their husbands are already offering becomes enough. If she is unhappy, she should become more grateful. If she is resentful, she should become more respectful. If she is exhausted, she should become more loving. If she is lonely, she should stop mentally criticizing the man sitting beside her and consider whether the real problem was her attitude all along.

That is not a recipe for a healthy marriage. That is emotional austerity with throw pillows.

A genuinely mutual argument would ask what both partners owe each other. It would ask whether warmth and appreciation flow in both directions. It would ask whether the wife’s criticism appeared out of nowhere or whether it grew in the soil of being ignored, dismissed, overburdened, patronized, or treated like the household’s emotional infrastructure. It would ask whether “love your husband” is being used as an invitation to intimacy or as a demand that women stop noticing disappointment.

But Jared’s framework does not require that curiosity. It has already found the culprit.

Women just need to love their husbands instead of hating them.

How marvelously simple. How historically familiar.

Exhibit Eleven: Feminist Men Are Against Family Life

Finally, in a discussion about fathers and domestic labor, Jared wrote:

That’s simply false. Feminism sold you the myth of the do-nothing dad, but it’s just fake propaganda. Men throughout history have been involved in family life. Society would not have functioned if they were not.

Feminist men are against family life.

This is a perfect example of male grievance as historical illiteracy.

Yes, men throughout history have been involved in family life. Of course they have. No historian worth the ink in her footnotes would argue that men were absent from families until feminism invented diaper-changing in 1971. Men have been fathers, providers, teachers, tradesmen, farmers, disciplinarians, protectors, companions, and members of households across time.

But that is not the same as saying men have historically shared domestic labor equally, changed diapers as a normative expectation, cooked routine meals, managed household logistics, or shouldered the daily repetitive care work assigned to women in most patriarchal family structures.

“Men were involved in family life” is not a rebuttal to “domestic labor has been gendered.”

It is a dodge.

The final line, though, is the real treasure:

“Feminist men are against family life.”

This is one of those claims that only works if “family life” means “a family structure where women know their place.” Feminist men are not against family life. Feminist men are against using “family life” as a velvet curtain over unequal labor, male entitlement, reproductive coercion, economic dependence, and the expectation that women exist to absorb everyone else’s needs.

If your definition of family life collapses the moment men are expected to cook dinner, change diapers, respect women’s autonomy, and treat marriage as a partnership rather than a throne room with laundry, the problem is not feminism.

It is your definition of family.

What Jared Shows Us

Jared’s posts are useful because they gather so many forms of male grievance in one place: historical illiteracy, statistical illiteracy, self-analysis refusal, and the persistent treatment of female autonomy as social danger.

His personal experiences may be painful. I do not doubt that. Men can be hurt. Men can be mistreated. Men can be trapped in awful relationships. Men can be manipulated, belittled, betrayed, and broken. Feminism does not require pretending otherwise.

But pain does not automatically produce insight.

Sometimes pain produces politics.

And when personal pain becomes a universal theory about women, marriage, feminism, child support, abortion, dating, and what wives owe husbands, we are no longer simply hearing one man process grief. We are watching grievance harden into ideology.

The central feature of that ideology is not love for men. It is suspicion of women.

Women choose wrong. Women think wrong. Women leave wrong. Women desire wrong. Women define themselves wrong. Women fail to appreciate. Women fail to respect. Women fail to love. Women fail to understand what they owe.

And feminism, conveniently, explains it all.

That is why the issue was never really whether women like nice guys. The issue is whether women are allowed to choose men, reject men, leave men, disappoint men, disagree with men, or define themselves without those choices being treated as evidence of corruption.

Feminism did not make women human beings.

It simply insisted that society stop pretending they were not.

Some men have never recovered.

A writer arrives breathlessly at a conclusion other people have been discussing for decades, plants a flag in it, and announces that they have discovered a new continent. The locals, who have been living there the entire time, are expected to applaud politely while someone explains their own terrain back to them with the confidence of a man holding a map upside down.

That is more or less what happens in Zarina Macha’s article “No, Feminism Is Not About Choice,” published under her Substack The Rational Female.

Macha’s central argument is that feminism is not really about women choosing whatever they want, but about dismantling patriarchy and restructuring society. This is presented as a devastating revelation, the sort of thing that should make modern feminists clutch their tote bags and whisper, “My God, she’s cracked the code.”

The problem is that many feminists have been making this exact point for decades. Feminism is not, and has never been, simply the belief that every decision made by a woman becomes feminist because a woman made it. That is not feminism. That is the political philosophy of a scented candle.

In fact, if anything, modern feminism occasionally leans a little to hard the other way on the topic of women being allowed to make choices and remain feminists.

To be fair, Macha is criticizing something real. Choice feminism, the idea that any individual decision made by a woman should be affirmed as feminist simply because it is hers, has been a problem. It has allowed corporations to slap “empowerment” on products, advertisements, sweatshop fashion, and the occasional razor commercial while doing very little to challenge the actual conditions under which women live and work. It has made criticism difficult because any attempt to ask why women are making certain choices, what pressures shape those choices, or who profits from those choices can be dismissed as “judging women.” In that sense, Macha is not wrong to say that “feminism is about choice” is an inadequate definition. The issue is that she mistakes an existing feminist critique of ‘choice feminism’ for a critique of feminism itself.

That distinction matters. Feminists have long argued that choice is not meaningful unless we also talk about power, law, money, culture, violence, sexuality, race, class, and the social consequences attached to refusing the role assigned to you.

Liberal feminists, radical feminists, Marxist feminists, Black feminists, queer theorists, postcolonial feminists, and cultural feminists have disagreed with each other about nearly everything except the basic fact that women’s lives are shaped by systems larger than personal preference. Feminism is not the claim that every choice is feminist. Feminism is the insistence that women should not be structurally coerced into lives designed for male comfort and then told their compliance was a preference.

This is where Macha’s argument begins doing that peculiar anti-feminist shuffle where one true point is asked to carry several false conclusions on its exhausted little back.

She says women have always been able to make choices because choice is part of the human condition.

On the most literal level, yes.

Of course women have always made choices.

Women under coverture made choices. Women denied property rights made choices. Women denied the vote made choices. Women denied divorce made choices. Women denied contraception made choices. Enslaved women made choices. The existence of choices has never been evidence of equality. If your options are “obey” or “suffer,” then congratulations, you technically have choices.1

You do not, however, have meaningful freedom.

This is a basic distinction, and yet the article repeatedly treats it as though feminism is confused because feminists talk about constraints.

The question has never been whether women possess the metaphysical capacity to make decisions. The question is what options are available, who controls the terms, what happens when women refuse, and whether the consequences are distributed equally.

A woman who can choose between economic dependency and social ruin is making a choice.

A woman who can choose between an unwanted pregnancy and a dangerous illegal abortion is making a choice.

A woman who can choose between staying with an abusive husband and losing her children is making a choice.

But only someone very committed to winning an argument with a cardboard cutout would confuse that with liberation.

The article’s historical claims become even shakier when Macha turns to gender roles. She argues that men and women developed complementary roles based on biological differences and mutual cooperation, which sounds tidy if you skim human history with one eye closed. Certainly biology influences social organization. Human beings are not floating brains piloting meat suits through neutral space. Pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, physical strength, vulnerability during reproduction, and survival conditions all shaped social life in different places and periods. But the leap from “biology influences social norms” to “gender hierarchy was natural cooperation” is where the argument starts hoping nobody asks follow-up questions.2

Gender roles were not simply the result of men and women sitting down around a communal fire and amicably dividing tasks according to vibes. They were enforced through law, religion, property systems, inheritance structures, political exclusion, education, employment restrictions, and marital authority. This was true before “modern” history and it’s true today.

In English common law, coverture meant that a married woman’s legal identity was effectively subsumed under her husband’s. She could not freely own property, make contracts, control wages, or maintain an independent legal existence in the way an unmarried man could. In the United States, women had to fight for married women’s property acts, access to higher education, suffrage, professional entry, legal contraception, equal credit, workplace rights, and legal protection from discrimination. These were not minor lifestyle preferences. They were structural limits, not biological. Women didn’t develop hives when given access to credit cards in their name.

The word “cooperation” does a lot of laundering in Macha’s argument, as well. Men and women have certainly cooperated throughout history. Families cooperated. Couples cooperated. Communities cooperated. People loved one another inside patriarchal systems, sacrificed for one another, built homes together, raised children together, grieved together, survived together.

But cooperation and hierarchy are not opposites.

A Victorian husband might genuinely love his wife while still possessing legal and economic power over her. A plantation mistress might feel affection for her husband while also existing within a racial and gender hierarchy that positioned white men as masters of households, wives, children, and enslaved people. A medieval noblewoman might wield influence while still being constrained by dynastic marriage, inheritance law, and male guardianship.

When historians describe systems of power, we generally do not stop calling them systems of power simply because people inside them occasionally loved each other.

This is one of the recurring problems in both “No, Feminism Is Not About Choice” and Macha’s later essay “How Feminism Made My Life Worse.”

Feminist critiques of power are repeatedly interpreted as attacks on love, marriage, motherhood, femininity, softness, romance, and men as a group. But feminism is not saying that every heterosexual marriage is a hostage situation with nicer curtains. It is asking why so many institutions made marriage women’s primary route to survival, respectability, sex, motherhood, legal identity, and economic security.

If traditional family roles are so naturally fulfilling that women would choose them anyway, why did societies spend so much time legally compelling women into them and punishing those who resisted? That is the question hovering over this whole debate like historically literate Victorian ghost.

Then we arrive at the technology argument, which is always popular in anti-feminist writing because it sounds clever until you actually think about it. Macha argues that modern women have more choices because of technology: birth control, washing machines, central heating, electric ovens, and other inventions that freed people from the constant grind of survival.

This is true as far as it goes, but it does not go nearly as far as she wants it to.

Technology creates possibilities. Politics determines access. Law determines legitimacy. Culture determines stigma. Economics determines distribution. A washing machine is helpful only if you can afford one, access electricity, and live in a society where reducing domestic labor does not simply mean women are expected to do more unpaid work elsewhere.

Birth control is transformative only if people can legally obtain it, afford it, understand it, and use it without punishment. The birth control pill did not float down from heaven accompanied by a choir of pharmaceutical angels. Its development, distribution, legalization, and normalization were shaped by activists, doctors, patients, lawyers, reformers, and feminists. In the United States, contraception existed before the Supreme Court recognized a constitutional right to marital privacy in Griswold v. Connecticut, but existing is not the same thing as being legally accessible. Even after Griswold, unmarried people still faced restrictions until Eisenstadt v. Baird. This is why saying “technology liberated women, not feminism” is like saying elevators created disability rights. Elevators matter. But if the building owner can still lock the door, you have not solved the problem.

Macha also argues that feminism has made men and women adversarial rather than complementary. This is one of the oldest tricks in the anti-feminist recipe book: observe conflict, blame the people who named the conflict, and then accuse them of destroying a harmony that was often maintained through women’s silence.

Feminism did not invent gender conflict. It exposed the fact that the old arrangement was not equally beneficial to everyone. A woman who could not vote, could not control her property after marriage, could not reliably access divorce, could not obtain contraception, could not enter many professions, and could not count on equal pay may still have loved her husband and children.

But her love does not prove the system was fair. It proves human beings build meaning even inside constraints.

The “feminism is a religion” argument is similarly theatrical but thin. Macha suggests that feminism operates like a worldview with doctrines and rules. But feminism contains liberal feminists, radical feminists, Marxist feminists, socialist feminists, Black feminists, womanists, cultural feminists, queer feminists, ecofeminists, postcolonial feminists, and enough internal disagreement to power a small argumentative city.

The history of feminism is not a single church with a pope in sensible shoes issuing doctrine from the Vatican of Not Shaving. It is an intellectual and political tradition defined by debate. Feminists have argued about sex work, pornography, motherhood, marriage, capitalism, race, gender identity, the state, wages, sexuality, kink, domestic labor, essentialism, separatism, liberal rights, and whether anyone should ever have trusted Freud with a metaphor. Calling that a religion does not refute it. It just gives the author permission to dismiss it without doing the work of engaging it.

Her Cinderella example has a similar problem. Macha argues that if feminism were simply about women choosing, then Cinderella should be considered a feminist icon because she chooses marriage and domestic happiness. But feminist criticism of fairy tales has never been primarily about marching into the Disney vault and arresting Cinderella for crimes against liberation. The question is what stories teach.

Why are beauty, passivity, endurance, heterosexual marriage, and rescue so often presented as female fulfillment? Why are some ambitions rewarded and others punished? Why does the heroine’s goodness so often appear through suffering quietly enough to be recognized by someone more powerful? A feminist reading of Cinderella is not “no woman may like this story.” It is “what cultural work does this story perform, and why has it been told this way so many times?”

This same confusion appears when Macha discusses liberal feminism, choice feminism, and the waves of feminism. She is correct that liberal feminism is not the same thing as choice feminism. Liberal feminism has historically focused on legal equality, political reform, educational access, workplace opportunity, and rights within existing institutions, while choice feminism is more of a flattened cultural slogan that often treats agency as an individual consumer product. But again, she takes a legitimate distinction and turns it into a smoking gun.

Feminists already know these distinctions exist. In fact, feminist history is largely the story of feminists arguing with each other about exactly these distinctions while anti-feminists periodically wander in, point at the argument, and announce that disagreement proves the whole thing is fake.

The most revealing line in the first article may be the closing question: if feminism is about giving women choice, does that include the choice not to be feminist?

The answer, obviously, is yes. Women can choose not to be feminists. Women can reject the label. Women can disagree with feminist theory. Women can marry, stay home, have children, homeschool, bake bread, wear floral dresses, attend church, adore their husbands, and post about the joys of traditional femininity. 3

What they cannot reasonably expect is that feminists will treat every political claim attached to those choices as beyond criticism. Choosing a life is not the same as turning that life into a universal prescription.

You can choose the apron. You do not get to pretend the apron has no history.

This is where the second essay, “How Feminism Made My Life Worse,” becomes reveals the emotional architecture underneath the theoretical argument. In that piece, Macha describes how feminism encouraged women to prioritize independence, education, career, and sexual freedom, and she connects those messages to her own difficulty finding lasting romantic fulfillment.

I want to be careful here because personal pain is not a punchline.

She describes bullying, depression, suicidal ideation, panic attacks, being sectioned, abusive sexual experiences, and difficulty forming long-term relationships. Those are serious experiences, and I do not doubt the sincerity of her account. But sincerity is not the same thing as causation.

The structure of the second essay is essentially autobiographical: I absorbed feminist messages; I pursued independence and self-development; I became unhappy in love; therefore feminism made my life worse. But autobiography is not, by itself, historical proof. If individual unhappiness were enough to discredit an ideology, then every miserable housewife of the 1950s would prove that traditional gender roles were a disaster, something I feel Macha would have a problem with.

In fact, that was precisely the observation Betty Friedan made famous in The Feminine Mystique. Friedan did not argue that every housewife was miserable or that motherhood was inherently degrading. She argued that a culture insisting women should be completely fulfilled by marriage, children, and domesticity left many women unable to explain their dissatisfaction except as personal failure. The difference is that Friedan did not stop at “I feel bad, therefore the system is wrong.” She examined education, advertising, magazines, psychology, domestic ideology, and postwar culture.

She turned private misery into a political question.

Macha does something narrower. She experiences pain in a world shaped by individualism, unstable relationships, consumer culture, changing gender expectations, economic precarity, mental health struggles, romantic media fantasies, dating app culture, and the general emotional landfill of modern life, and then identifies feminism as the villain in the rubber mask.

This is less historical analysis than Scooby-Doo causation. The gang has not investigated capitalism, social media, housing costs, childhood trauma, mental health systems, sexual violence, romantic fantasy, patriarchal dating expectations, or the fact that modern heterosexuality often looks like a group project where half the class refuses to open the Google Doc. No, the culprit is feminism. Case closed. Someone get the van.

The nostalgia running beneath both essays is that women were once prepared for relationships, marriage, and family in a way they no longer are. There is something worth discussing there. Modern life often does leave people emotionally underprepared for intimacy. A culture that tells everyone to be self-sufficient while also selling romance as salvation is going to produce confusion. Women are told to be independent but desirable, ambitious but not intimidating, sexually liberated but not “too much,” emotionally available but not needy, romantic but realistic, feminine but not weak, successful but not selfish. Men are often given even worse emotional training, which is to say they are handed a toolbox containing silence, porn, resentment, and maybe one podcast microphone. There is a real problem here. But blaming feminism for it is at best ridiculous and at worst shouting ‘pick me’ at the top of your lungs because there’s nothing patriarchy likes more than a woman who will do the “brave” thing and say “actually feminism is evil!”

The past did not offer women a universally healthier relationship culture. It offered many women fewer exits. It offered legal and economic pressure to marry. It offered stigma against divorce. It offered limited contraception. It offered fewer employment options. It offered the romantic security of being told that your husband was your provider while the law, church, and economy made sure you needed one. That may have produced more marriages, but more marriages do not automatically mean better lives.

A locked room has excellent retention rates.

Macha’s essay also relies on broad claims about what “most women” want: most women want love, marriage, romance, a dream man, and family more than career. Perhaps many do. Many women do want marriage and children. Many also want work, creative achievement, education, friendship, sexual autonomy, political voice, solitude, community, travel, money, art, pleasure, and the ability to leave a bad situation without being thrown into destitution.

Feminism does not require women to want careers more than relationships. It requires that women not be forced to organize their lives around dependence because society cannot imagine them as full adults otherwise.

Her discussion of softness, gentleness, and femininity also deserves more care than the article gives it. Macha argues that softness should be respected and that Cinderella represents a kind of strength through kindness and gentleness. Fine. Softness can be beautiful. Gentleness can be strong. Care can be powerful. Nurture matters. The problem is not softness. The problem is compulsory softness, selectively enforced softness, and the long history of defining women’s virtue through their willingness to absorb harm gracefully. Feminism does not need to sneer at gentleness to ask why women have so often been praised for enduring pain quietly.

Cinderella may be kind and resilient, but she is also trapped in an abusive household until outside recognition saves her. If that is your model of feminine strength, we should at least be honest about the price of admission.

The same goes for Macha’s comments about women being cruel to other women. Women can be cruel. Women can be manipulative, competitive, passive-aggressive, and vicious. Anyone who has survived a middle school girl’s bathroom knows that. But again, the existence of female cruelty does not disprove structural sexism.

In fact, some of the strongest feminist work has examined how women enforce patriarchal norms on each other, how respectability politics works, how mothers teach daughters survival through compliance, how women police other women’s sexuality, and how proximity to male approval can become a form of social currency. “Women can be awful too” is not a refutation of feminism. Feminists have been saying that with footnotes.

The real contradiction between the two essays is this: in the first, Macha criticizes feminists for supposedly making feminism too much about choice. In the second, she criticizes feminism because women have made choices that she believes have harmed them. Women choosing domesticity are treated as authentic. Women choosing career, independence, sexual freedom, or delayed marriage are treated as victims of feminist indoctrination. This means the argument is not really about whether women should have choices. It is about which choices are considered legitimate and which choices must be explained away as brainwashing.

That is why her proposed alternative, “women’s advocacy” without feminism, sounds less like a new framework and more like feminism with the structural analysis surgically removed. Of course we should care about women’s well-being without hating men. Of course we should value motherhood, care work, gentleness, relationships, and emotional life. Of course feminism should be critiqued where it becomes elitist, racist, consumerist, cruel, essentialist, or indifferent to women whose desires do not fit the professional-class empowerment script. But a women’s advocacy that refuses to discuss patriarchy, law, economic dependence, reproductive control, domestic violence, sexual coercion, political exclusion, and cultural scripts is not more rational. It is just less equipped.

In the end, Macha is right about one thing: feminism is not simply about choice. But this is not the devastating revelation she thinks it is. Feminism is about power. It is about the forces that shape choice before a woman ever experiences it as personal preference. It is about who gets resources, who gets credibility, who gets safety, who gets protected, who gets paid, who gets forgiven, who gets punished, who gets believed, and who gets told that their suffering is just the natural order of things.

Feminism was never merely about choosing. It was about making sure women had something meaningful to choose from in the first place.

A Brief Note From Someone Who Also Once Thought She Had Outgrown Feminism

This is the part where I want to be careful, because I do not think the useful critique here is “she is young, therefore she is wrong.” Young women are allowed to think seriously, write publicly, change their minds, reject labels, and argue themselves into intellectual corners with the same confidence as everyone else. Frankly, if being publicly wrong in your twenties disqualified you from later having useful thoughts, most of the internet would have to be placed under quarantine. I am not interested in patting a younger woman on the head and saying she will understand when she is older. That is condescending, and also the exact sort of thing women get enough of already.

But I do recognize the shape of this argument. In my early twenties, I also thought feminism was probably exaggerating. I believed in freedom, individual choice, personal responsibility, and the idea that I was somehow standing above the mess by being “rational.” I called myself socially liberal and economically conservative, which is one of those phrases people use when they want to sound morally decent without reading the fine print. So when Macha describes herself as “culturally classical liberal and economically social democrat,” I understand the appeal.

For me, it felt sophisticated. Balanced. Adult. Like I had found the sensible middle between hysterical partisans on both sides, which is very cute in hindsight, in the way baby raccoons are cute before they get into the trash or try to steal my sister’s chicken eggs.4

The problem is that this kind of self-description can also become a very attractive waiting room for people who do not want to admit that “neutrality” often has politics of its own.

Because here is the thing I had to learn the long and embarrassing way: freedom is not just a mood. Freedom has infrastructure. Freedom needs healthcare, housing, wages, education, childcare, legal protection, contraception, abortion access, workplace rights, public safety, disability access, and the ability to leave a bad marriage without falling through a trapdoor. You cannot meaningfully support women’s freedom while treating the systems that make freedom possible as secondary details. You cannot say women should be free to choose their lives while dismissing the structures that determine whether those choices are actually available.

So here is the advice-column part, from one older woman who once thought feminism was overreacting to a younger woman who now thinks feminism is the problem: Be suspicious when a framework tells you that the reason your life feels hard is because women became too free.

Sometimes a diagnosis feels powerful not because it is accurate, but because it gives shape to chaos. It says: here is the villain, here is the story, here is why you hurt. I understand the appeal. Truly. Sometimes a satisfying explanation is not true. Sometimes it is just tidy.

That does not mean Macha has to call herself a feminist. Nobody has to. Feminism is not a hostage situation with a reading list. But if the alternative is “women’s advocacy” that wants to support women while denying or minimizing patriarchy, then the question becomes: support women against what? Bad vibes? Personal disappointment? Dating confusion? Other women being mean? All of those things matter, but they are not enough. Women do not just need encouragement. They need rights. They need resources. They need bodily autonomy. They need economic security. They need protection from violence. They need historical memory. They need a politics that understands why individual pain keeps appearing in patterned ways.

That is what feminism, at its best, gives us. Not perfection. Not purity. Not a sacred text delivered by Gloria Steinem on stone tablets while Betty Friedan argues with bell hooks in the parking lot. It gives us a way to ask why so many private struggles have public causes.

You are not wrong to want love, softness, marriage, children, romance, domesticity, faith, gentleness, or a life that does not revolve around becoming a corporate productivity demon in ankle boots. But feminism is not the thing standing between women and those desires. Feminism is the reason those desires can be choices rather than assignments.

The tragedy is that anti-feminism often sells women a comforting lie: that if we can just undo the confusion feminism caused, we can return to something stable, meaningful, and whole. But the stability of the past was often built out of women’s dependency. The meaning was often enforced through shame. The wholeness often required silence from anyone who did not fit. Feminism did not destroy paradise. It interrupted a prison sentence.

On the surface, this sounds like a debate about seventy-two hours. Should someone seeking an abortion have to wait three days between requesting care and receiving it? Is that a reasonable pause? Is it a protective measure? Is it an obstacle? Is it one of those policies that pretends to be neutral while quietly doing the political equivalent of putting superglue on a doorknob?

But the waiting period is not really about time. It is about belief.

The assumption behind a mandatory waiting period is that a woman who requests an abortion today may not truly understand what she wants until three days from now. Her stated decision is treated as incomplete. Her certainty needs a probationary period. Her judgment must sit in the bureaucratic naughty chair until the state decides enough reflection has occurred. This is usually presented as compassion, but it is not compassion to assume that an adult patient has arrived at a medical appointment without ever once considering the implications of the thing she is there to do.

That is the insult hiding under the paperwork.

Because the history of women’s reproductive healthcare is, in many ways, the history of women not being believed about their own bodies. They are not believed when they say they are in pain. They are not believed when they say something is wrong. They are not believed when they say they do not want children. They are not believed when they say they want an abortion. They are not believed when they say pregnancy is dangerous, unwanted, unsustainable, or simply not the future they choose.

Again and again, the central question is not whether women know themselves. The central question is whether institutions are willing to believe them.

The three-day waiting period is not the whole story. It is a symptom. It is the policy rash that appears when a society has been infected for centuries with the idea that women are unreliable narrators of their own lives.

For most of Western history, women were treated as fundamentally suspect authorities on themselves. Under coverture, married women effectively ceased to exist as independent legal persons, which is quite an achievement if your goal is to make marriage function like a legal sinkhole with floral centerpieces. Women were denied access to higher education because they were supposedly too delicate for intellectual strain. They were excluded from voting because they were supposedly too emotional for political judgment. They were restricted in property ownership because they were supposedly incapable of managing their own affairs, despite being expected to manage households, children, kin networks, community obligations, social reputations, and every domestic crisis from “the baby has a fever” to “your father has decided feelings are for the French.”

The contradiction was not accidental. Patriarchy has always been very good at making women responsible for everything and authoritative about nothing. Women were expected to raise future citizens but not vote. They were expected to shape the moral character of the nation but not participate fully in public life. They were expected to bear children but not control reproduction. They were expected to understand everyone else’s needs while remaining strangely unqualified to interpret their own.

Medicine inherited that logic, added Latin, and called it science.

For centuries, women’s testimony was treated as suspect. Pain was minimized. Exhaustion was dismissed. Anger was pathologized. Dissatisfaction was medicalized. The diagnosis of hysteria became medicine’s junk drawer for women who were sad, angry, traumatized, sexually dissatisfied, politically inconvenient, resistant to domestic confinement, or just generally failing to perform womanhood with the required amount of lace-covered gratitude. A woman could say something was wrong. A doctor could decide the real problem was that she was a woman saying things.

Very tidy. Deeply stupid. Historically persistent.

The point was not merely that women were seen as fragile. It was that women were positioned as unreliable witnesses to their own bodies. A woman might feel pain, but someone else had to decide whether the pain was real. A woman might be unhappy, but someone else had to decide whether her unhappiness was justified. A woman might say she did not want children, but someone else had to interpret whether that desire was genuine, temporary, pathological, selfish, immature, or simply waiting to be cured by the mystical powers of a sufficiently persuasive man and a beige nursery.

That assumption never disappeared.

Today, it often arrives in the language of concern. We should make sure she understands. We should make sure she has thought about it. We should make sure she will not regret it. These statements sound reasonable until you notice how selectively they are applied. Patients make serious medical decisions every day. They consent to surgeries. They refuse treatments. They begin chemotherapy. They decline chemotherapy. They undergo procedures that alter their bodies permanently. Yet abortion attracts a special machinery of hesitation, as if pregnancy is the one medical condition where the patient’s own decision requires state-managed emotional marination.

That question did not emerge from nowhere. It has been rehearsed in law, medicine, religion, advertising, television, film, and family conversation for generations. Before a woman ever walks into a clinic, culture has already taught her what her body is for, what choices are acceptable, which emotions she is supposed to feel, and whether her own judgment is enough.

This is why reproductive healthcare is never just a medical issue. Healthcare begins long before a patient meets a doctor. Healthcare begins in culture.

Most people do not learn about reproductive healthcare from medical journals. They learn from television, movies, news coverage, social media, churches, schools, families, and the ambient misogyny fog machine we call “public discourse.” They learn from stories about what “good women” do. They learn from narratives in which motherhood is fulfillment, childfreedom is damage, abortion is tragedy, and a woman who says no to pregnancy must be either confused, traumatized, immature, selfish, or waiting for the plot to teach her better.

This is where popular culture matters. Not because television directly tells people what to think in some cartoonishly simple brainwashing machine where Shonda Rhimes pulls a lever and lawmakers fall out of the wall. Culture matters because it teaches people what feels normal. It gives politics its emotional vocabulary. It trains audiences in who deserves sympathy, who deserves suspicion, and whose certainty is allowed to count.

Take Cristina Yang on Grey’s Anatomy. Cristina is one of television’s clearest examples of a woman who knows she does not want children and is treated by those around her like this must be a temporary software glitch in the Motherhood Operating System. She does not say she is unsure. She does not say she may want children later. She does not say she is waiting for the right partner, the right age, the right home, or the right Instagrammable kitchen island around which to perform maternal fulfillment. She says, repeatedly and clearly, that she does not want to be a mother.1

When Cristina becomes pregnant and chooses abortion, the conflict is not that she does not know her own mind. The conflict is that other people refuse to believe she knows her own mind. Owen tries to reinterpret her decision as fear rather than clarity. He suggests she is afraid she would not be a good mother, as if every woman who rejects motherhood is secretly trapped in an emotional escape room and just needs a man with enough confidence and absolutely no business being there to find the key. Cristina’s response is devastating because it names the thing everyone keeps refusing to hear: she knows she could love a child, but she does not want one. She does not want to be a mother.

That distinction matters. Cristina is not incapable of love. She is capable of self-knowledge. The scandal is not that Cristina has an abortion. The scandal is that Cristina does not repent of not wanting motherhood. She refuses the expected narrative arc in which the ambitious woman eventually discovers that babies were the missing ingredient in her sad little career casserole. Instead, she keeps saying what she has said all along: this is not the life she wants.

And that is apparently very upsetting to a culture that has spent centuries insisting that all women secretly want the same thing.

The fact that Cristina’s storyline felt unusual tells us quite a lot, because television has spent decades treating women who do not want children as either temporary anomalies or narrative problems awaiting repair. Even when childfree women appear, the story often cannot simply let them not want children in peace. In The Baby, Natasha’s reluctance around motherhood is refreshing at first, but even there the show gives her a damaged-childhood explanation, because apparently “I just don’t want kids” is still not enough of a character motivation unless we first take it through the prestige-TV trauma car wash. Seinfeld gives us Elaine pushing back against the endless “you gotta have a baby” chorus, only to have her reconsider when a man she is dating gets a vasectomy, because even sitcoms about nothing somehow find time to ask whether a woman’s reproductive choices are really final. Ally McBeal turns this into full narrative clown shoes: Ally spends years embodying the anxious single-career-woman question, complete with the infamous dancing baby hallucination,2 and then the show eventually has a child appear at her door thanks to an egg-bank mix-up, because heaven forbid a woman end the series with only a law career, friends, and unresolved emotional issues like a normal television man.

Succession gives Shiv a more modern version of the trap: she is ambivalent, aware that motherhood would collide with career, marriage, power, and family dysfunction, yet even her refusal gets treated as unstable once her mother tells her some women are not meant to be mothers. Suddenly motherhood becomes defiance, because apparently the only thing more powerful than patriarchy is a mother making one emotionally devastating comment over lunch.

The pattern is exhausting. Not wanting children cannot simply be a preference. It has to be a wound, a phase, a panic response, a symptom, a joke, a challenge, or a narrative error that the writers eventually try to correct by dropping a baby into the plot like a moral at the end of an episode of He-Man.

That is the cultural soil in which abortion waiting periods grow. If culture repeatedly teaches that women who say they do not want children are probably confused, damaged, selfish, or not yet in possession of the full truth about themselves, then a mandatory waiting period starts to look less like an intrusion and more like common sense. After all, if women are always about three days away from discovering their “real” maternal instincts, why not make them wait? Maybe on day two the uterus will release a tiny statement clarifying its position.

The same logic appears in a different form in the Grey’s Anatomy episode “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper,” where Miranda Bailey, an actual surgeon and chief of surgery, walks into another hospital and says she is having a heart attack. Bailey is not a random person misreading WebMD at two in the morning after googling “weird chest feeling, am I dead?”3 She is a doctor. She knows the symptoms. She knows that heart attacks can present differently in women. She asks for appropriate testing. She tells them what is happening in her own body.

And still, she is dismissed.

The doctors at Seattle Presbyterian minimize her concerns, focus on stress, and eventually send in a psychiatrist. This is where the episode becomes less “medical drama” and more “documentary with better lighting.” Bailey knows exactly what is happening to her body, but her knowledge is treated as anxiety until her body performs the only argument some medical systems seem willing to accept from women: a full-scale crisis. Only after she worsens is the heart attack confirmed and treated.

That episode is so effective because the point is not subtle. If Miranda Bailey, a doctor, a surgeon, a chief, a woman who has spent years saving lives with the confidence of a battle axe in Crocs, can be treated as an unreliable witness to her own body, what exactly is supposed to happen to everyone else?

The answer, historically speaking, is: exactly what you think.

Women say they are in pain. Women say something is wrong. Women say their symptoms do not feel normal. And too often they are told it is stress, anxiety, hormones, weight, age, motherhood, not motherhood, their period, perimenopause, depression, or that thrilling diagnostic category known as “have you considered being less difficult?” The details change, but the structure remains the same. Women’s bodily knowledge is provisional until someone with more authority confirms it.

Now bring that back to abortion. The logic of the waiting period is not separate from the logic of the doctor dismissing Bailey’s heart attack. It is the same logic in a different lab coat. Bailey says, “Something is wrong with my body,” and the institution says, “Are you sure?” A woman seeking abortion says, “I do not want to continue this pregnancy,” and the state says, “Are you sure?” Cristina says, “I do not want to be a mother,” and the culture says, “Are you sure?” The repeated question is not a neutral request for clarification. It is a system of delay, doubt, and control.

And then there is the “good girls avoid abortion” problem, one of those pop culture tropes so common it practically deserves its own waiting room magazine. The sympathetic woman may consider abortion. She may schedule an appointment. She may cry, agonize, pace, stare at a phone, touch her stomach, or look soulfully out a rain-streaked window. But if she is meant to remain morally legible to a broad audience, the story often prevents her from actually having one. She miscarries. She changes her mind. The pregnancy becomes medically impossible. The father suddenly becomes less of a collection of red flag in a trenchcoat. The baby becomes a sign of growth. The future magically rearranges itself into something workable because the plot has apparently found childcare, healthcare, rent money, paid leave, emotional support, and a reliable partner in the back of a wardrobe.

This is not just storytelling convenience. It is cultural training.

The “good woman” is permitted to be overwhelmed by pregnancy, but not to reject motherhood with clarity. She can be frightened, but not firm. She can be conflicted, but not certain. She can walk up to the abortion storyline, tap on the glass, and consider entering, but the narrative frequently grabs her by the shoulders and redirects her toward the motherhood exit before she does something the audience might not forgive. The story reassures viewers that a good woman may think she wants an abortion, but if given enough time, enough pressure, or enough plot manipulation, she will discover that she does not.

Again, notice how close this is to the logic of waiting periods. The woman says she wants an abortion. The law says wait. The trope says wait. The culture says wait. Maybe you will change your mind. Maybe you are scared. Maybe you are confused. Maybe you are not really the kind of woman who does this. Maybe your future self, the one we have invented for you and dressed in soft-focus maternal lighting, knows better than you do.

This is why the waiting period is so revealing. It is not merely an administrative hurdle. It is the bureaucratic version of a story we have been telling about women for centuries. It takes the cultural assumption that women are unreliable authorities on their own bodies and turns it into policy.

The more you look at these examples together, the clearer the pattern becomes. Cristina Yang says she does not want children and is treated as though she must be wrong about her own desires. Miranda Bailey says she is having a heart attack and is treated as though she must be wrong about her own body. The “good girls avoid abortion” pattern says women may believe they want to end a pregnancy, but a good narrative will reveal that they were wrong about their own decision before the credits roll.

The shared assumption is that women require verification. Their pain requires verification. Their symptoms require verification. Their desires require verification. Their reproductive decisions require verification. Their “no” requires verification. Their “yes” requires verification. Their certainty is never quite finished until someone else signs off on it.

And that is the real issue with mandatory waiting periods. They do not simply delay care. They formalize doubt. They take suspicion already embedded in culture and give it an appointment slot.

By the time someone walks into a clinic, she is not arriving as a blank slate. She is arriving after years of cultural messaging about motherhood, regret, femininity, credibility, pain, sacrifice, and what “good women” are supposed to do. She is arriving from a world that has repeatedly told her women often misunderstand themselves. The waiting period then repeats that lesson in the language of law: maybe you do not know yet. Maybe you need more time. Maybe the state should help you think.

But women have been thinking.

Women think before they miss a period. They think when they take the test. They think when they calculate rent, childcare, medical bills, work schedules, existing children, relationships, safety, health, dreams, risks, and what kind of life they can actually survive. The idea that reflection begins only once the state starts the clock is insulting. It is also revealing. The waiting period is not designed around women’s reality. It is designed around institutional disbelief.

Ireland may soon remove its mandatory three-day abortion waiting period, and that matters. It matters because barriers to care matter. It matters because delays matter. It matters because reproductive autonomy should not be treated like a customer service return window for a defective toaster.

But removing the legal waiting period does not automatically remove the cultural one.

The cultural waiting period is the one women enter the moment they say something inconvenient about their own bodies. I am in pain. I do not want children. I want an abortion. I want contraception. I want sterilization. I know something is wrong. I know what I want. I know what I can handle. I know what I cannot.

And then comes the response, sometimes from doctors, sometimes from husbands, sometimes from lawmakers, sometimes from television writers, sometimes from the comments section, that glorious haunted hayride of unsolicited male expertise:

Are you sure?

The legal waiting period may only last seventy-two hours.

The cultural waiting period has been running for centuries.

And frankly, it should have been discharged from care a long time ago.

2

I WISH I WAS JOKING. The look on her face when she sees the baby is the look on ALL OUR FACES.

It is not clever. It is not edgy. It is not brave. It is the rhetorical equivalent of finding a moldy sandwich under a couch cushion and declaring you made dinner.

But when UFC fighter Josh Hokit reportedly used a post-fight interview at a White House UFC event to make that exact claim about Michelle Obama, it was not just a random act of mouth-related negligence. It was not merely one man deciding that the best use of his moment in front of a microphone was to say something so intellectually bankrupt it should be repossessed by the bank of basic decency.

It was a performance.

And, more importantly, it was a performance with a very long history.

Because the attack on Michelle Obama is not really about Michelle Obama. That is the first thing we need to understand. Michelle Obama does not have to be present. She does not have to be relevant to the event. She does not have to have said anything, done anything, worn anything, posted anything, or breathed too confidently in a sleeveless dress. Her body, her gender, and her femininity remain permanently available for public inspection because America has spent centuries treating Black women’s womanhood as if it comes with a comments section.

This is not new. The conspiracy theory is modern. The logic is old.

For centuries, Black women have been portrayed as too strong, too physical, too loud, too dominant, too sexual, too aggressive, too independent, too angry, too muscular, too much. Too much for what? Too much for the narrow little dollhouse of femininity built around white womanhood and then marketed as universal truth. Black women have repeatedly been measured against a standard that was never designed to include them, then punished for failing to fit inside it.

That is the real story here.

Not one fighter. Not one stupid comment. Not one former First Lady.1 The real story is the long history of denying Black women access to the social category of “woman” whenever womanhood implies softness, protection, respectability, sympathy, or care.

Michelle Obama does not need anyone to prove that she is a woman.

The point is that Black women should not have to keep answering the question.

Womanhood was never race neutral

One of the most important insights from Black feminist thought is that “woman” has never been a neutral category.

That sounds simple, but it is the entire haunted mansion.

When nineteenth-century Americans talked about women as delicate, pure, domestic, morally superior, dependent, fragile, and in need of protection, they were not describing all women. They were describing an ideal. More specifically, they were describing an idealized version of white, middle-class womanhood. The so-called “true woman” was pious, pure, submissive, and domestic. She belonged in the home. She softened men. She raised children. She created a moral sanctuary from the harshness of the public world. She was imagined as physically weak but spiritually powerful, politically excluded but morally influential, dependent on men but somehow also responsible for civilizing them.

A very convenient arrangement, if you happened to be a man who wanted clean socks and moral absolution.

This ideology did not simply elevate women. It sorted women.

White womanhood became associated with purity and protection. Black womanhood was positioned outside that protected category. Enslaved women, free Black women, immigrant women, poor women, Indigenous women, and working-class women could not easily fit the velvet-gloved fantasy of the delicate lady. Not because they were less womanly, but because the dominant culture had already decided that “real” femininity required racial, class, and sexual respectability.

Femininity was not just a gender identity. It was a racial privilege.

That is why attacks on Black women so often focus on their bodies. Their muscles. Their faces. Their voices. Their height. Their anger. Their clothing. Their sexuality. Their hair. Their supposed aggression. Their supposed dominance. Black women are not merely judged by gender norms. They are judged by gender norms built through racial exclusion.

This is where intersectionality matters. Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term to describe how systems of oppression overlap and produce specific forms of harm. Black women are not simply experiencing racism in one lane and sexism in another, like two miserable little cars politely taking turns at a junction. They are positioned at the collision point, where race and gender crash into each other and then somehow the insurance company asks them to prove the damage was real.

Moya Bailey’s term misogynoir helps name this more precisely: anti-Black misogyny directed specifically at Black women. Not generic sexism. Not generic racism. A fused, targeted, culturally durable contempt.

And that contempt has always had a body politics.

Slavery and the invention of the “unfeminine” Black woman

The roots of this go directly into slavery.

White womanhood was increasingly imagined as delicate, dependent, pure, and domestic at the same time that enslaved Black women were being forced to labor, reproduce, nurse, cook, clean, raise children, endure sexual violence, and survive the sale of their own families. A society cannot depend on Black women’s physical exploitation while also admitting that they are fragile, protected, and deserving of care. So it did what white supremacy so often does when reality becomes inconvenient: it invented a story.

That story said Black women were naturally strong. Naturally suited to labor. Naturally sexual. Naturally coarse. Naturally less refined. Naturally less vulnerable. Naturally less feminine.

“Natural” is doing a lot of work there. Historically, “natural” is often what people say when they mean “I benefit from this arrangement and would prefer not to discuss it.”

Enslaved Black women were treated as women when enslavers wanted reproductive labor. Their capacity to bear children mattered because those children inherited enslaved status. Their wombs were economic instruments in a system of racial exploitation. But those same women were denied womanhood when womanhood meant protection, respect, sexual innocence, maternal rights, or legal recognition.

They were women when the plantation wanted wombs.

They were not women when those wombs belonged to human beings.

This is why Deborah Gray White’s work on enslaved Black women remains so important. In Ar’n’t I a Woman?, White shows how slavery produced enduring stereotypes of Black womanhood, especially the Jezebel and Mammy figures. The Jezebel stereotype portrayed Black women as sexually promiscuous and therefore supposedly responsible for their own exploitation. The Mammy stereotype portrayed Black women as loyal, maternal, desexualized caretakers who existed to nurture white families rather than their own. These images seem different, but they share a purpose: they make Black women usable.

One stereotype says Black women can be violated.

The other says Black women can be worked.

Neither says Black women are human.

And both helped establish the larger framework in which Black women were positioned outside ideal femininity. White womanhood was delicate. Black womanhood was durable. White womanhood was pure. Black womanhood was sexual. White womanhood was dependent. Black womanhood was laboring. White womanhood was protected. Black womanhood was exploitable.

That is the rotten little seedbed from which the “Black women are masculine” trope grows.

Sojourner Truth and the question that still has teeth

This is why Sojourner Truth’s famous intervention at the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron still matters so much.

The version most people know, the “Ain’t I a Woman?” version, has a complicated publication history. The famous refrain comes from a later account by Frances Dana Gage, not the earliest published version.2

But the broader point survives the textual mess.

Truth challenged the white women’s rights movement by exposing the racism inside its definition of womanhood. In the famous version, she points out that men claim women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches, but nobody does that for her. She has labored. She has endured hunger. She has borne children and seen them sold away. She has suffered as a Black woman under slavery and yet is still asked, implicitly and explicitly, whether she counts as a woman.

Her argument was not simply “I, too, am a woman.”

It was sharper than that.

Her argument was: your definition of womanhood is racist.

If womanhood means protection, then why am I not protected? If womanhood means delicacy, what happens to women forced into labor? If womanhood means moral value, why are Black mothers denied the right to keep their children? If womanhood means political exclusion on the grounds of weakness, why are Black women expected to work like men and suffer like animals?

Truth revealed the trap. White women were oppressed by patriarchal ideas of femininity, certainly. But they could also appeal to those ideas. They could say: we are mothers, we are moral guardians, we are delicate, we deserve protection, we deserve influence, we deserve rights because of our womanly virtue.

Black women could not make that appeal in the same way because the culture had already denied them the presumption of virtue, delicacy, and protection.

That is why the question still bites.

Ain’t I a woman?

America has spent centuries trying not to answer.

Sarah Baartman and the scientific spectacle of Black women’s bodies

The story also runs through Sarah Baartman, the Khoikhoi woman taken from southern Africa and exhibited in early nineteenth-century Europe under the stage name “Hottentot Venus.”

Baartman’s body was treated as public property. Audiences paid to stare at her. Scientists studied her. Artists reproduced her. European spectators turned her into an object of racial and sexual fascination, using her body to support claims about African women as primitive, hypersexual, excessive, and physically different from European women.

This is one of the clearest examples of the racialized surveillance of Black women’s bodies.

Baartman was not simply displayed as “different.” She was displayed as evidence. Her body became a text white audiences believed they were entitled to read. Her hips, buttocks, genitals, face, and posture were interpreted through a colonial gaze that had already decided what it wanted to find: proof that Black women were less refined, less feminine, less civilized, closer to nature, closer to animals, closer to sex, and further from the protected category of respectable womanhood.

That archive did not disappear.

The modern internet did not invent the obsessive inspection of Black women’s bodies. It accelerated it, monetized it, memeified it, and handed it to men who think “research” means staring at a woman’s shoulders in a YouTube thumbnail for six hours.

When people obsess over Michelle Obama’s arms, Serena Williams’ muscles, Brittney Griner’s height, Caster Semenya’s body, or any Black woman whose physicality exceeds the narrow borders of white femininity, they are participating in a much older tradition. They may not know the name Sarah Baartman. They may not know anything about nineteenth-century racial science. Most of them appear to have only a nodding acquaintance with the concept of “reading.” But the script is familiar.

Black women’s bodies are treated as suspicious bodies.

Bodies to measure.

Bodies to debate.

Bodies to classify.

Bodies to disqualify.

White womanhood was a fortress. Black womanhood was left outside.

After emancipation, white supremacy leaned heavily on the protection of white womanhood.

In the Jim Crow South, white women were often positioned as symbols of racial purity and civilization. The myth of the endangered white woman became one of the most powerful justifications for racial terror. Black men were falsely portrayed as sexual threats to white women, and those accusations helped fuel lynching, segregation, and political violence.

Ida B. Wells exposed this lie with extraordinary courage. Her anti-lynching work showed that white mobs often used the language of white female protection to disguise economic retaliation, consensual relationships, racial control, and political terror. “Protecting white women” became one of white supremacy’s favorite costumes. It was threadbare, bloodstained, and somehow still taken out for every formal occasion.

But here is the other half of that gender system: Black women were not protected.

Black women experienced sexual violence under slavery, during Reconstruction, under Jim Crow, and throughout the twentieth century, but their victimization was routinely ignored or dismissed. The same culture that treated white women’s purity as sacred treated Black women as inherently impure. The same culture that portrayed white women as vulnerable portrayed Black women as unrapeable, immoral, or sexually available.

This is not incidental. It is structural.

The case of Recy Taylor makes this brutally clear. In 1944, Taylor, a Black woman in Alabama, was kidnapped and raped by white men after leaving church. Her attackers confessed, but no one was indicted.

Let me repeat that for you.

Her attackers confessed, but no one was indicted.

Rosa Parks investigated Taylor’s case years before Parks became nationally famous for the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Black women’s anti-rape activism was not a footnote to the civil rights movement. It was one of its foundations.

And yet, in the dominant public imagination, Black women’s vulnerability has rarely been granted the same political force as white women’s vulnerability. Black women have been expected to endure, to survive, to keep going, to carry everybody else’s pain while being told their own is too inconvenient, too complicated, too angry, too divisive.

This is where the “Strong Black Woman” stereotype becomes dangerous.

Because sometimes the denial of Black women’s femininity does not sound like an insult.

Sometimes it sounds like praise.

The “Strong Black Woman” trap

The Strong Black Woman stereotype looks complimentary if you do not examine it for more than five seconds, which, tragically, is how a great deal of public discourse is produced.

Black women are strong. Black women are resilient. Black women can handle anything. Black women survive.

All of that can sound admiring. Sometimes it is admiring. There is real history in Black women’s survival, organizing, labor, care work, political leadership, cultural production, and community defense. Black women have held families, movements, churches, schools, neighborhoods, and entire political coalitions together while receiving approximately three crumbs and a commemorative tote bag in exchange.

We love to talk about how Harriet Tubman led men into battle. We like to talk a lot less about how she died in poverty because the government refused to pay her pension as a soldier.3

But the stereotype turns survival into obligation.

If Black women are always strong, then they do not need protection.

If Black women can handle anything, then their pain is less urgent.

If Black women are naturally resilient, then society owes them less care.

If Black women are built for endurance, then exploitation becomes easier to justify.

This is the trap Patricia Hill Collins identifies through the framework of “controlling images.” Black women are repeatedly represented through stereotypes that discipline their behavior and rationalize their oppression. Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire, the welfare queen, the Black matriarch, the Strong Black Woman: these are not just insulting images. They are political tools.

Mammy exists to serve.

Jezebel exists to be used.

Sapphire exists to be dismissed.

The matriarch exists to be blamed.

The Strong Black Woman exists to be denied care.

It is a whole racist Barbie Dreamhouse of stereotypes, except every doll comes with trauma and no one gets paid.

The “Black matriarch” and the panic over Black women’s authority

In 1965, the Moynihan Report gave twentieth-century policy language to an older anxiety: the fear that Black women had too much power.

The report, officially titled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, argued that Black poverty and inequality were tied to the supposed breakdown of the Black family. At the center of that diagnosis was the figure of the Black matriarch: too dominant, too independent, too powerful, too emasculating.

This is crucial because accusations of masculinity are not always about appearance. Often, they are about authority.

Black women are masculinized when they lead. When they speak firmly. When they refuse submission. When they earn more. When they survive without male protection. When they raise children. When they express anger. When they enter politics. When they become First Lady and decline to make herself small enough for the national imagination.

The “Black matriarch” panic turned Black women’s survival into a social pathology. Instead of asking how slavery, segregation, labor exploitation, housing discrimination, education inequality, and state violence shaped Black family life, the report helped popularize a familiar conservative maneuver: find a Black woman and blame her for the wreckage.

It is very efficient. Historically vile, but efficient.

This logic never really left. We still see it when Black mothers are blamed for systemic inequality. We see it when Black women are described as emasculating. We see it when Black women’s independence is treated as a threat rather than an achievement. We see it when Black women are expected to save democracy every election cycle and then are told they are asking for too much when they expect democracy to return the favor.

And we see it in the treatment of Michelle Obama.

Michelle Obama and the biceps that broke America

Michelle Obama has been subjected to this racialized gender policing for years.

Her arms became a national conversation. Her height was scrutinized. Her athleticism was scrutinized. Her facial expressions were scrutinized. Her anger, real or imagined, was scrutinized. Her marriage was scrutinized through the old language of domination and emasculation. She was framed as angry, intimidating, aggressive, unfeminine, and secretly controlling.

She could plant a vegetable garden and somehow become a threat to freedom.

She could encourage children to eat vegetables and people acted as if she had personally waterboarded Ronald McDonald.

She could wear a sleeveless dress and America behaved like her biceps had breached the Capitol.4

That is because Michelle Obama occupied a symbolic position white America struggled to process: a Black woman as First Lady. Not servant. Not background figure. Not stereotype. Not comic relief. Not caretaker to white children. Not a tragic figure. Not a body on display for white consumption. A Black woman in one of the most visible symbolic roles in the country, representing the nation itself.

For some people, that was intolerable.

So they reached for the old tools.

Angry Black Woman.

Sapphire.

Matriarch.

Masculine.

Secretly male.

The conspiracy theory that Michelle Obama is a man is not separate from these older stereotypes. It is their crudest remix. It takes the long-standing claim that Black women are insufficiently feminine and says the quiet part with a bullhorn purchased from the clearance bin at Fascism Depot.

And the point of the insult is not simply to mock Michelle Obama. The point is to discipline the boundaries of womanhood. It says: this woman does not count. This woman is too tall, too strong, too visible, too confident, too Black, too loved, too admired, too powerful, too much.

This is why the “joke” works for the people who enjoy it. It lets them attack Michelle Obama, Black women, feminists, queer people, and trans people all at once. A rancid little culture-war buffet.

Serena Williams, Brittney Griner, and the athletic body on trial

Sports make this pattern especially visible because women athletes are already navigating a gender trap.

Be excellent, but not too powerful.

Be competitive, but not too aggressive.

Be athletic, but not too muscular.

Be strong, but not threatening.

Win, but remain pleasing.

Dominate, but make it cute.

For Black women athletes, that trap becomes even tighter. Their physical power is celebrated when profitable and punished when it unsettles racialized femininity.

Serena Williams is one of the clearest examples. She is one of the greatest athletes in the history of tennis, which should be a complete sentence. Instead, for much of her career, public commentary obsessed over her body. Her muscles. Her shape. Her clothing. Her anger. Her sexuality. Her femininity. Her supposed intimidation. The question was never merely whether Serena could play. Obviously, she could. The question was whether the culture could tolerate a Black woman whose excellence looked like power.

Brittney Griner has faced similar masculinizing attacks. Her height, voice, athletic ability, and appearance have been used as material for gendered mockery and misgendering. And when Hokit reportedly made a similar “is a man” comment about Griner before targeting Michelle Obama, that matters. It shows that this is not a one-off insult. It is a chosen vocabulary. A little misogynoir catchphrase with knuckle tape.

Caster Semenya’s case shows the global stakes of gender policing in sports. Semenya, a South African runner, was subjected to invasive scrutiny and sex testing after her athletic success, and later rules around testosterone forced her into a long legal and medical battle over her eligibility. Black women are disproportionately subjected to bodily suspicion when their athletic excellence disrupts expectations.

Strength becomes suspicion.

Suspicion becomes inspection.

Inspection becomes regulation.

Regulation becomes exclusion.

This is why the “Black women are masculine” trope is not just playground cruelty. It has consequences. It shapes medical treatment, media coverage, workplace stereotypes, sports regulations, political discourse, and public sympathy.

It determines who gets to be seen as a woman without submitting paperwork in triplicate.

A brief word on trans panic

There is also a modern anti-trans element here, and we should name it without letting it swallow the older racial history.

The “Michelle Obama is a man” conspiracy borrows from trans panic. It depends on the idea that being trans is shameful, deceptive, ridiculous, or disqualifying. Even when the target is a cisgender woman, the insult works by treating transness as contamination. It says: wouldn’t it be humiliating if this woman were not a “real” woman? Wouldn’t that make her fraudulent? Wouldn’t that make her disgusting? Wouldn’t that make her laughable?

So yes, this rhetoric harms trans people. It turns trans identity into a weapon and relies on the audience accepting anti-trans assumptions. It also helps explain why these claims have become more common in recent years as right-wing politics has turned gender panic into a mass-production industry.

But anti-trans rhetoric did not invent the masculinization of Black women.

It gave an old racist trope a new costume.

For centuries, Black women were accused of being insufficiently feminine. Today, that suspicion is often expressed through the language of gender conspiracy. The target may be Michelle Obama, a cisgender Black woman, but the mechanism borrows from the same policing used against trans women: who counts as a real woman, who gets believed, who gets mocked, who gets inspected, and who gets pushed outside the category.

The software is old.

The update added trans panic, podcast microphones, and men who think staring at a woman’s jawline counts as political analysis.

The point is not whether Michelle Obama is “feminine enough”

This is where the conversation can easily go wrong.

The answer to “Michelle Obama is a man” is not “No, look, she is feminine enough.”

That accepts the terms of the insult.

Michelle Obama does not need to be defended by proving she is beautiful, graceful, stylish, maternal, heterosexual, appropriately feminine, or sufficiently non-threatening. She is those things in various ways, sure, but that is not the point. The point is not that Michelle Obama deserves womanhood because she successfully performs femininity in a way the public should approve.

The point is that womanhood should not be a gated community with white supremacy checking IDs at the entrance.

Black women should not have to be soft enough, small enough, quiet enough, pretty enough, modest enough, nurturing enough, or non-threatening enough to have their womanhood recognized. And Black women who are masculine, queer, trans, tall, muscular, loud, angry, disabled, fat, athletic, gender nonconforming, or simply uninterested in performing femininity for public approval are still not available for dehumanization.

The deeper issue is not whether one Black woman can be admitted into ideal womanhood.

The issue is the ideal itself.

Because ideal femininity has always been a trap. It punishes white women by confining them to fragility, purity, dependence, and domesticity. It punishes Black women by excluding them from those categories and then weaponizing that exclusion. It punishes trans women by treating womanhood as a biological fortress. It punishes all women who fail or refuse to perform correctly.

But it does not punish everyone equally.

Race matters.

Class matters.

Sexuality matters.

Body size matters.

Disability matters.

Gender presentation matters.

Power matters.

That is the whole point. The category of “woman” has always been political. It has been built, guarded, narrowed, whitened, sexualized, sentimentalized, and policed. And when Black women stand in public too visibly, too confidently, too powerfully, the guards come running.

Historically predictable, still disgusting

Josh Hokit’s comment was ugly, but it was not original.

That may be the most damning thing about it.

It belongs to a long archive: slavery’s denial of Black women’s vulnerability, racial science’s obsession with Black women’s bodies, Jim Crow’s worship of white womanhood, the sexual exploitation of Black women, the Sapphire stereotype, the Moynihan Report’s panic over Black matriarchy, the sports world’s gender policing of Black women athletes, and the modern right’s anti-trans panic.

And that is why the correct response is not shock exactly. Disgust, yes. Criticism, yes. Accountability, certainly. But shock gives too much credit. Shock suggests novelty. Shock suggests we have not seen this before.

We have seen this before.

Sojourner Truth saw it.

Sarah Baartman lived it.

Ida B. Wells fought it.

Recy Taylor survived it.

Serena Williams played through it.

Brittney Griner still gets hit with it.

Michelle Obama has been dealing with it for years.

The accusation changes form, but the underlying claim remains: Black women are not allowed uncomplicated access to womanhood. Their femininity is conditional. Their bodies are suspect. Their anger is pathological. Their strength is masculinizing. Their vulnerability is inconvenient. Their excellence is threatening. Their visibility is an invitation to public dissection.

So no, Michelle Obama does not need anyone to prove she is a woman.

What needs proving, apparently, is whether this country can stop treating Black women’s womanhood like an open debate moderated by the worst man you have ever met.

Recommended Reading

Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Patriarch: Black Masculine Identity Formation Within the Context of Romantic Relationships

Stereotypes of Black American Women Related to Sexuality and Motherhood

Ar′n′t I a Woman? Rev: Female Slaves in the Plantation South by Deborah Gray White

Mammies, Matriarchs and Other Controlling Images by Patricia Collins

The difficulty is that a proposal is supposed to come before the real writing begins, and I keep finding myself unable to wait. Every time I research one piece of the book, I fall down another rabbit hole that connects to the same larger argument. A normal person would make a note, save it for later, and move on. I am apparently not that person. I have too much to say, and while I would very much enjoy being paid an advance to sit around and write the actual book, some of these ideas are already scratching at the inside of my skull like tiny raccoons with footnotes.

This particular raccoon arrived in the form of the laugh track. More specifically, it arrived through the Laff Box, the machine developed by sound engineer Charles Douglass in the 1950s that allowed television producers to insert prerecorded audience laughter into programs whenever they wanted. A joke that received only a polite chuckle could suddenly sound like it had brought the house down. A mediocre punchline could be transformed into a moment of collective hysteria. A scene filmed without an audience could be supplied with one after the fact. In other words, television executives invented a machine that could peer-pressure you from inside your own living room, and somehow everyone decided this was normal.

That should strike us as stranger than it usually does. Most people think of laugh tracks as an irritating relic of old television, or maybe as a technical quirk from the days when sitcoms were still figuring out how to translate theater and radio comedy and shows filmed in front of a live studio audience into a domestic visual medium that filmed on a back studio lot. But the more I thought about the Laff Box, the more I became convinced that the laugh track was never only about comedy. It was about agreement. The truly fascinating thing is not simply that producers could fake laughter. It is that they understood fake laughter would work.

They understood something fundamental about human beings: we are social creatures who constantly look to one another for cues. We look for signals about how to behave, what to value, what to admire, what to reject, and what to find embarrassing. Psychologists might call this social proof, while cultural theorists might frame it as the production of common sense, but the basic mechanism is not hard to understand. People often determine what seems normal by observing what appears to be normal for everyone else. The laugh track creates precisely that illusion. It does not tell viewers what to think so much as it tells viewers what everyone else supposedly already thinks.

That distinction matters because people resist authority all the time. We argue with teachers, politicians, parents, clergy, experts, and strangers on the internet who have somehow mistaken a podcast microphone for a personality. But we are often much less resistant to what appears to be consensus. If everyone else is laughing, perhaps we should be laughing too. The genius of the laugh track was that it transformed television from a private viewing experience into a manufactured social event. Even when viewers sat alone in their homes, they were given the impression that they were watching alongside hundreds of other people. The audience became invisible but ever-present, a ghostly crowd living inside the television, already reacting before the viewer had fully decided how to feel.

This mattered especially in the 1950s, when television was rapidly becoming one of the most powerful cultural institutions in American life. In 1950, only about 9 percent of American households had a television. By 1960, that number had risen to roughly 90 percent. That is not a gradual cultural adjustment. That is a media avalanche. In a single decade, television went from novelty to household fixture, and the stories it told about American life became some of the most repeated images in the country.

The family sitcoms of this period did not merely entertain. Shows like Leave It to Beaver, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, The Donna Reed Show, and Father Knows Best offered audiences a clean, orderly, deeply selective vision of American domestic life.

Their worlds were serene, middle-class, white, heterosexual, and usually insulated from the messier realities of the actual decade. The Cold War, racial segregation, labor conflict, queer repression, economic inequality, and women’s dissatisfaction did not disappear from America. They simply did not get invited into the Cleaver living room.

That is where the larger argument behind June Cleaver Must Die comes in. Postwar American media did not simply reflect American culture. It helped manufacture it. Television, advertising, magazines, films, domestic advice manuals, and political rhetoric all worked together to create a vision of gender, family, and national belonging that felt natural precisely because it was repeated so often. The idealized housewife was not merely discovered in the American home and then faithfully represented on screen. She was assembled, polished, marketed, sentimentalized, and sold back to the public as though she had been there all along, waiting patiently beside the casserole dish.

Some people were remarkably explicit about wanting exactly that. In the 1947 national bestseller Modern Woman: The Lost Sex1, Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia F. Farnham argued that modern women were psychologically disordered by ambitions beyond wifehood and motherhood. They even advocated for “government and socially-minded organizations” to create “propaganda” making it clear that women pursuing anything other than motherhood and housewife status was “not generally desirable for women.” Which is one of those historical moments where the mask does not slip so much as fling itself into traffic. With the rise of postwar domestic sitcoms, Lundberg and Farnham essentially got what they wished for: a cultural machine that repeatedly presented domestic femininity as fulfillment and female ambition as confusion, selfishness, or comic disorder.

That is how common sense works. The most effective cultural messages rarely announce themselves as ideology. They appear as obvious truths. Everyone knows what a good wife looks like. Everyone knows what a normal family looks like. Everyone knows what kind of woman is admirable and what kind is ridiculous. These assumptions become powerful because they stop looking like assumptions. They become the background noise of everyday life. Or, in this case, the background laughter.

Once you start thinking about laugh tracks this way, the more interesting question is not whether they made jokes funnier. The more interesting question is what audiences were being invited to agree about. Sitcoms are never just collections of jokes. They are stories, and stories carry values. They tell us what kinds of people are reasonable, what kinds of conflicts matter, what kinds of behavior disrupt the social order, and what kinds of resolutions feel satisfying. The laugh track does not create those meanings by itself, but it helps guide viewers toward them. It marks the approved interpretation. It says, in effect, this is where we laugh.

This brings us to Lucy Ricardo, who is useful precisely because she is so beloved. I love Lucy. Most people love Lucy. That is what makes her such a good example, because a feminist critique of television does not require us to pretend that beloved shows were secretly evil artifacts pulled from Satan’s prop closet. The point is not that I Love Lucy hated women or that viewers were wrong to enjoy it. The point is that the show repeatedly drew comedy from Lucy wanting something she was not supposed to want. She wanted to perform. She wanted recognition. She wanted adventure. She wanted access to opportunities that seemed routinely available to her husband. She wanted more than the role assigned to her, and the machinery of the sitcom turned that wanting into comic disruption.2

The pattern matters more than any single joke. Lucy schemes, reaches, dreams, disguises herself, inserts herself into public spaces, and tries to cross boundaries that domestic life has placed around her. Then everything falls apart. The audience laughs, Ricky scolds or reacts, the disruption is contained, and normality returns. Lucy is not framed as a villain. That would be too blunt and far less effective. She is framed as lovable, chaotic, excessive, and fundamentally disruptive. The laughter does not tell us she is bad. It tells us she has stepped outside the expected order of things, and that stepping outside can be enjoyed so long as the door closes again by the end of the episode.

Sometimes the lesson was subtler than that, and sometimes the script simply walked into the room, slapped the audience in the face with a gender role, and waited for applause.

In a second-season episode of Father Knows Best, Betty Anderson decides she wants to be an engineer and signs up for field experience. Her family mocks her choice throughout the episode, because apparently the idea of a young woman wanting to understand bridges or machinery was treated as less “promising career path” and more “urgent family emergency.” When Betty finally begins her training, the engineer in charge tells her that “the male has his job, the female has hers, don’t confuse them.” He even explains that although his mother votes, she does not go to the polls until after she has cooked her husband’s breakfast. Democracy, yes, but only after eggs.

This is not just an old sitcom being old. It is an unusually clear example of the cultural logic these programs often helped normalize. Betty’s ambition is not treated as an ordinary interest. It becomes the problem the episode has to manage. Her desire to enter a male-coded field is framed as confusion, disruption, and comedy before the domestic order can reassert itself.

The laugh track does not need to say, “Women should not be engineers.” The structure of the episode can do that work while laughter softens the edges. It becomes a joke, and jokes have a wonderful way of letting ideology walk around in public without showing identification.

You can see the same structure across a wide range of mid-century television. The ambitious woman, the dissatisfied wife, the woman who wants a career, the woman who wants sexual or social autonomy, the woman who refuses to remain gratefully contained within domestic life: again and again, these figures become sources of comic tension. They are not always condemned outright. They are often made funny, which can be a much more flexible and durable form of discipline. A society does not always need to outlaw a behavior if it can successfully make that behavior seem ridiculous.

Ridicule is one of the oldest tools of social control because it operates through embarrassment rather than force. People may defy a rule, challenge a law, or argue with authority, but nobody wants to become the joke. That is why comic humiliation matters. The sitcom did not need to punish nonconforming women with tragedy. It could punish them with laughter. It could turn ambition into overreach, dissatisfaction into nagging, intelligence into meddling, and independence into spectacle. Viewers did not have to leave an episode thinking, “I have been instructed in the proper boundaries of femininity.” They simply absorbed, week after week, the rhythm of what was treated as sensible and what was treated as absurd.

This is one reason television matters so much to the history of gender. When people imagine how societies maintain gender roles, they often picture politicians, religious leaders, legal systems, and formal institutions. Those absolutely matter. But culture matters too, and sometimes culture is more effective precisely because it feels less coercive. Advertisements sold products. Women’s magazines sold advice. Politicians sold nostalgia. Sitcoms sold normality. None of these needed to operate as part of some grand conspiracy. They only needed to share the same assumptions about family, gender, authority, and belonging. Over time, those assumptions reinforced one another until the argument disappeared and only the image remained.

That image has had a very long afterlife. The 1950s that appears in modern political rhetoric is rarely the actual decade. It is not the 1950s of segregation, McCarthyism, queer persecution, compulsory conformity, domestic dissatisfaction, tranquilizers, or women being told that ambition was a symptom of psychological disorder. It is the antiseptic television 1950s: the living room, the kitchen, the smiling wife, the wise father, the children learning lessons, the world restored before the credits roll. That is the version of the decade that nostalgia politics keeps trying to resurrect. Not history, exactly. More like a rerun with policy ambitions.

This distinction matters because nostalgia does not always mean people literally want to live in the past. People often want the feeling of the imagined past without the medical care, the laundry technology, the infant mortality, the legal inequality, or, in my personal nightmare, the historical underwear.

The problem is that modern right-wing nostalgia often turns that feeling into political demand. The fantasy becomes a governing project. The family sitcom becomes a policy mood board. When politicians, pundits, and influencers talk about returning to “traditional” family values, they are frequently invoking a version of the 1950s that owes more to June and Ward Cleaver than to the complicated lives of actual mid-century women. The soundstage becomes a historical source. The laugh track becomes evidence. The rerun becomes memory.

That is why the laugh track is worth taking seriously. It was never the architect of postwar American culture. It did not invent patriarchy, domesticity, or the housewife ideal. That would be giving a box of recorded chuckles far too much credit, and frankly, I refuse to let the Laff Box get that full of itself. But it was one small and revealing component of a larger system. It helped create the impression that certain reactions were shared, certain judgments were obvious, and certain social boundaries were already agreed upon. It was a tiny machine hidden inside the walls of the myth factory, reminding viewers every week that everyone else already knew what was funny.

The next time you watch an old sitcom, ignore the joke for a moment and listen to the audience instead. Ask who is being laughed at. Ask who gets to be sensible and who gets to be ridiculous. Ask whose desires create the conflict and whose desires represent the solution. Ask what kind of world is being constructed through those choices, and why it needed a fake crowd to help hold it together.

Because sometimes the most revealing character on television is not the husband, the wife, the boss, or the nosy neighbor. Sometimes it is the crowd that does not actually exist, laughing on cue, telling you that everyone else already agrees.

Whether they actually did is another matter entirely.

There are vintage ads that make you laugh because the past was ridiculous.

And then there are vintage ads that make you stare into the middle distance and wonder if the entire advertising industry needed a supervised field trip to therapy.

Today’s artifact from the Housewife-Industrial Complex is this 1952 Chase & Sanborn coffee ad, which asks the timeless question: what if stale coffee justified a little light domestic violence?

Read more

He is doing Victorian medicine with Wi-Fi.

This is the same old story in worse lighting. Western culture has spent centuries insisting that respectable women do not really want sex, then acting shocked, threatened, medically concerned, or legally activated when women prove otherwise.

The lie was never simply “women do not want sex.”

The lie was “good women do not want sex.”

That distinction matters. A lot.

Because if “good” women do not want sex, then women who do want sex become a problem. They become immoral. Diseased. Hysterical. Fallen. Perverse. Obscene. Neurotic. Damaged. Ruined. Ran through. Bad mothers. Bad wives. Bad feminists. Bad citizens. Bad investments.

Pick your century. Pick your vocabulary. The structure stays annoyingly consistent, because sexism isn’t creative.

Western societies did not simply deny women’s sexuality. They managed it. They sorted women into categories that served patriarchal power. Respectable women were imagined as pure, passive, modest, maternal, domestic, and sexually innocent. Women who expressed desire, pursued pleasure, loved other women, wanted contraception, left marriages, rejected motherhood, or claimed sexual autonomy were treated as immoral, diseased, obscene, unstable, deviant, or dangerous.

The point was not that women had no desire. The point was that women’s desire was only acceptable when it served someone else’s system: husband, church, state, family, empire, race, birthrate, or male ego.

And when women’s desire stopped serving those systems?

Suddenly everyone needed a doctor, a priest, a judge, a psychiatrist, a postal inspector, and eventually, some guy in a podcast studio explaining “female nature” between ads for supplements.

The Victorian “angel in the house” was not a person so much as a scented candle with a uterus. She existed to comfort, refine, soothe, inspire, reproduce, and morally elevate the men around her.

Victorian gender ideology made this system especially obvious. Men were imagined as physically strong but morally vulnerable, suited to public life, business, politics, empire, and all the other places where one could apparently commit financial fraud while wearing a waistcoat. Women were imagined as physically weak but morally superior, belonging to the domestic sphere as wives, mothers, spiritual guardians, and decorative evidence that a man had succeeded.

A respectable woman’s sexuality was folded into marriage and motherhood. She was not supposed to be a sexual subject. She was supposed to be a wife. A mother. A moral atmosphere. A domestic stabilizer. The place where men returned after doing capitalism and colonialism all day.

And because this system depended on the fiction that good women did not want, women who did want had to be reclassified.

Enter: the fallen woman.

Victorian culture loved the fallen woman almost as much as it feared her. She appears everywhere: paintings, sermons, novels, moral literature, prostitution panic, purity campaigns. She is seduced, ruined, discarded, punished, pitied, painted beautifully, and then turned into a warning label for everyone else.

Someone had to carry the sexual knowledge, sexual danger, and sexual blame that respectable society pretended good women did not possess. If the angel proved that good women did not want, the fallen woman proved that women who did want deserved what happened to them.

Men’s desire was treated as natural, expected, sometimes regrettable, often excused. Women’s desire was treated as evidence. Evidence of class inferiority. Evidence of moral weakness. Evidence of racialized danger. Evidence of prostitution. Evidence of mental instability. Evidence of unfitness for respectable life.

This is how “purity” works as a social weapon. It does not just describe behavior. It creates borders. Good women over here. Bad women over there. Wives over here. Prostitutes over there. Mothers over here. Fallen women over there. White middle-class womanhood over here. Everyone else dragged into Victorian asylum to keep the rest of society from being fouled by their existence.

Victorian visual culture practically had a subscription plan for this. Paintings like William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience or Augustus Egg’s Past and Present turned women’s sexual transgression into melodrama, spectacle, warning, and moral instruction. Look, the pictures said. This is what happens when women leave the narrow path.

The fact that men were usually standing somewhere nearby with a bank account and full legal personhood was treated as a side issue.

Funny how that works.

When morality was not enough to contain women’s desire, medicine stepped in.

This is where the story moves from the pulpit and the parlor to the asylum, the doctor’s office, and the diagnostic manual of Things Women Do That Annoy Men.

Hysteria. Nymphomania. Erotomania. Moral insanity. Uterine disorder. Menstrual derangement. Female disease. Nervous exhaustion. Frigidity. Excess. Deficiency. Too much desire. Not enough desire. Desire for the wrong person. Anger mistaken for illness. Boredom mistaken for illness. Resistance mistaken for illness. Trauma mistaken for illness. A woman failing to perform domestic serenity convincingly enough could become a medical event.

To be clear, not every woman in an asylum was there because she wanted sex. History is not improved by making it dumber. But a culture committed to female passivity made women’s bodies, moods, sexuality, and reproductive systems very easy targets for diagnosis. If a woman’s proper role was wife, mother, and domestic angel, then any refusal or failure inside that role could be read as pathology.

Put a doctor’s coat on patriarchy and suddenly everyone pretends the cage is treatment.

If a woman wanted too much sex, she was sick. If she did not want sex with her husband, she was sick. If she read too much, argued too much, grieved too loudly, resisted too openly, or failed to appreciate the spiritual enrichment of household drudgery, medicine had a drawer full of labels.

The diagnosis was often less “what is wrong with this woman?” and more “why is this woman making everyone uncomfortable?”

This is why Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” still hits with the force of a polite domestic haunting. The narrator is not merely ill. She is trapped inside a medical and marital system that treats her perception, creativity, and distress as problems to be managed by male authority. She is told to rest, submit, stop writing, and accept treatment from a husband-physician who knows best.

The wallpaper gets it before he does.

Women’s desire, frustration, and autonomy were not simply repressed. They were interpreted. Classified. Managed. Spoken over. When women did not fit the ideal, the system rarely asked whether the ideal was rotten. It asked what was wrong with the woman.

This medicalization mattered because it made control look neutral. A priest calling a woman sinful is obvious moral regulation. A husband calling a wife disobedient is obvious domestic power. But a doctor calling a woman hysterical? That has authority. That has Latin. That has a certificate on the wall.

And patriarchy loves nothing more than outsourcing itself to experts.

The law played its part too.

If women’s desire was dangerous, then women’s knowledge was an emergency. If women could access information about sex, contraception, abortion, marital rights, divorce, or sexual pleasure, they could make decisions. Patriarchal systems have historically treated women making decisions as if someone released raccoons into a courtroom.

“Free Love”

Victoria Woodhull understood this. Woodhull, the first woman to run for president, was scandalous for many reasons, not least because she had the audacity to discuss marriage, divorce, sex, and autonomy as if women were people with bodies and choices rather than household furniture with moral obligations.

Her “free love” politics were not simply the caricature her enemies made of them. She was not just announcing a national orgy from behind a lectern, though 19th century newspapers certainly behaved as if she had personally set fire to every wedding ring in Manhattan. For Woodhull, free love meant the freedom to choose love, leave marriage, reject coercion, and insist that the state should not trap women in intimate arrangements that harmed them.

This was terrifying because marriage was not just romantic. It was legal, economic, sexual, and political. Married women’s identities had long been absorbed into their husbands under coverture. Divorce was difficult. Marital rape was not recognized as a crime in the way we understand it today. A woman’s respectability depended on sexual containment inside marriage, even if the marriage was miserable or abusive.

So when Woodhull said women should have the right to love freely, leave freely, and control their intimate lives, she was not just making a lifestyle argument. She was pulling at the wiring of the whole patriarchal house.

Naturally, Anthony Comstock arrived with a bucket of moral gasoline.

Comstock was the kind of man who looked at sexual knowledge and thought, “What if the federal government helped me be unbearable?” The Comstock Act of 1873 classified obscene materials and articles for contraception or abortion as non-mailable. In practice, Comstock-style laws restricted access to birth control information, sex education, reproductive knowledge, and sexual materials under the great flapping banner of morality.

This is important: sexual ignorance was not innocence. It was policy.

Women were told they were naturally pure, then denied the information that would let them make their own choices. Control the pamphlet. Control the envelope. Control the clinic. Control the vocabulary. Control the woman.

Comstock understood something conservatives still understand: if women can access sexual knowledge, they can make sexual decisions. And if women can make sexual decisions, the whole purity racket starts coughing blood.

The same logic shaped the treatment of lesbian desire, which gives us one of the clearest examples of desexualization as strategy.

Women’s same-sex desire was not unknown. Lawmakers knew. Doctors knew. Writers knew. Pornographers knew. Satirists knew. Please. These were Victorians, not golden retrievers.

The myth that Queen Victoria “did not believe lesbians existed” is useful because it tells us what people want to believe: that lesbianism escaped criminalization because men were too innocent or too stupid to imagine it. The reality is much more revealing. Elite men knew sex between women existed. What they feared was naming it too loudly.

Because if respectable women heard about lesbianism, they might realize it was possible.

That is the part that matters.

In 1921, British lawmakers considered criminalizing “gross indecency” between women. The proposal failed, but not because everyone suddenly discovered a deep commitment to lesbian civil liberties. Some opponents feared that public discussion of sex between women would spread knowledge of it. In other words, silence was not ignorance. It was governance.

They knew. They just preferred women not know that they knew.

This is patriarchy accidentally admitting that lesbianism had excellent word-of-mouth potential.

Boston Marriages

The history of romantic friendship complicates this further. Nineteenth-century women could sometimes form intense, affectionate, passionate relationships with other women, especially in middle- and upper-class circles. They wrote letters, exchanged gifts, used emotionally lavish language, and built deep bonds that could hide in plain sight precisely because respectable women were not supposed to be sexual.

This does not mean every romantic friendship was lesbian in the modern sense. History does not become queerer by flattening everyone’s life into our categories like a rainbow steamroller. But it does mean that the cultural denial of women’s sexuality created strange spaces of possibility. Women’s intimacy could be tolerated when it was interpreted as pure affection, spiritual companionship, or feminine emotional excess.

The closet was sometimes built out of plausible deniability and stationery.

The “mine” and “thine” of wedded folk

Is often quite confusing

And sometimes when they use the “ours”

It sounds almost amusing

But you and I may well defy

Both married folk and single

To do as well as we have done

The “mine” and “thine” to mingle.

- Poem written by Jane Addams to her “gal pal” Mary Rozet Smith

Respectable women could love each other passionately as long as everyone agreed not to call it sex.

That plausible deniability could provide cover, but it also erased. It made desire difficult to name, defend, organize around, or protect. Women’s same-sex desire could be dismissed as innocence until institutions decided it was dangerous, at which point it could become perversion, obscenity, inversion, or criminal scandal.

That is the recurring pattern: women’s desire does not exist until it needs to be punished.

By the late nineteenth century, sexology stepped in and invented the filing cabinet.

Sexologists like Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis helped classify sexual practices, desires, identities, and behaviors into categories of normal and abnormal. This is one of the strange things about the modern history of sexuality: Western society did not simply stop talking about sex. It talked about sex constantly, but increasingly through experts who claimed the authority to define it.

Sex became something to classify, diagnose, rank, explain, and police. Normal. Perverse. Inverted. Degenerate. Healthy. Diseased. Masculine. Feminine. Reproductive. Sterile. Useful. Dangerous.

Sexology took desire, handed it a clipboard, and asked whether it was normal enough to be left unsupervised.

This is also when heterosexuality becomes increasingly naturalized as the default, while other forms of desire become marked as deviant identities. In earlier periods, sexual acts might be condemned as sins or crimes. In the modern period, desire itself increasingly becomes a kind of personhood to be studied. The homosexual. The invert. The nymphomaniac. The frigid woman. The pervert. The normal woman. The abnormal woman.

Once desire has labels, institutions can decide which desires are acceptable, which are curable, which are punishable, and which are better left unmentioned around respectable ladies in case they get ideas.

And respectable ladies getting ideas has always been the nightmare.

The Sexual Cold War

After World War II, this same respectability trap returned with a Cold War haircut.

Women had worked, organized, served, earned money, entered public life, and taken on new roles during the war. Then the war ended, men returned, and the culture needed women back in the home. This required messaging. A lot of messaging. Magazines, advertisements, experts, doctors, schools, churches, politicians, and pop culture all helped sell the idea that true feminine fulfillment came through marriage, motherhood, housework, and domestic devotion.

The happy housewife was not discovered. She was manufactured, marketed, medicated, and sold back to women as nature.

This is where Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham’s Modern Woman: The Lost Sex enters the chat like a Freudian haunted doll. Published in 1947, the book argued that modern women were psychologically disordered and that feminism itself was a kind of illness. The independent woman became lost. The feminist became neurotic. The working woman became a threat to children. The woman who did not find fulfillment in domesticity became evidence of psychological failure rather than evidence that domesticity might be suffocating.

The Victorian angel came back from the dead in a shirtwaist dress and started taking Miltown.

The midcentury expert class looked at women trapped in domestic monotony and decided the problem was women. Not the confinement. Not the lack of economic power. Not the political containment. Not the sexual scripts that treated women as wives first and people second. Not the cultural demand that women find ecstasy in vacuuming near a casserole.

No, no. The problem was that women were maladjusted.

Betty Friedan famously called this “the problem that has no name,” but part of the horror is that the problem actually had too many names: neurosis, frigidity, dissatisfaction, maladjustment, immaturity, penis envy, bad motherhood, feminist pathology. Women were unhappy inside a system designed to make them small, and the system responded by diagnosing the unhappiness.

This is what happens when a culture confuses obedience with health.

Making it Modern

It is also why modern manosphere claims about women’s sexual pleasure are not merely annoying little internet droppings. They are part of a very old lineage.

When a dating coach says women do not need orgasms, he is reviving the idea that women’s pleasure is irrelevant unless it serves men. When he says female arousal is suspicious or that you do not want a woman to get “too wet,” he is reviving the fear of visible female desire. When he says a woman’s “body count” damages her value, he is dragging the fallen woman narrative into a podcast studio and teaching it about crypto-currency.

The Victorian doctor called women hysterical. The Cold War psychiatrist called them neurotic. The manosphere calls them ran through and thinks it invented gender theory.

These men love to present themselves as brutally honest realists, but they are mostly recycling older anxieties with worse lighting. “High-value men.” “Sexual marketplace value.” “Pair bonding.” “Female nature.” “Body count.” “No ROI.” It all sounds modern because the branding has been updated, but the skeleton is old.

Women’s desire is still treated as a problem when it belongs to women.

Female pleasure is immaterial when it would require male reciprocity. Female sexual experience is damaging when it threatens male ownership. Female refusal becomes a social crisis when men feel denied access. Female arousal becomes suspicious when it suggests women are not passive objects. Female sexual knowledge becomes dangerous when it gives women choices. Female autonomy becomes civilizational collapse when the whole civilization has been using women as unpaid infrastructure.

The manosphere pretends female pleasure does not matter because female pleasure forces reciprocity.

If women’s pleasure matters, then women are not just sexual resources. They are sexual subjects. They can want, judge, compare, refuse, desire, leave, laugh, tell their friends, write reviews, and decide that the gentleman who thinks cunnilingus has no ROI is not worth a calendar invite.

That is the part patriarchy hates.

The modern rhetoric around women’s pleasure also runs straight into the orgasm gap, which is not exactly a ringing endorsement of heterosexual sexual scripts. Research repeatedly shows that heterosexual women orgasm less frequently than heterosexual men, and one major reason is the cultural assumption that “sex” means penetration, while the activities more likely to lead to orgasm for many women get demoted to “foreplay,” a word that has done a lot of damage for something that sounds like it belongs in a golf manual.

So when modern male influencers claim women’s orgasms do not matter, they are not neutrally describing biology. They are defending a sexual script that already fails women and then calling the failure natural.

“Women don’t need orgasms biologically” is what happens when a man learns reproduction exists and decides pleasure is liberal propaganda.

This is why the “too wet” claim is so revealing. It is not just bad sex advice. It is fear of women’s bodies doing something that belongs to them. Arousal is acceptable only when it flatters male ego, not when it suggests a woman is having an independent experience.1 Desire is acceptable only when it is contained, directed, and useful. Too much visible pleasure makes the woman too much of a person.

And that has always been the issue.

Western culture has never been confused about women’s sexuality in some innocent way. It has been deeply invested in sorting it. Good women are pure. Bad women want. Wives are respectable. Prostitutes are polluted. Lesbians are impossible until they are obscene.2 Feminists are neurotic. Women who want contraception are corrupt. Women who want pleasure are selfish. Women who refuse bad sex are destroying civilization. Women who know too much are dangerous.

The categories change. The scam remains.

Define “good women” as sexually passive.

Define desiring women as deviant.

Give that deviance a moral, medical, legal, psychological, or pseudo-scientific label.

Use that label to justify control.

Repeat whenever women gain autonomy.

The lie was never simply “women do not want sex.” The lie was “good women do not want sex unless that desire serves a husband, family, state, church, empire, birthrate, or male ego.”

A woman who does not want sex can be called frigid. A woman who does can be called immoral. A woman who wants sex but not pregnancy can be called corrupt. A woman who wants women can be called impossible, obscene, or better left unmentioned. A woman who wants pleasure can be called selfish. A woman who wants autonomy can be called dangerous.

And that is the scam.

Western culture did not desexualize women because women lacked desire.

It desexualized women because women’s desire makes patriarchy nervous.

And frankly, it should.

Ladies, you heard it here, if a man doesn’t think your orgasm is a good investment…take your toys and go home.3 He’s not worth it.

Recommended Reading

“The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860”, Barbara Welter

Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State, Judith R. Walkowitz

The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980, Elaine Showalter

Nymphomania: A History, Carol Groneman

“The Principles of Social Freedom”, Victoria Woodhull

The Comstock Act of 1873

Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England, Sharon Marcus

“Lesbianism and the Criminal Law in England and Wales”, Open University

Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia F. Farnham

“The Evolution of the Manosphere Across the Web”, Manoel Horta Ribeiro et al.

Spoilers ahead, go see the film! It is genuinely funny and fun and we don’t get enough fun movies anymore.

There is no particularly dignified way to say this, so let us begin with the obvious: the sword in Masters of the Universe is a penis.1

We are not surprised by this. Fantasy as a genre has spent many decades handing men long, rigid objects and insisting they represent destiny, kingship and divine authority rather than the much more obvious Freudian symbolism.

But in case anyone is worried that I am imposing vulgar feminist symbolism upon an innocent movie about a nearly naked man thrusting a weapon into the sky while shouting that he has the power, Skeletor helpfully removes all ambiguity.

At one point, he refers to the “big long sword dangling between [Adam’s] glorious thighs.”

No, really.

I didn’t invent that sentence. I merely sat in a mostly empty cinema and received it while trying to not snort soda out my nose.

And yet the most interesting thing about Masters of the Universe isn’t that it understands the sword is a penis. It’s that the film spends more than two hours carefully separating the possession of traditional masculine symbols from actual strength, leadership or moral authority.

The sword is enormous. Adam’s muscles are enormous. Skeletor’s insecurity is also enormous.

Only one of these things ultimately matters.

What Kind of Man Is He-Man?

Director Travis Knight has been unusually explicit about the film’s central question. During interviews, he said he wanted to explore: “What does it mean to be a man?”

That might sound like an alarmingly serious ambition for a film featuring characters named Fisto and Ram Man, but Knight is not trying to scrape the glitter off the franchise and reveal a sombre prestige drama hiding beneath it. The ridiculousness is part of the argument.

He-Man is one of the most exaggerated images of masculinity ever mass-produced. He is a bronzed wall of muscle wearing boots, a harness and a leather loincloth. He looks as though someone fed Conan the Barbarian directly into a toy factory.2

But Adam is not the kind of man his body tells us he should be.

He is not a hardened soldier. He is not obsessed with dominance. He is not constantly looking for someone to overpower. He is an artist who works in human resources, talks openly about emotions and repeatedly attempts to solve conflict through communication.3

The most visibly hypermasculine man in the universe is, spiritually, the colleague who reminds everyone to use “I feel” statements during workplace mediation.4

This is not incidental. Knight has described Eternia as representing a distinctly 1980s model of masculinity, organized around physical strength, emotional discipline and power. Adam, raised in contemporary America, returns with a competing model based on empathy, communication and understanding.

The film then smashes those ideas together with all the delicacy of two action figures being hurled across a living-room floor.5

Adam looks like the old ideal but refuses to perform it correctly.

That makes him a disappointment to nearly every man who believes masculinity is something that must be proven through pain.

“This World Is No Place for the Weak”

Adam first learns the rules of patriarchal masculinity from his father.

King Randor humiliates his young son in front of the soldiers Adam is supposed to command one day, telling him, “This world is no place for the weak.”

It’s toxic masculinity in concentrated form: vulnerability must be shamed out of boys before it becomes visible enough for anyone else to punish. Leadership means hardness. Authority must be established publicly. A son becomes a man by learning that love and approval are conditional upon his ability to conceal fear and excel physically.

Randor believes humiliation will prepare Adam to rule.

Instead, it teaches him that he cannot become the kind of man his father respects without amputating the parts of himself that make him Adam. This is shown explicitly when Adam is reunited with his father and says that now he’s who is father wanted him to be. His father asks what his son thought he wanted him to be and Adam says “not me.”

The film does not present Randor as uncomplicatedly monstrous. After fifteen years in Skeletor’s prison, he appears to have had some time to reconsider his parenting philosophy. Captivity is not generally recommended as a route to emotional growth, but apparently it can produce remarkable clarity regarding whether publicly degrading your sensitive child was an effective succession strategy.

Randor represents inherited masculinity: the beliefs passed from fathers to sons not necessarily because they work, but because no one has been permitted to question them. King Randor, in many ways, feels like the kind of Korean and Vietnam veterans that raised the boys who were watching He-Man in the 1980s. In extreme need of therapy and instead choosing to tell their sons to “man-up” and that “crying is for girls.”

“When war breaks out, it’s not the poets that step up. It’s the man with the muscle.”

That is the governing logic of Eternia. Strength means force. Leadership means command. Masculinity means being physically capable of defeating another man and emotionally incapable of admitting that anything has hurt you.

Adam returns looking like the final boss of a protein-powder commercial, but he does not accept those terms of engagement. He may not be a poet, but he is sensitive and artistic and not the man with the muscle. He’s the kind of man who wears a sweatshirt with a kitten in a teacup with the words “alpha male” on it, unironically, to the gym.

Skeletor Is Andrew Tate as Andrew Tate Imagines Himself

If Randor represents traditional masculinity reproduced through fathers and institutions, Skeletor represents its diseased endpoint.

Knight described Skeletor before the film’s release as “the embodiment of toxic masculinity.” In another interview, he characterized him as a deeply insecure, power-hungry man who is always performing and becomes furious when his audience fails to respond correctly.

Which is why the most concise description of this version of Skeletor may be: Andrew Tate as Andrew Tate thinks he is, except with more wit.

Skeletor does not merely want power. He needs power to be visible and successfully performed for the masses.

He needs submission, spectacle and recognition. His authority can’t simply exist; it must be constantly staged through humiliation and fear. Everyone must know he’s the strongest man in the room because the possibility that they might not know is intolerable.

His theatricality is not separate from his insecurity. It is the scaffolding holding it upright.

He is particularly obsessed with Adam’s masculinity: his body, his strength, his sword and whether he is sufficiently ruthless to use them.6

“You may have the power,” Skeletor tells him, “but you’re too scared to use it. You don’t even know how.”

Adam answers, “I know how to use it. I just prefer not to.”

That exchange contains the film’s entire argument.

Skeletor can’t imagine power that doesn’t continually prove itself through domination. To possess force and choose restraint looks, to him, exactly like impotence.

Adam understands something Skeletor can’t: having the ability to hurt people does not make hurting them necessary. Restraint is not proof that power is absent. Sometimes it is the clearest evidence that power is secure.

This is where the film’s critique extends neatly into contemporary gym-bro and manosphere culture. The problem isn’t exercise, muscle or physical strength. The problem is the conversion of the male body into a public referendum on worth, based on muscle mass.

The body must become evidence. Its size, hardness and discipline must demonstrate that the man inside it cannot be dismissed, feminized, humiliated or controlled. Masculinity becomes a status permanently under review, requiring constant measurement against weaker men.

Skeletor has constructed his entire identity around winning that comparison.

Adam declines to participate.

Nothing to See Here, Bro

The film makes the same point on a much smaller scale through Adam’s roommate, Hussein. When Adam is away, Hussein watches romantic movies alone and allows himself to cry openly. The moment Adam returns, however, he scrambles to conceal what he has been watching, wipes away the evidence of emotion and noticeably lowers his voice. Nothing about his feelings has changed. Only his audience has.

The scene turns masculinity into a performance assembled in real time, complete with vocal adjustment, emotional concealment and the urgent need to establish that he was definitely not sitting at home moved by a romance.

The joke works because Adam is possibly the least threatening person before whom Hussein could perform this ritual. Adam is emotionally expressive, artistic and hardly likely to revoke another man’s membership card for crying at a film. Yet Hussein still assumes that another man’s presence requires him to become less visibly vulnerable.

The surveillance doesn’t have to be hostile, or even real, because he’s already internalized it. He watches himself on patriarchy’s behalf.

That brief domestic gag expands the film’s argument beyond obviously toxic men such as Randor and Skeletor. Most men do not rule kingdoms, imprison their relatives or make threatening remarks about the glorious swords hanging between other men’s thighs. They may simply deepen their voices, hide the romantic movie and pretend they were never crying.

The scale is different, but the governing anxiety is the same: masculinity must be demonstrated, and emotion becomes dangerous the moment another man might see it.

The Most Muscular Man Alive Would Like to Open a Dialogue

Before resorting to violence, Adam tries to talk Skeletor down.

He attempts to “open a dialogue,” speculating that Skeletor may have conquered Eternia because he could not become king or because he was insufficiently loved as a child.

This is, objectively, an astonishing approach to a skull-faced genocidal dictator.

It is also crucial to the film’s distinction between Adam and the men around him. Adam doesn’t refuse violence because he is incapable of it. He refuses because he believes other possibilities should be exhausted first.

He is not weak. He is unwilling to make violence the organizing principle of his identity.

Eventually, of course, he fights. The movie is still called Masters of the Universe, not A Productive Mediation Session at Castle Grayskull. But violence is Adam’s final instrument rather than his preferred language.

Even his command to Skeletor, “Face me like a man,” is immediately punctured by Skeletor’s response:

“A, I don’t have a face, and B, I don’t want to!”

The film constantly destabilizes its own masculine spectacle. Every heroic declaration is in danger of being interrupted by a joke, an innuendo or Skeletor calling Adam “you naughty boy.”

Which he does…twice.

This is a film that knows masculine power is theatre and keeps allowing someone backstage to drop a sandbag onto the performance.

The Sorceress Explains the Metaphor for Anyone Still Taking Notes

Near the end of the film, the Sorceress finally explains why Adam was chosen.

Earlier men used the Sword of Power largely for brute strength. Adam offers something else: understanding, empathy and humanity.

When Adam protests that the sword has been broken, the Sorceress reacts with something close to: That sword? You thought this was about that sword?

The power was never contained in the object.

Adam is the vessel.

This changes the meaning of the franchise’s most famous declaration. Adam does not lift the weapon and announce:

“By the power of Grayskull, my sword has the power.”

He says:

“By the power of Grayskull, I have the power.”

The difference isn’t just grammar. It’s the film’s thesis.

The sword provides access to power, but it cannot decide what power means. That depends upon the man holding it.

In Skeletor’s hands, power means domination because domination is the only thing that can quiet his insecurity. In Randor’s worldview, power means hardness because hardness is how kings prove they deserve to rule. In Adam’s hands, power becomes protective because his identity does not depend upon everyone else becoming smaller.

Orko later delivers the film’s tidy moral in the style of the original cartoon:

“Today, we learned that muscles don’t necessarily make a man.”

Correct, little floating wizard.

No notes.

Apparently Some People Thought This Was Just Innuendo

The conservative review site Plugged In catalogued the film’s sexual jokes with the grave diligence of someone documenting contraband found during a prison search. It notes the suggestive uses of Fisto, “give ’em head,” the sword and Adam being “ravished.”

All of those things are indeed in the film.

At one point an employee begs Adam, “Please stop ravishing the pillager.”

Adam replies, “He’s ravishing me!”

Elsewhere, Fisto shouts, “GIVE ’EM HEAD, RAM MAN!”

Ram Man, with perfect confusion, answers: “What?”

But treating these jokes as a collection of stray sexual asides misses what they are doing. The film is not accidentally placing phallic innuendo inside a story about men competing over physical dominance, bodily power and the right to rule.

The innuendo is part of the critique.

The sword is funny because swords have always operated as symbols of masculine authority while pretending not to resemble anything else. The names are funny because “Fisto” and “Ram Man” emerged from a toy line that was already an unintentional festival of hypermasculine camp.

The film does not invent the homoeroticism of Masters of the Universe. It merely turns the spotlight on them during Pride month in a very particularly funny way.

A Better Kind of Strength

Not every element of the film’s critique is perfectly resolved. Adam ultimately defeats authoritarian masculinity through a large physical confrontation because that is what this genre demands. The film still depends upon the pleasure of watching a spectacular male body hit things very hard.

But it does not ask Adam to become Skeletor in order to defeat him.

He remains awkward. He remains emotionally open. He remains the kind of man who would rather negotiate than dominate, create rather than destroy and admit fear rather than disguise it as aggression.

His transformation gives him a stronger body. It does not replace his personality with a more conventionally masculine one.

That may be the film’s smartest decision. Adam does not need to outgrow empathy before becoming heroic. His empathy is what makes him capable of using power without being consumed by it.

The movie gives us a hero who has everything the gym-bro ideal promises will make a man powerful: the body, the weapon, the bloodline and the ability to crush his enemies.

Then it insists that none of those things makes him worthy.

The power is understanding.

The power is restraint.

The power is remaining human when the world tells you humanity is weakness.

The sword is still your penis, obviously.

But the power was never the sword.7

A quick reminder that I’ll be speaking at the next Wham! Bam! Thank You! Slam! on June 20 at 5PM ET and the theme is delightfully subtle:

Kill the Patriarchy.

To be clear, there will be no actual violence. We are historians, writers, and professional users of footnotes. We will be using our words. Some of those words may be sharp.

I’ll be telling the story of the time a group calling themselves the Modern Confederacy decided that a history professor saying the Civil War was about slavery was simply a bridge too far. What followed involved harassment, threats, university administrators, and a lesson about what happens when women speak publicly with authority.

The event features an incredible lineup of storytellers, and I’d love to see some familiar faces in the audience.

Tickets:
Get your ticket here

Because if there’s one thing history teaches us, it’s that the people yelling “sit down and be quiet” are usually worth ignoring.

And if there’s a second thing history teaches us, it’s that the Confederacy remains remarkably committed to losing.

Because the internet is a cursed pedagogical laboratory with push notifications, several men immediately arrived to demonstrate the concept in real time. Not all men, obviously. But enough men. Enough men to form a focus group, if not a statistically significant sample size.

The replies were, predictably, a buffet of wounded indignation. I was accused of prejudice. I was accused of victim-blaming. I was accused of grouping all men into one stereotype. I was called a heartless sexist bigot being paid a “professor salary” to turn out more heartless sexist bigots from my allegedly luxurious academic bubble.

First of all, “professor salary” is adorable. Even when I was lecturing full time, I was not exactly lounging on a chaise made of money while a butler fed me grapes and whispered, “Another patriarchy takedown, madam?” Now I have 57 paid subscribers and am compensated primarily in spite, caffeine, and the faint hope that maybe fewer people will keep taking life advice from the same patriarchal handbook currently setting the house on fire if I offer an alternative.

Second, and more importantly, patriarchy does not mean “men are bad.” It means boys and men are often trained to experience basic accountability as persecution, critique as hatred, and women’s refusal to flatter them as social collapse. Which is, incidentally, exactly what the replies did.

I did not say men are inherently terrible. I did not say every man is personally responsible for every problem on earth. I did not say women are flawless woodland spirits who emerge from moss beds carrying soup and intersectional praxis. I said patriarchy trains people.

And my God, did some of the trained seals start clapping.1

“Not All Men” and the Tiny Funeral for Reading Comprehension

One of the most common responses to any feminist critique of patriarchy is the classic “not all men.” It has a close cousin: “Why should any man behave better if all men are judged by the worst of us?” This would be a useful objection if the original claim had been “all men are the worst of men.” But that was not the claim.

The claim was that patriarchy, as a system, teaches boys and men certain expectations about power, attention, emotional expression, entitlement, and women’s labor.

Many men hear “patriarchy does this to men” and translate it into “you, personally, Kevin, are history’s greatest monster.”2 That translation error is not incidental. It is part of the problem. If your first response to a systemic critique is to demand individual reassurance, you are already showing how much you expect the conversation to bend around your feelings.

Systems are not the same thing as individual character. When historians talk about monarchy, we are not saying every king or queen that ever was, was the most evil being to ever walk the earth. When we talk about white supremacy, we are not saying every white person wakes up and consults a laminated racism checklist over breakfast. Systems shape behavior. They reward certain actions, punish others, and teach people what to expect from the world.

R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt’s work on hegemonic masculinity argues that masculinity is not simply a biological fact or a collection of individual personality traits. It is a hierarchy of gendered expectations, with certain versions of manhood culturally rewarded over others. Their concept has shaped gender studies, sociology, criminology, education, and health research precisely because it helps explain how gender norms become social instructions rather than private quirks.

Patriarchy teaches boys that masculinity means control, emotional invulnerability, sexual access, public authority, and distance from anything coded feminine. It teaches them that anger is strength, grief is weakness, care is emasculating, and women’s attention is a resource owed to them if they perform masculinity correctly. Then, when the world does not hand them the prize they were promised, many men experience that not as disappointment, but as theft.

That is the crisis. Not “men are monsters.” Not “boys are born bad.” Not “women good, men bad, please clap.” The crisis is that boys are being handed a broken emotional toolkit and then told the hammer is the only instrument a real man should need.

Patriarchy Hurts Men Too, Which Some Men Only Admit When They Want to Blame Women

One man accused me of victim-blaming men and boys. Another said men are really in crisis because oligarchs are “vampires” sucking the life out of America.

Now, listen. The oligarchs are absolutely vampires. No notes. They are wearing Patagonia vests instead of capes, but spiritually, yes, Dracula with a quarterly earnings call.

Economic precarity matters. Loneliness matters. The decline of social institutions matters. Young people of all genders are living through unstable housing, unstable employment, political radicalization, social isolation, digital algorithmic alienation, and a general sense that the future has been replaced by a subscription service. But patriarchy is not separate from those problems. It is one of the ways people are taught to understand them.

If a man feels lonely, patriarchy often tells him the problem is women. If a man feels economically powerless, patriarchy tells him he has been robbed of the breadwinner status that was supposedly his birthright by women in the workplace. If a man feels sexually rejected, patriarchy tells him women have become too picky, too selfish, too feminist, too fat, too old, too educated, too ruined by cats, too busy voting, too unwilling to organize their lives around his emotional weather. If a man feels lost, patriarchy offers him a map where every road leads back to controlling women.

This is why it matters to be precise. Men and boys really are struggling. Equimundo’s State of American Men report explicitly frames men’s lives through questions of purpose, relationships, precarity, isolation, and hope. It does not require us to pretend men are fine. It asks us to take seriously the social conditions shaping their lives.

The data on male friendship and isolation also matters here. The American Perspectives Survey found that Americans report fewer close friendships than they once did, communicate with friends less often, and rely less on friends for personal support. The same research has been used to show a particularly sharp decline in men’s social circles: in 1990, a majority of men reported having at least six close friends, while by 2021 that number had dropped dramatically, and 15 percent of men reported having no close friendships at all.

That is not nothing. Loneliness matters. Isolation matters. The collapse of male friendship matters. The fact that many men are taught to pour all emotional intimacy into a romantic partner, then panic when women are unwilling to be girlfriend, therapist, mother, confessor, maid, muse, sex object, and emotional landfill all at once, matters.

But that is exactly why patriarchy has to be part of the analysis. Feminism did not invent male loneliness. Feminism did not close the factories, destroy unions, gut wages, atomize communities, or create algorithmic sludge pits where teenage boys are fed misogyny by men with microphones and unresolved daddy issues.

But feminism is often blamed because it is easier to yell at women than to ask why the entire social order has trained men to confuse dominance with stability.

The “Skill Issue” Is Not a Joke, Except Where It Is Extremely Funny

I keep coming back to “skill issue” because it is funny, but also because it is true. Emotional literacy is a skill. So are accountability, vulnerability, apology, rejection, grief, loneliness, and the ability to listen without immediately centering yourself. Hearing criticism of a system you benefit from without pretending someone has thrown you personally into a volcano is a skill. Respecting women who do not flatter you is a skill. Building friendships that do not depend on misogyny as social glue is a skill. Learning how to be a person without needing a woman nearby to absorb the emotional shrapnel is also, unfortunately, a skill many men were never encouraged to develop.

The American Psychological Association’s guidelines for psychological practice with boys and men do not frame masculinity as an individual moral failure. They define masculinity ideology as a set of descriptive, prescriptive, and proscriptive beliefs about boys and men. In other words, masculinity is not just “what men are.” It is what boys and men are told they should be, should not be, and must never be caught being. The APA also discusses gender role strain: the distress boys and men may experience when they violate masculine norms, fail to meet them, or are punished for deviating from them.

This is the part the “you just hate men” crowd refuses to hear. Patriarchy does not merely hand men power. It also narrows the range of acceptable humanity available to them. A boy who cries is mocked. A boy who is gentle is feminized. A boy who seeks help is weak. A man who loves women as people rather than prizes risks being told he has been domesticated, softened, ruined, or a “simp.”3

Then these boys grow up and are told they should lead households, run governments, dominate workplaces, interpret women’s boundaries, manage disappointment, build relationships, become fathers, and somehow navigate a world where women increasingly have the legal, economic, and social power to say no. And many of them cannot handle it.

Not because they are biologically incapable. Not because they are uniquely evil. Not because women are better humans by nature. Because they were trained badly. And when women say, “This training is bad,” too many men hear, “You are bad,” and react accordingly.

Again: skill issue.

“Maybe the Issue Is Humanity in General”

Another reply asked whether the problem was really just “humanity in general.” This is one of those statements that sounds reasonable if you squint hard enough and avoid all of recorded history.

Yes, humanity is messy. Humans are capable of selfishness, cruelty, cowardice, resentment, and posting absolute nonsense on the internet with the confidence of a man explaining menstruation to a gynecologist.

Women can be terrible. Women can be abusive. Women can be narcissistic. Women can uphold patriarchy. Women can enforce gender norms with the dedication of a border collie herding sheep into a burning barn. No serious feminist historian is arguing that women are incapable of harm.

But “everyone is flawed” is often used to sand the fingerprints off power.

The question is not “Can women also be bad?” The question is: whose bad behavior has historically been normalized, legalized, excused, institutionalized, romanticized, and built into the structure of family, church, state, medicine, education, law, and culture?

That is where patriarchy enters. Patriarchy is not “men are uniquely sinful.” It is a system that has historically given men disproportionate authority in public life, private life, economic life, religious life, political life, and sexual life, while teaching everyone that this arrangement is natural, moral, biological, divine, efficient, romantic, or simply inevitable.

That does not mean every man is powerful. It does mean masculinity has been culturally associated with authority, control, rationality, leadership, and public life, while femininity has been associated with care, submission, emotional labor, dependency, and private life.

When those associations start to break down, some people experience equality as loss.

That is not “humanity in general.” That is power throwing a tantrum because someone touched its toys.

The Manosphere Is Patriarchy With a Ring Light

The modern “male crisis” conversation often presents itself as compassionate concern for men and boys. Sometimes that concern is real. Men are struggling with loneliness, suicide, addiction, isolation, educational disengagement, and a lack of meaningful community. Those things matter. But the loudest voices claiming to care about men rarely seem interested in helping men become emotionally healthy, mutually respectful, socially connected human beings.

Instead, they sell grievance. They tell men that women are the problem. Feminism is the problem. Queer people are the problem. Single mothers are the problem. Birth control is the problem. No-fault divorce is the problem. Women’s education is the problem. Women having standards is the problem.

The manosphere does not rescue men from patriarchy. It repackages patriarchy as self-help.

Recent research on online misogyny and masculinity influencers has raised concerns about how boys encounter misogynistic content online. Dublin City University’s Anti-Bullying Centre, where Debbie Ging’s work on digital media, gender, online anti-feminism, incels, and male supremacist ideology is central, has developed resources specifically addressing the impact of masculinity influencers on teenage boys.

That matters because the manosphere offers boys a story. Not a good story. Not a true story. But a story with villains, rewards, rituals, and a very flattering mirror. It tells men they are suffering because women have stopped obeying. It tells them healing means domination, confidence means contempt, and emotional regulation means never admitting vulnerability unless it can be weaponized against women later.

And then, when women point out that this is dangerous, we are accused of hating men.

No. I hate the system that tells men the only way to be whole is to be in charge of someone else. I hate the system that teaches boys to amputate parts of themselves and call the wound masculinity. I hate the system that tells men anger is the only acceptable emotion and then acts surprised when the world is full of angry men. I hate the system that convinces men they are entitled to women’s care while training them to despise the very traits that make care possible.

That is not misandry. That is analysis.

Entitlement Is Not the Same Thing as Need

In Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women, Kate Manne argues that male entitlement extends beyond sex into admiration, bodily autonomy, knowledge, power, and care. In interviews about her work, she has framed misogyny not merely as individual hatred of women, but as a system that enforces patriarchal norms and punishes women who refuse to give men what they have been taught they are owed.

That distinction matters because need is human, while entitlement is political. A man needing love, care, intimacy, friendship, sex, belonging, respect, purpose, and tenderness is not a problem. Those are human needs. Everyone has them. Everyone is shaped by whether they receive them. The problem begins when those needs are converted into debts women supposedly owe.

“I am lonely” is a feeling. “Women should lower their standards because I am lonely” is entitlement. “I want care” is human. “Women are selfish if they do not provide me care on demand” is entitlement. “I feel rejected” is pain. “Women must be punished for rejecting me” is misogyny. “I am struggling” deserves compassion. “I am struggling, therefore feminism has ruined society and women must become more obedient” deserves a shovel and a shallow grave.

This is why the replies to my post were so useful. They did not merely object. They demanded. They demanded reassurance, exception, sympathy, and the immediate softening of a critique because it made them uncomfortable. The first move was not “How do we help boys develop better emotional tools?” It was “How dare you say the tools we were given are broken?”

Aggrieved Entitlement, or: Where Is My Throne?

Sociologist Michael Kimmel has described “aggrieved entitlement” as the experience of feeling entitled to something and then experiencing not receiving it as humiliation.

That phrase deserves to be bronzed and placed above the entrance to every comment section where men are furious that women are discussing patriarchy without first issuing a warm blanket and a personal exemption form.

Aggrieved entitlement helps explain why equality can feel like oppression to people who expected dominance. It explains why some men experience women’s independence not as freedom, but as abandonment. It explains why women’s criticism becomes “misandry,” women’s boundaries become “cruelty,” women’s standards become “hypergamy,” women’s education becomes “indoctrination,” and women’s refusal to soothe male discomfort becomes evidence that feminism has destroyed civilization.

Patriarchy promised men a throne. Not all men got one, obviously. Many men were exploited, impoverished, racialized, colonized, disabled, criminalized, marginalized, and ground under the boot of other hierarchies. Patriarchy does not distribute power equally among men. It never has. But it still sold men a story about what they were owed as men: a wife, a household, authority, respect, sex, children, a family name, public deference, emotional service, domestic labor, and the right to be the default human subject around whom others orbit.

Then social movements came along and said, actually, women are people. Some men have still not recovered from the shock.

“Men Are Turning Away”

One reply informed me that as men stop giving women “attention or concern,” women will need to “learn to defend themselves from consequences.” This was meant, I assume, as a threat. It landed more like a weather report from the Republic of Proving My Point.

Because there it is: the imagined punishment for women not behaving properly is male abandonment, male indifference, and male withdrawal of protection. This is old. Dusty old. Victorian fainting couch old. Antebellum paternalism old. “Women have only one right, the right to protection, and protection requires obedience” old.

Patriarchy has always loved this bargain. Obey, and men will protect you. Submit, and men will provide. Be pleasing, and men will care. Stay in your place, and men will call it love. But the protection was always conditional. Women were protected as long as they were useful, compliant, respectable, sexually available within approved boundaries, reproductively available within approved boundaries, and grateful for the arrangement. The moment women wanted autonomy, the protection would vanish.

This is why the threat “men are turning away” does not terrify me in the way it is supposed to. Women have been defending themselves from the consequences of men’s choices for centuries. Women have defended themselves from laws they did not write, wars they did not declare, pregnancies they did not freely choose, economies that underpaid them, medical systems that dismissed them, churches that subordinated them, and households that treated their labor as natural rather than necessary.

So when men threaten to stop giving women “attention,” forgive me if I do not immediately collapse onto a chaise in mourning.

Male attention has not historically been an uncomplicated blessing. Sometimes it is love, partnership, friendship, solidarity, tenderness, desire, collaboration, and care. And sometimes it is surveillance, entitlement, harassment, control, violence, and a man in your mentions explaining that women are toxic narcissists because he is very calm and rational and definitely handling disappointment well.

The Point Was Never That Men Are Hopeless

The saddest part is that none of this has to be inevitable. Men are not doomed to emotional incompetence. Boys are not born entitled. Masculinity does not have to be a haunted house where every room contains either rage or silence.

There are men who know this. There are men who have done the work, who build real friendships, parent with tenderness, hear women’s criticism without needing to turn it into a courtroom drama starring themselves as the accused, and understand that feminism is not asking them to vanish. It is asking them to stop mistaking domination for identity.

The problem is not men existing. The problem is a system that teaches men to understand equality as humiliation. That is exactly why the backlash to my post was so revealing. I said patriarchy trains boys and men to expect women’s applause. Several men replied by demanding reassurance, exception, praise, deference, nuance, sympathy, and immediate protection from the discomfort of being discussed as part of a gendered social system.

They did not disprove the point. They footnoted it.

I do this work because I care. Not because I think men are disposable. Not because I enjoy being yelled at by strangers whose reading comprehension arrives on a three-day delay. Not because I am making a lavish “professor salary” from the feminist-industrial chaise lounge complex.4

I do it because patriarchy is killing us. It is killing women through violence, control, medical neglect, forced pregnancy, economic inequality, and the thousand daily degradations of being told we exist to serve, soothe, smile, and submit. It is killing men too, through isolation, emotional repression, grievance politics, violence, addiction, despair, and the lie that being loved is less important than being obeyed.

Feminism did not create this crisis. Feminism is just one of the few traditions honest enough to name it.

So no, men and boys are not in crisis because women got too mean, too educated, too independent, too feminist, too unwilling to clap like trained seals. They are in crisis because patriarchy promised them a throne and gave them a cage.

And some of them are so attached to the cage, they cannot even see the bars.

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The premise is simple. For centuries, patriarchy has shaped our politics, workplaces, relationships, religions, media, and cultural expectations while insisting it’s just “the way things are.” Conveniently, the people benefiting from those arrangements have rarely been eager to examine them too closely.

So we’re going to.

Twice a month, I’ll be joined by historians, writers, academics, activists, creators, and other interesting people for live conversations about gender, power, culture, and history. We’ll talk about everything from tradwives and reproductive rights to media representation, masculinity, labor, religion, and the strange ways old ideas keep finding new packaging.

Think of it as part history lecture, part feminist roundtable, and part group project dedicated to asking, “Okay, but what if we did things differently?”

And because this is Bitchy History, there will almost certainly be bizarre historical advertisements, questionable life advice from dead people, and at least one moment per episode where we all collectively wonder how humanity made it this far.

The goal isn’t just to complain about the world as it exists. The goal is to understand how we got here, who benefits from the current arrangement, and what a more equitable future might actually look like.

More details, guest announcements, and scheduling information are coming soon.

Until then, remember:

The patriarchy isn’t going to fuck itself.

Unfortunately.

I had so much fun on the show!

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Recently, a man arrived to explain women’s history to me with the confidence of someone who had either spent years studying the subject or had just eaten an entire family-sized bag of lead paint chips.

Sadly, it was not the first option.

His central claim was that women were “given” the right to vote while men had to “earn” it through the draft. In his words:

“Men NEVER actually had the right to vote.

Men EARNED the right to vote. Far more than amy women ever did.”1

This is one of those claims that collapses the moment it encounters even a light breeze of historical context. The federal draft did not exist until the Civil War. The modern Selective Service system was established in 1917. White male suffrage had already expanded dramatically across the United States long before either of those things happened. So no, male suffrage in the United States was not historically contingent on draft registration. That is not a controversial correction. It is a basic timeline. The kind of thing one might learn before deciding to announce, “I’ll teach you,” to a historian.

But the factual error is almost less interesting than the confidence. He did not simply misunderstand a date. He built an entire moral universe on a false premise. Men earned citizenship. Women received it. Men sacrificed. Women benefited. Men carried the burdens of civilization. Women whined about patriarchy from the couch. The draft claim was merely the scaffolding holding up a much older and much uglier story: that men are the actors of history and women are the recipients of history.

Then, when the historical foundation cracked, he did what people often do when facts threaten a cherished worldview. He declared the facts basically irrelevant.

“I will look into that. It was not made up, as you inaccurately stated. It was what I believed true based on the information I knew at the time. If I am wrong, I will ammend.

Regardless, it hardly changes anything.”

That “regardless” is doing the work of a forklift here. The claim was central until it became inconvenient. Then, suddenly, it hardly mattered. This is why arguing with historical illiteracy can feel like trying to nail soup to a wall. The specific claim changes, but the conclusion remains untouched. If the draft argument fails, we move to sacrifice. If sacrifice gets complicated, we move to housework. If housework gets complicated, we move to lawns. The facts are not the foundation. They are decorations hung on a belief that already existed.

That belief eventually revealed itself in one of the most accidentally honest sentences I have read in a while.

“One could say your own incompetence created the patriarchy.”

There it is. The entire patriarchal project in one sentence wearing clown shoes.

Women were not excluded from power. Women earned exclusion. Women were not denied access to education, property, politics, law, and professional life. Women simply proved they did not deserve access. This is one of patriarchy’s oldest tricks: build the barrier, point to the people trapped behind it, and say their absence proves they never belonged in the room.

For centuries, women were denied formal education and then dismissed as intellectually inferior. Women were excluded from political office and then mocked for lacking political experience. Women were barred from professions and then described as naturally unsuited for professional achievement. Married women lost legal and economic independence under systems like coverture and then were told their dependence proved they needed male authority. The cage was built first. The theory of women’s natural incapacity came afterward to make the cage look like common sense.

There is a reason there are so many women lauded as the “first woman to…” in the history books and it is not because no woman ever wanted to be a lawyer, doctor, soldier, or politician before them. It was because it was such a struggle to get even one woman into a position to hold those roles against all the odds stacked against them by men.

His argument about housework makes the same move, only with more suburban lawn fumes.

“Ive done housewife chores. Its honestly easy.”

This may be my favorite sentence in the entire rant because it reveals the size of the historical hallucination. When people like this imagine “housewife chores,” they are usually imagining a modern domestic task list filtered through appliances, grocery stores, electricity, running water, chemical cleaners, refrigeration, disposable products, and a level of medical security that would have seemed like sorcery to most women in the past. They imagine loading a dishwasher, wiping down a counter, and folding laundry while listening to a podcast, then declare themselves experts on the entire history of domestic labor.

So let’s actually imagine the “easy” version historically. Imagine doing housewife chores in the nineteenth century, perhaps on the frontier, after giving birth for the fifth time. Maybe only two of your children are still living. Maybe one died of fever, one of dysentery, and one before their first birthday. You are still physically recovering, but there is no paid parental leave, no antibiotics, no epidural, no reliable contraception, and no guarantee that your next pregnancy will not kill you. The laundry is not a machine. It is hauling water, heating water, scrubbing fabric, wringing it by hand, and hanging it to dry. Food is not a grocery delivery app. It is gardening, preserving, baking, milking, slaughtering, stretching, storing, and hoping weather, pests, illness, or political instability do not destroy your family’s ability to eat. Medicine is not a pharmacy. It is prayer, guesswork, inherited knowledge, and luck.

Calling that “easy” requires not just ignorance, but imagination failure. It requires mistaking the modern household for the historical household, and then mistaking women’s unpaid work for leisure because no one handed them a paycheck at the end of the day. But the absence of wages does not mean the absence of labor. It means the labor was structurally devalued. A man growing wheat is understood as work. A woman turning that wheat into bread, meals, and survival somehow becomes “just cooking.” A man building a house is understood as work. A woman maintaining the bodies, clothing, food, cleanliness, children, elders, and emotional life inside that house becomes “just a housewife.” The labor is there. The recognition is what disappears.

He continues:

“And ever since children were sent away to school for the day, that means the common housewife had a really easy life from about 5 years old through 18 years old because the kids were off to school for the day.”

This is one of those sentences that sounds like it was assembled in a lab specifically to test my blood pressure.

First, it assumes a universal childhood school experience that simply did not exist across class, race, region, or era. Second, it imagines the household as if children are the only labor in it. Third, it treats the home as a waiting room where women sat quietly until school let out, rather than as a site of production, management, care, cleaning, cooking, preservation, repair, nursing, budgeting, and often income generation.

This is the exact sleight of hand patriarchy depends on. Men’s work is treated as productive because it is visible, waged, or attached to property. Women’s work is treated as natural because it is repetitive, intimate, and necessary. If a man leaves the house for wages, that is labor. If a woman performs the work that makes his wage labor possible, that is love. Duty. Femininity. Instinct. Anything but work.

The rant eventually turns into a catalog of tasks men supposedly do and women supposedly never do.

“But, men working all day depending on the job was no easy task at all. Often doinh jobs women couldnt or wouldnt do and often were very dangerous. And then when theyd get home, they too helped with the kids (not all but most) or they cut the grass, shoveled the snow, built a deck, fixed a car, fixed the roofing or the siding, or coached their kids, or did landscaping, often times lifting heavy rocks, or digging up grass and dirt, and there are many others. They also managed to grill up dinner for the family.”

Notice what counts as labor here. Shoveling snow. Building decks. Fixing cars. Roofing. Landscaping. Grilling. Grass. Rocks. Dirt. We have apparently arrived at the Home Depot theory of civilization, in which humanity was built by men with mulch and a socket wrench while women contributed nothing but emotional weather patterns and decorative throw pillows.

The problem is not that these tasks are not work. Of course they are work. The problem is the selective definition. He recognizes physical tasks coded masculine as labor, but domestic and reproductive tasks coded feminine as background noise. A man lifting heavy rocks counts as civilization. A woman lifting water, carrying children, hauling laundry, managing food stores, making clothing, tending sick relatives, and laboring through pregnancy somehow does not.

Then comes the line that tells us everything about his research method.

“I have watched men do those tasks and many more all throughout my life. Never women. Ever actually seen a woman do those jobs in my lifetime.”

This is not evidence. This is a man mistaking “things I personally noticed” for historical research. His methodology is basically window-based anthropology with a side of lawnmower studies. He has observed men cutting grass and fixing siding, and from this limited sample he has extrapolated an entire theory of gender, labor, civilization, and history. Archives? Census records? Labor history? Women’s history? No need. He has seen a grill.

The historical record tells a different story. Women worked in fields, factories, homes, shops, boarding houses, schools, hospitals, churches, reform societies, political movements, and wartime economies. Enslaved women labored under brutal conditions while being denied legal rights to their own children. Working-class women performed wage labor and domestic labor because survival did not care about separate spheres ideology. Farm women did physically demanding agricultural and household labor. Immigrant women worked in sweatshops and laundries. Black women, Indigenous women, poor women, and rural women were very rarely invited into the delicate fantasy of leisure that anti-feminists like to pretend defined womanhood.

Even the supposedly protected white middle-class housewife was not simply floating through life in a cloud of aprons and gratitude. Domesticity was a political structure. It assigned women moral responsibility without equal power. It made them accountable for the home while denying them full participation in the public world that shaped the home’s legal, economic, and political conditions. Women were expected to create moral citizens, but not to be full citizens themselves. They were expected to influence men, not govern alongside them. They were expected to sustain society while being told society was not really their business.

This is the broader historical sleight of hand. Patriarchy does not merely exclude women from power. It rewrites the exclusion as proof of women’s natural place. It says women did not vote because politics was not their sphere, not because men fought to keep them disenfranchised. It says women did not dominate professions because they were not suited for public life, not because they were denied education, training, property rights, and institutional access. It says women stayed home because they preferred dependence, not because marriage, law, pregnancy, childcare, wages, and social stigma constrained their choices. It converts coercion into nature.

Eventually, he says the quiet part even louder.

“The truth is the stereotypes that you now call mysoginy vame from truth.”

This is the entire machinery operating at once. Stereotypes, in this worldview, are not political tools. They are neutral observations. If women were called weak, dependent, irrational, delicate, emotional, incapable, or unsuited for leadership, then those labels must have emerged because women really were those things. The possibility that stereotypes were created to justify unequal power never enters the room. It is standing outside with the rest of the books he did not read.

And yet history is littered with women doing the things they were supposedly incapable of doing. Women organized boycotts during the American Revolution. They raised funds, produced homespun cloth, managed households under wartime strain, and sometimes served as spies or camp followers.

Women entered reform movements through churches, temperance work, abolitionism, missionary societies, charitable networks, and social welfare campaigns, developing the political skills of fundraising, public speaking, petitioning, lobbying, and organizing long before they had the vote.

Women entered factories in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, took on wartime industrial labor during both world wars, served as nurses, ambulance drivers, resistance workers, and military personnel, and then were repeatedly told to return home once their labor was no longer convenient.

This cycle is important. When society needs women’s labor, it suddenly discovers women are capable. When the crisis passes, it rediscovers their alleged natural domesticity. During wartime, women become patriotic workers. Afterward, they become threats to male employment. During reform movements, women become moral guardians of the nation. When they demand voting rights, they become dangerous radicals. When women labor quietly, their work is invisible. When they demand recognition for that labor, they are accused of wanting special treatment.

Then, after all of this, he arrives at his grand finale.

“Theres a reason why women were not roaring through those early years. They knew they could not and did not want to do those tasks. They gladly accepted their role because they saw what men did. They only roared after men took the fight they couldnt handle. Solved the problems women couldnt. Created an easier society.”

This is not history. This is mythology. It imagines women’s exclusion as consent, women’s silence as satisfaction, and women’s limited options as proof of preference. It is the same logic that looks at a woman barred from the voting booth and concludes she must not have wanted politics. It looks at a woman denied a medical degree and concludes she must not have wanted science. It looks at a woman trapped in a legal system that makes her economically dependent on her husband and concludes she must have loved dependence.

But women did roar in “those early years.” They roared in petitions, sermons, letters, boycotts, strikes, abolitionist meetings, suffrage conventions, labor organizing, reform societies, lawsuits, autobiographies, slave narratives, church networks, and kitchen-table survival strategies.

The fact that he cannot hear them does not mean they were silent. It means he has mistaken his own deafness for historical evidence.

His final line is almost too perfect.

“Now you roar. On behalf of the strong intelligent and brave men who protected, provided, created, and problem solved their way through the most difficult times in history, youre welcome.”

And there it is: patriarchy writing its own thank-you note.

The issue is not that men never worked hard. Men worked hard. Men suffered. Men were exploited. Men died in wars, mines, factories, fields, ships, railroads, and worksites. The historical problem is not that male labor was imaginary. The problem is that patriarchal storytelling recognizes men’s labor as labor while treating women’s labor as biology, instinct, or atmosphere. Men’s suffering becomes sacrifice. Women’s suffering becomes nature. Men’s work becomes civilization. Women’s work becomes the wallpaper.

That is why the “women had it easy” argument is not just wrong. It is politically useful. If women had it easy, then feminism is ingratitude. If women were protected, then patriarchy was benevolence. If women did not build anything, then their exclusion from power was reasonable. If men alone created civilization, then women should be grateful recipients rather than equal participants.

The myth turns inequality into generosity and resistance into whining.

But the past does not support that fantasy. The historical record shows women laboring, organizing, resisting, creating, sustaining, and surviving under systems that often denied them recognition for doing so.

It shows that what we call “women’s work” has never been secondary to civilization. It has been one of civilization’s foundations. The problem is that foundations are easy to ignore precisely because everything else rests on them.

So when a man confidently announces that women’s historical labor was easy because he once did chores and survived, he is not just making a bad argument. He is performing the very erasure he denies. He is looking at centuries of reproductive labor, domestic labor, agricultural labor, wage labor, enslaved labor, emotional labor, reform work, political organizing, and survival work, and calling it nothing. He is not describing history. He is demonstrating why history had to be rewritten to include women in the first place.

And that is the real lesson here. Patriarchy depends on historical amnesia. It needs us to forget the labor women performed, the barriers women faced, the violence women endured, and the rights women fought to claim. It needs every generation to inherit the story that men acted and women received, men built and women benefited, men sacrificed and women complained. It is a tidy story. It is also a lie.

Unfortunately for men who build their entire worldview on that lie, women’s history exists.

And we kept the receipts.

This advertisement feels almost too on-the-nose to be real. A man in “Mr. Leggs” slacks literally standing on a woman’s head beside the slogan: “It’s nice to have a girl around the house.” The copy underneath proudly explains that after seeing his pants, she was “ready to have him walk all over her.” Because apparently the fantasy being sold here is not trousers. It is domination.

And this is the part people miss when they talk about sexism in the 1950s and 60s like it was just “different attitudes back then.” This is not subtle bias accidentally leaking into culture. This is industrial-grade messaging. A whole mythology about masculinity and femininity being sold through department stores, magazines, television, and advertising copy written by men who genuinely believed women existed as decorative terrain for male achievement.

The woman in this ad is not even fully a person. She is literally merged with the tiger rug. Part animal. Part furnishing. Part conquered object. The ad collapses “woman,” “house,” and “property” into the same category. The man stands upright, faceless and powerful, while she exists beneath him as atmosphere. You could teach an entire gender studies course using only this image and one cigarette-stained conference room full of Mad Men executives congratulating themselves for being very clever.

And yet this kind of imagery wasn’t considered fringe. It was mainstream. That matters. Because nostalgia for the “good old days” often quietly edits out what those days were actually asking women to tolerate. People remember the cute kitchens and structured families and conveniently forget the cultural messaging that told women submission was sexy, resistance was unattractive, and male authority was natural. The fantasy was not just domesticity. The fantasy was hierarchy.

What makes this ad especially fascinating is how nakedly honest it is. Modern advertising often repackages misogyny in empowerment language. It tells women they are “choosing” impossible beauty standards or “leaning into femininity” or “embracing traditional values.” This ad skips the euphemisms entirely. It just plants a loafer on a blonde woman’s skull and calls it romance. Brutal efficiency. Like patriarchy before the PR consultant arrived.

Also, for the record, imagine being the poor woman modeling for this photoshoot. Somewhere there is a 1960s makeup artist chain-smoking beside a studio light while a creative director says, “No, no, can we make her look more like decorative flooring?” Absolute haunted department-store energy.

The ad survives today because it shocks us, but it should also remind us of something important: culture trains people. Advertising is not just selling pants. It is selling social roles, fantasies, power structures, and ideas about what relationships should look like. This ad didn’t emerge from nowhere. It came from a culture already teaching men that dominance was masculinity and women that being desired mattered more than being respected.

The pants were wrinkle-resistant. The misogyny, unfortunately, was not.

Adapted from a paper I presented at the Pop Culture Association Conference in 2025

Star Trek: Voyager occupies a strange place in television history.

Depending on who you ask, it is either one of the most feminist shows of the 1990s or a reminder that even progressive television can accidentally drive straight into a wall while congratulating itself for breaking barriers.

On paper, Voyager was revolutionary. It gave television its first female captain leading a Star Trek series. Captain Janeway wasn’t the ship’s counselor. She wasn’t the doctor’s assistant. She wasn’t somebody’s wife standing on the bridge asking if anyone wanted coffee. She was the captain.

She gave the orders. She made life-and-death decisions. She got to be brilliant, stubborn, compassionate, ruthless, diplomatic, and occasionally terrifying.

For many women and girls watching in the 1990s, that mattered.

It still matters.

But if you’ve spent any time revisiting Voyager as an adult, you may eventually notice something odd happening in the background. While the show was busy proving a woman could sit in the captain’s chair, it was also doing some deeply weird things with its younger female characters.

And by “deeply weird,” I mean one of them was technically two years old and the other was marketed like she had escaped from a very expensive intergalactic Victoria’s Secret catalog.

The result is a show that feels like a perfect time capsule of 1990s feminism.

Women could have power.

Women could have authority.

Women could command a starship.

But apparently someone in the production office still believed viewers might panic if there wasn’t also a conventionally attractive woman in skin-tight clothing standing nearby to reassure them that nobody was getting too feminist.

This is the central contradiction of Voyager: it gave us feminist visibility while constantly trying to make that visibility less threatening. It put a woman in command, then surrounded her with narratives that turned youth, fragility, trauma, and sexual availability into selling points.

Voyager shows us what happens when feminism passes through the machinery of 1990s television: it gets polished, packaged, softened, sexualized, and sold back to us with a ratings bump.

In other words, Voyager did not reject feminism.

It commodified it.

There Was a Woman in the Captain’s Chair and Nobody Knew What to Do

One of the most revealing things about Voyager is that even Janeway wasn’t allowed to simply be a captain.

The production team spent an astonishing amount of time worrying about how to write a woman in command. Not whether she could command. Not whether she could lead. Not whether audiences would accept her authority. They worried about whether she was being written “as a woman.”

Producer and director Winrich Kolbe explained:

“I knew that we had to find a way of not writing her as a man, but writing her as a woman.”

Which is one of those statements that becomes more fascinating the longer you stare at it.

Because what exactly does that mean?

Janeway is commanding a starship. She is making strategic decisions, negotiating treaties, resolving crises, and occasionally threatening hostile aliens with the kind of calm intensity that suggests she has already planned three different ways to ruin their day.

At what point does leadership become masculine?

At what point does competence become male?

The concern itself reveals the underlying assumption: that authority is male by default, and therefore a woman exercising authority must somehow perform femininity at the same time to avoid making everyone uncomfortable.

Kate Mulgrew certainly noticed.

Reflecting on the early years of the series, she famously said:

“That bloody thing with my hair. Endlessly stupid hijinks with my hair! Not only my hair. My hair, my breasts, my feet, my waist. There was a woman in the captain’s chair and they didn’t know what to do.”

That quote should probably be engraved on a plaque somewhere in the Museum of Feminist Media Criticism.

Because Mulgrew identified the problem perfectly.

The production couldn’t stop looking at Janeway as a woman.

No matter how many diplomatic victories she secured or impossible decisions she made, conversations kept circling back to her appearance.

Her hair.

Her body.

Her femininity.

Male captains got to simply exist. Women captains apparently required an extensive ongoing review process.

In Laura Mulvey’s influential essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Mulvey argued that women in media are often positioned as objects to be looked at rather than subjects who act.

Even when women occupy positions of power, they remain visually coded as women first and characters second.

Janeway constantly bumps into this problem.

The show wants her authority.

The show likes what her authority says about the franchise.

The show just seems a little nervous about letting that authority stand entirely on its own.

And if Janeway represented female authority, the rest of the show’s women increasingly represented something else.

Because while the production was trying to figure out what to do with a female captain, it also created one of the strangest female characters in the history of Star Trek.

Her name was Kes.

She was two years old.

And somehow nobody thought that was a problem.

The Lolita Complex in Space

Before we talk about Kes, we need to talk about a cultural phenomenon that media scholar Gigi Durham calls The Lolita Effect.

The term “Lolita” gets thrown around so often in popular culture that most people have forgotten what it actually refers to.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was never intended to be a love story. It was a horror story told from the perspective of a predator. Yet over time, popular culture transformed “Lolita” into something very different: a shorthand for a particular type of girlhood. Young, innocent, vulnerable, naïve, and somehow also sexually desirable.

Durham argues that modern media is saturated with these images.

Advertising, film, television, music videos, fashion photography, and celebrity culture repeatedly blur the line between childhood and adult sexuality.

Girls are encouraged to appear older. Women are encouraged to appear younger. Youth itself becomes a form of currency.

As Durham writes:

Numerous clothing ads feature grown women dressed as little girls, sucking on lollipops, with tiny barrettes or bows in their hair, kneeling, crouching or lying flat in positions of utter helplessness and subordination. Childishness is sexy, these messages imply. Ergo, children—especially little girls—are sexy.

That is the core contradiction.

The idealized female figure is often expected to embody two things at once:

Sexual availability and emotional innocence.

Adult desirability and childlike vulnerability.

Power and helplessness.

The result is what Durham calls the “Pretty Baby” myth, where youth itself becomes eroticized.

This isn’t necessarily about literal children. In fact, it often isn’t. It is about the cultural preference for women who appear inexperienced, dependent, emotionally undeveloped, and non-threatening.

The fantasy is not simply beauty.

The fantasy is vulnerability.

The fantasy is a woman who has all the physical characteristics of an adult but retains the innocence, dependence, and pliability associated with childhood.

If that sounds familiar, congratulations. You’ve probably consumed American media at some point during the last century.

You can see it in the endless parade of teenage love interests played by actresses in their twenties. You can see it in beauty standards that prize youth above almost every other characteristic. You can see it in the recurring cultural obsession with women who are “barely legal,” “girl next door,” “innocent,” “pure,” or “untouched.”

And you can absolutely see it in 1990s television.

This is where Voyager becomes interesting.

Because the show didn’t simply create a young female character.

It created a character whose youth, innocence, fragility, and emotional inexperience were central to her identity.

Her name was Kes.

And she was two years old.

The Child-Bride of the Delta Quadrant

Kes is one of those characters who becomes more alarming the longer you think about her.

At first glance she seems harmless enough.

She’s kind, compassionate, curious, eager to learn. She’s basically a golden retriever in a jumpsuit.

She is also canonically less than two years old when she joins Voyager.

Not metaphorically.

Not spiritually.

Not “well alien years work differently.”

Two years old.

The show repeatedly reminds viewers of this fact. The Ocampa have lifespans of approximately nine years, making Kes extraordinarily young even by the standards of her own species.

And yet the series simultaneously presents her as an adult romantic partner.

This is where things start getting weird.

Or rather, this is where they start getting weird enough that somebody should have maybe raised a hand in the writers’ room.

The production’s own descriptions of Kes are remarkably revealing.

Rick Berman1 described the role as requiring “a sort of elfin female.”

Winrich Kolbe elaborated:

“You didn’t want a ball-buster, you didn’t want to have tank-like women saying, ‘Follow me!’ We wanted somebody who could be fragile, but with a steely will underneath.”

Notice the language.

Not intelligent.

Not capable.

Not authoritative.

Fragile.

The goal was fragility, delicacy, vulnerability.

Kes wasn’t accidentally written as childlike.

She was designed that way.

She was intentionally constructed as small, innocent, emotionally inexperienced, and physically delicate.

Then the writers surrounded her with older men who were attracted to her.

Neelix.

The Doctor.

Tom Paris in alternate timelines.

Perhaps one reason for our fascination with the sexy little girl is her tricky double role in contemporary society—she is simultaneously a symbol of female empowerment and the embodiment of a chauvinistic “beauty myth.”

She invokes the specter of pedophilia while kindling the prospect of potent female sexuality.

- Dr. M. Gigi Durham “The Lolita Effect”

At various points, Kes becomes the object of affection, fascination, mentorship, obsession, or romantic interest from men significantly older and more experienced than she is.

The power of Durham’s framework is that it explains why Kes feels unsettling even when the show insists everything is perfectly normal.

The issue isn’t simply that she’s young. It’s that her youth is central to her appeal. She is desirable because she is innocent. She is attractive because she is emotionally undeveloped.

She embodies Durham’s “Pretty Baby” myth, where girls are simultaneously framed as sexually desirable and emotionally childlike.

The contradiction isn’t accidental.

The contradiction is the point.

And nowhere does that contradiction become more uncomfortable than in the episode “Elogium.”

Because somehow Voyager looked at a character who repeatedly reminds everyone she is not yet two years old and thought:

“You know what this storyline needs? Puberty.”

Elogium and the Most Uncomfortable Puberty Metaphor in Star Trek History

If Kes’s existence raises uncomfortable questions, the episode “Elogium” takes those questions, puts them in a shuttlecraft, and accelerates directly into an asteroid field.

The premise is simple enough. An encounter with an alien lifeform triggers Kes’s Elogium, a biological process unique to the Ocampa. The Elogium is essentially a combination of puberty, fertility, and menopause rolled into a single event. It is the brief period during which Ocampa can reproduce.2

The problem is that Kes is not supposed to be experiencing it yet.

As Janeway attempts to help her understand what is happening, she explains that humans go through a similar process called puberty.

Kes responds:

“But I’m too young. Much too young. It usually happens between the ages of four and five. I’m not even two yet.”

And there it is.

The episode has now explicitly framed itself as a story about premature puberty, fertility, and reproductive decision-making involving a character who repeatedly reminds us that she is not yet two years old.

What follows is one of the strangest attempts at social commentary in the franchise.

At least in theory.

Because there is a genuinely interesting science fiction concept buried somewhere underneath the wreckage.

Imagine a story about a young woman suddenly confronted with the possibility of reproduction before she feels ready. Imagine a thoughtful exploration of bodily autonomy, reproductive choice, family expectations, or the pressure society places on women to become mothers.

There are fascinating questions here.

What does it mean to have control over your reproductive future?

What happens when biology imposes a timeline you did not choose?

How do you decide whether motherhood is right for you?

For a franchise that has often used science fiction as a vehicle for discussing contemporary political issues, this should have been fertile ground. No pun intended.

Instead, Voyager somehow manages to stumble directly past every interesting conversation available to it.

The episode never meaningfully engages with reproductive rights.

It never explores bodily autonomy in any sustained way.

It never develops a coherent metaphor for pregnancy, fertility, or social expectations surrounding motherhood.

Instead, it rushes through the entire dilemma so quickly that the audience barely has time to process the implications before the credits roll.

Which is perhaps fortunate, because the implications are deeply uncomfortable. But it was still a missed opportunity. One of many in Voyager’s run.

The central problem is that the episode accidentally creates what feels like a teen pregnancy narrative while simultaneously insisting that the character at the center of that narrative is developmentally younger than a teenager.

The language used throughout the episode repeatedly emphasizes Kes’s youth and inexperience. She is frightened. Confused. Unprepared. She openly states that she is too young for what is happening to her.

And yet the story still asks viewers to engage seriously with the possibility of her becoming a mother.

It’s difficult to overstate how bizarre this becomes once you stop accepting the show’s premises at face value.

Imagine if a contemporary television series introduced a character explicitly coded as a preteen and then centered an episode around whether she should have a child.

The audience would rightly be horrified.

But Voyager seems strangely unaware of the implications of its own worldbuilding.

Part of the problem is that the series wants Kes to occupy two contradictory roles at once.

She is supposed to be innocent and childlike. She is also supposed to be an adult romantic partner.

She is supposed to be inexperienced and vulnerable. She is also supposed to be old enough to navigate questions of sex, reproduction, and parenthood.

The show wants both versions of Kes simultaneously.

It wants the appeal of innocence and the narrative functions of adulthood.

And “Elogium” exposes just how unstable that balancing act really is.

Durham argues that media frequently creates female characters who exist in a liminal space between childhood and adulthood, combining the vulnerability associated with youth with the sexual desirability associated with adulthood.

That tension is not a side effect of Kes’s characterization.

It is the foundation of it.

“Elogium” simply makes the contradiction impossible to ignore.

The episode accidentally asks the audience to confront the logical consequences of a character who has been constructed as both child and woman at the same time.

The results are exactly as uncomfortable as that sounds. Except the show never acknowledges that discomfort or how disturbing the framing is.

And if Kes represented the 1990s obsession with innocence packaged as desirability, her eventual replacement represented something slightly different.

Because when Jennifer Lien left the series, Voyager stopped selling innocence.

It started selling sex.

Quite literally.

Because the next major female character arrived with a production mandate, a skin-tight catsuit, and one of the most revealing quotes in the history of the franchise.

As producer Brannon Braga3 later recalled:

“Then I called Rick... and it was his idea to make it a Borg babe.”

And with that, Voyager entered its next phase.

The Day Star Trek Invented the Phrase “Borg Babe”

If Kes represented innocence sexualized, Seven of Nine represented something else entirely.

Trauma sexualized.

And unlike the Kes discussion, where fans can at least argue about authorial intent, the production team was remarkably honest about what they were doing.

Sometimes, media critics spend years dissecting symbolism, interviewing creators, and searching for hidden meanings.

Sometimes a producer just walks into the room and says the quiet part out loud.

This is one of those times.

Discussing the creation of Seven of Nine, Brannon Braga recalled:

“What if we had a Borg character on the show? I mean, there’s some conflict for you. Then I called Rick…and it was his idea to make it a Borg babe. We formulated the character, who had a proper name a the time – I think it was Perrin, short for Perineum.”

A Borg babe.

Not a former Borg struggling with identity.

Not a survivor of assimilation.

Not a woman attempting to reconstruct her humanity after decades of psychological trauma.

A Borg babe.

Honestly, I appreciate the honesty.

Fans have spent decades trying to explain Seven’s appearance through narrative logic. The catsuit was necessary. The costume reflected her alien nature. The design represented her struggle with identity. The outfit was symbolic.

The producers called her a Borg babe.

Case closed.

What’s fascinating is that the underlying concept for Seven is actually excellent.

She was assimilated by the Borg at age six.

Everything that made her an individual was stripped away.

She spent decades as part of a collective consciousness before being separated from it and forced to rebuild a sense of self.

That’s an incredible premise.

It’s arguably one of the strongest character concepts in the franchise.

In another version of Voyager, Seven might have become a sustained exploration of trauma, recovery, identity formation, and what it means to reclaim one’s humanity after experiencing profound psychological violation.

Sometimes that version of the character even appears on screen.

Jeri Ryan’s performance is often excellent. Many of Seven’s episodes are among the strongest in the series. Her gradual evolution from detached Borg drone to fully realized individual remains one of Voyager’s greatest achievements.

The problem is that the production never seems entirely interested in the same character arc the writers are creating.

The writers are building a story about identity.

The marketing department and production team is building a pinup calendar.

And those two goals spend seven seasons crashing into each other.

Writer Bryan Fuller described Seven as:

“This woman who was raised in the wild by wolves and now has to be trained to be human again.”

That’s actually a remarkably accurate description.

Seven’s early stories revolve around basic socialization. She struggles with humor. She struggles with friendship. She struggles with intimacy. She struggles with understanding emotions.

Jeri Ryan herself often discussed Seven’s journey in terms that sound less like an adult character arc and more like developmental milestones. Seven experiences first laughter. First friendships. She goes through what Ryan jokingly described as an “unruly teenage phase.”

In many respects, Seven is emotionally younger than her physical appearance suggests.

Which is where things start becoming familiar.

Because if you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably noticed a pattern.

Kes was characterized by emotional innocence.

Seven is characterized by emotional immaturity.

Kes was positioned as vulnerable.

Seven is positioned as vulnerable.

Kes’s appeal was tied to youth.

Seven’s appeal is tied to a kind of developmental incompleteness.

Different packaging.

Similar logic.

The women who populate Voyager are repeatedly defined through forms of emotional dependency and vulnerability.

The difference is that by 1997, the show had stopped wrapping those qualities in fairy-tale innocence.

Now it was wrapping them in spandex.

And nowhere is that contradiction more obvious than in the costume.

Because if Seven’s story is supposedly about reclaiming her humanity, someone should probably explain why the first step in that process involved engineering one of the most notorious outfits in science fiction history.

The answer, unfortunately, is exactly what you think it is.

The Corset Under the Borg

One of the things I find most refreshing about Brannon Braga is that he occasionally says things media critics might have spent twenty years trying to prove.

Discussing Seven of Nine’s arrival on Voyager, Braga recalled that some members of the Deep Space Nine production staff thought they were “sellouts” for “just putting tits and ass on the show.”

His response?

“Yeah, we’re putting tits and ass on the show.”

Honestly, thank you for your service to feminist media criticism.

That quote matters because it cuts through decades of fan over-explanation. Seven’s appearance was not an unfortunate side effect of storytelling. It was not an accidental consequence of character design. It was not simply “Borg aesthetics.”

It was deliberate.

The point was sex appeal.

The point was ratings.

The point was to make sure viewers noticed Seven’s body before they had to think too hard about her trauma.

This is where Laura Mulvey’s concept of “to-be-looked-at-ness” becomes almost painfully useful. In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Mulvey argues that women in film are often positioned as spectacles: displayed, eroticized, and visually coded for the pleasure of the viewer.

“In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.”

- Laura Mulvey “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”

Seven of Nine might as well have arrived with a footnote.

Her actual character premise is fascinating. Her story could have been one that focused on trauma, identity, recovery, and personhood.

And sometimes it is.

But very often, Voyager filters that story through sexual appeal.

Her awkwardness becomes sexy.

Her vulnerability becomes sexy.

Her emotional immaturity becomes sexy.

The show repeatedly asks us to watch a woman who is learning basic human social behavior while also framing her as an object of constant male desire.

Even when the writers insisted she was not being written as a “sex kitten,” the episodes often disagreed. In “Revulsion,” after Seven realizes Harry Kim is sexually attracted to her, she immediately offers to “copulate” with him as a way to learn more about being human.

The scene is played for comedy, but it reveals the larger pattern. Seven’s journey toward humanity is repeatedly routed through sexuality. Friendship, community, and identity are all there, but the show keeps wandering back toward sex like a dog returning to a suspicious smell.

Sarah Banet-Weiser would recognize this as popular feminism turned into commodity. Seven looks empowered. She is brilliant, strong, capable, and central to the series. But her empowerment is packaged in a form that boosts ratings rather than challenges patriarchy.

It sells.

It does not liberate.

That preoccupation with sex wasn’t limited to the writing.

It was literally stitched into the costume.

And this is where Seven of Nine becomes difficult to separate from the broader history of women in Star Trek.

By 1998, the franchise should have known better.

It had been nearly thirty years since the female bridge officers of the original Enterprise stopped wearing miniskirts as standard uniform issue.

The Next Generation had finally abandoned the infamous cleavage-baring “cosmic cheerleader” outfit that Marina Sirtis spent years wearing as Counselor Troi.

The franchise appeared to be moving, however slowly, toward treating women like Starfleet officers rather than decorative accessories.

Then Voyager decided it needed a ratings boost.

All it took was Rick Berman and Brannon Braga deciding the show needed a little more sex appeal, and suddenly the newest female cast member was squeezed into a skin-tight catsuit with a science-fiction explanation so flimsy it practically dissolved on contact with air.

The official justification was that the suit was “skin regenerative.”

The real purpose was considerably less subtle.

Years later, Jeri Ryan described the elaborate construction hidden underneath the costume:

“The producers had said that they wanted it to look like skin, to be skin-regenerative fabric. For the breast mound, they wanted two individual breasts and they wanted it to hug every curve, like skin.”

I’m sorry.

The what?

The breast mound.

That was apparently the actual production term.

According to Ryan, the costume designer had to engineer a complex corset beneath the suit because the producers wanted the fabric to cling to every contour of her body while still maintaining the visual separation of what Ryan politely referred to as “two individual breasts.”

At a certain point, we are no longer discussing costume design.

We are discussing aerospace engineering for cleavage.

The result was a costume so restrictive that Ryan couldn’t get in or out of it without assistance. She had a dedicated dresser. Bathroom breaks became production events.

As Ryan recalled:

“If I had to go to the bathroom it was a 20-minute production shutdown. It’s true, no joke. The whole crew had to know about it.”

Think about what that means.

A female actor’s ability to perform basic bodily functions became a logistical challenge because the production was so committed to maximizing visual appeal.

And this is where Sarah Banet-Weiser’s concept of popular feminism becomes particularly useful.

Seven looks empowered.

She is brilliant. Strong. Capable. Central to the narrative.

But her empowerment is packaged for consumption.

The visual presentation of the character constantly reassures viewers that no matter how intelligent, powerful, or important she becomes, she remains available to the gaze.

The character is not merely a former Borg drone reclaiming her humanity.

She is a former Borg drone reclaiming her humanity while wearing a corset designed around something called a breast mound.

If that sounds absurd, that’s because it is.

The absurdity is the point.

"Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy"

The episode is mostly a comedy about the Doctor’s ego running loose in the holodeck of his own mind, but one fantasy is especially revealing: he imagines himself as a celebrated painter, with Seven of Nine posed nude as his model.

The joke is supposed to be about the Doctor.

But the image still works the way the male gaze always works.

He stands. She reclines.

He creates. She is displayed.

He gets interiority. She becomes atmosphere.

The scene is brief, ridiculous, and played for laughs. It also distills the problem beautifully: even when Seven is one of the most interesting characters on the ship, the show can still reduce her to a fantasy object the moment someone else’s imagination takes over.

Hugh, Seven, and the Gender Politics of Borg Recovery

The strongest evidence that Seven’s treatment wasn’t inevitable comes from another Borg character entirely.

Several years before Seven of Nine arrived on Voyager, The Next Generation introduced Hugh.

Like Seven, Hugh is separated from the Collective and forced to develop an individual identity. Like Seven, he must learn friendship, autonomy, emotion, and personhood after existing as part of the Borg hive mind.

The basic premise is remarkably similar.

The treatment is not.

When the Enterprise crew encounters Hugh, they treat him like what he effectively is: a traumatized individual. He is confused. Vulnerable. Childlike in some respects. The story approaches his recovery with patience, empathy, and curiosity.

Nobody builds storylines around whether the audience finds him attractive.

His trauma is allowed to simply be trauma.

His humanity is allowed to simply be humanity.

Seven, by contrast, is introduced through a framework of visual appeal almost immediately. Her rehabilitation becomes entangled with sexuality. Her vulnerability becomes part of her marketability.

The difference between the two characters is not narrative.

It is gender.

What makes the comparison even more interesting is that Brannon Braga had a hand in both worlds. He wrote “I, Borg,” one of the franchise’s most thoughtful explorations of Borg individuality. He also co-wrote Star Trek: First Contact, which introduced the overtly sexualized Borg Queen, and later helped create Seven of Nine.

The shift is telling.

As the Borg became female, they also became sexualized.

Hugh is treated as a person first.

The Borg Queen is treated as temptation.

Seven is treated as spectacle.

Hugh’s experience is dignified.

Seven’s experience is commodified.

And that isn’t an accident.

It’s a reminder that media doesn’t simply tell us stories about gender. It teaches us whose suffering deserves empathy, whose recovery deserves respect, and whose trauma can be repackaged as entertainment.

Which brings us back to the central contradiction at the heart of Voyager.

The series wanted credit for being progressive.

The question is what kind of progress it was actually selling.

Feminism With a Ratings Bump

Kes and Seven ultimately reveal what I think is Voyager’s central contradiction.

The series wanted credit for progressive representation while still prioritizing viewer demographics, network expectations, and commercial appeal. Its female characters were visible but not protected. Complex but commodified. Empowered, but only within carefully controlled limits.

In Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny, Sarah Banet-Weiser argues that popular misogyny often emerges alongside popular feminism rather than in opposition to it. As women become more visible in public life and media, new forms of backlash emerge to contain, dilute, and repackage that visibility.

In other words, feminism becomes acceptable so long as it remains marketable.

That framework helps explain a great deal about Voyager.

The series gave us Janeway.4

But it also gave us Kes.

It gave us Seven.

It gave us a female captain, then surrounded her with increasingly hyperfeminized female characters whose bodies, vulnerability, and desirability could reassure audiences that feminism had not, in fact, gone “too far.”

This isn’t simply a Voyager problem.

It’s a 1990s problem.5

The decade loved “girl power.” It loved independent women. It loved female professionals, female action heroes, and female leaders.

As long as they were attractive.

As long as they were non-threatening.

As long as they remained consumable.

As long as they could still sell magazines, merchandise, and television ratings.

Seen through that lens, Voyager becomes less of an anomaly and more of a perfect cultural artifact.

The series genuinely expanded representation. Janeway mattered. Seven mattered. The show inspired countless women and girls to imagine themselves as scientists, leaders, explorers, and problem-solvers.

That progress was real.

But so were the limitations.

Ultimately, Voyager reflects the tensions at the heart of 1990s feminism: progressive on the surface, deeply compromised underneath.

This is how misogyny often operates under neoliberalism. It doesn’t necessarily silence women. It doesn’t always erase them from the screen.

Instead, it hyper-visualizes them.

It turns them into brands.

It makes them profitable.

It allows women to have power, provided that power remains attractive, marketable, and reassuring.

The irony is that we can see the limits of that model most clearly by looking at what happened decades later. When Star Trek: Picard finally allowed Seven of Nine to be openly queer and less obviously constructed around the male gaze, parts of the fandom reacted as though the franchise had suddenly become political.

As if the real controversy wasn’t the corset.

As if the real controversy wasn’t the “Borg babe.”

As if the real controversy wasn’t spending years packaging a trauma survivor as fan service.

No, apparently the dangerous thing was letting her kiss a woman.

Which tells us everything we need to know.

Voyager is a landmark for representation.

But it comes with an asterisk.

The series didn’t reject feminism.

It commodified it.

It gave us visibility without protection, empowerment without power, feminism with a wink and a ratings bump.

Kes and Seven are not failed characters. In many ways, they are exactly what the production intended them to be.6

That is what makes them so fascinating.

And so frustrating.

Their stories remind us that representation alone is never enough. Visibility is not liberation. A woman can be at the center of the screen and still be trapped inside someone else’s fantasy.

The real question is not whether a show includes women.

The real question is what those women are allowed to be.

On Voyager, the answer was often: captain, genius, survivor, explorer, scientist, leader...

...but only after the camera had a good look first.

It was, in many ways, the queer version of Francis Fukuyama’s famous “End of History” thesis.1 Writing in the final days of the Cold War, Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy had effectively won the great ideological struggle of the modern era. History would continue, of course, but the big questions had supposedly been settled. The future might contain disagreements, crises, and conflicts, but the destination had been reached.

A similar story emerged around LGBTQ rights.

There was Stonewall. There was the AIDS crisis. There was activism. There was progress. There was marriage equality. Rainbow logos appeared on corporate websites every June. Politicians began showing up at Pride events. Major television shows featured queer characters without triggering national scandal. The culture had changed.

Roll credits.

The problem with declaring history over is that history has a nasty habit of continuing.

Fukuyama’s thesis looked considerably less convincing after terrorism, financial collapse, democratic backsliding, authoritarian resurgence, and the general tendency of human beings to repeatedly reinvent old problems with updated branding.2 Liberal democracy did not triumph so much as discover that victory is rarely permanent and history does not recognize finish lines.

LGBTQ history turns out to have the same problem.

Many people interpreted marriage equality as the final chapter of queer history when it was really the end of one chapter and the beginning of another.

That misunderstanding helps explain why Pride feels different in 2026. Across the United States and around the world, Pride Month arrives amid lawsuits against Pride events, attacks on transgender rights, school curriculum battles, book bans, and politicians who seem to have built entire careers around being personally offended by the existence of pronouns.

For some people, this feels like history moving backwards.

But that’s only true if you believe queer history was a straight line.

It wasn’t.

One of the strangest things about how Americans tell LGBTQ history is that we’ve transformed it into a story of inevitable progress. Stonewall becomes the beginning. Marriage equality becomes the ending. Everything in between becomes a series of obstacles on the road toward an inevitable destination. It is a version of history that assumes social change moves in one direction and that every victory permanently resolves the conflicts that came before it.

Historians tend to get nervous around stories that neat. To wildly paraphrase William Shakespeare: The course of civil rights never did run smooth.

The reality is that Pride did not emerge because queer people were accepted. Pride emerged because they weren’t.

The first Pride marches were held in 1970 to commemorate the Stonewall uprising, itself a response to police raids, harassment, arrests, and the routine criminalization of LGBTQ life. The people marching through New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other cities were not celebrating victory. They were not thanking society for finally recognizing their humanity. They were not marking the successful completion of a civil rights campaign.

They were refusing invisibility.

That distinction matters because modern conversations about Pride often assume that Pride was originally a celebration that somehow drifted into politics. Every June, someone asks why Pride can’t “just be a celebration.” Every June, someone complains that Pride has become too political. Every June, someone acts as though the political dimensions of Pride are a recent corruption of what was once an uncomplicated festival dedicated to rainbow flags and corporate sponsorships.

Historically speaking, that’s nonsense.

Pride was always political because queer existence was always political.

The act of gathering publicly as LGBTQ people was political. The act of refusing shame was political. The act of being visible in a society that often preferred queer people remain hidden was political. Pride was not a celebration that occasionally became a protest. The celebration was the protest.

And that historical reality helps explain something many people continue to misunderstand about social change.

Visibility and backlash have always traveled together.

One of the assumptions embedded in the queer “End of History” narrative is that visibility naturally produces acceptance. Once enough people know LGBTQ individuals, encounter LGBTQ stories, and see LGBTQ representation in public life, opposition should gradually fade away.

Sometimes that happens.

But history suggests something more complicated.

The historian and theorist Susan Stryker has written extensively about the ways transgender people become symbolic sites where societies attempt to stabilize gender categories during periods of social change. When traditional understandings of gender begin to feel unstable, trans people often become targets for broader anxieties about identity, order, and social transformation.

What makes Stryker’s insight so useful is that it helps explain why the contemporary anti-trans movement emerged when it did.

Trans people did not suddenly appear in the last decade. They did not emerge from social media. They were not invented by universities. They have existed throughout history, even if the language used to describe them has changed.

What changed was visibility.

More people came out. More stories became public. More people knew a trans coworker, student, neighbor, family member, athlete, writer, or public figure. More people became impossible to ignore.

And visibility destabilizes systems that rely on invisibility.

The anti-trans movement is often presented as a response to some sudden social transformation, but in many ways it resembles earlier moments of backlash in LGBTQ history. The backlash did not occur because trans people appeared. It occurred because trans people became visible enough that opponents could no longer pretend they weren’t there.

This is one of the great paradoxes of social change. Backlash is frequently interpreted as evidence that progress has failed when, in reality, backlash often emerges because progress has succeeded.

The backlash is not proof that visibility failed.

The backlash is often proof that visibility worked.

Understanding this also helps explain why anti-LGBTQ politics sounds so repetitive.

Somebody is always threatening the family.

The identities change. The targets rotate. The panic survives.

The feminist scholar Sara Ahmed argues that political narratives repeatedly construct “the family” as something vulnerable, fragile, and perpetually under siege. Queers become cast as threats not only to individual families but to the broader reproduction of social order itself.

Once you notice this pattern, it becomes impossible to unsee.

In the 1970s, Anita Bryant warned that gay people threatened children.

In the 1980s, the AIDS crisis became a vehicle for broader fears about morality and social collapse.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, opponents insisted same-sex marriage would destroy marriage itself, a claim that remains one of the more impressive examples of political logic eating itself alive.

In the 2010s, bathrooms became the battlefield.

In the 2020s, drag queens, trans athletes, pronouns, libraries, and school curricula joined the list.

The emotional architecture remains remarkably consistent.

The family is under attack.

The children are in danger.

Civilization is collapsing.

Again.

The remarkable thing is not that these panics continue to emerge. The remarkable thing is how little creativity goes into them.

As a historian, there are moments when reading contemporary political rhetoric feels like discovering that someone has been photocopying the same moral panic for fifty years and occasionally changing the font. The names change. The slogans change. The villains rotate in and out of the story. But the underlying narrative remains stubbornly familiar.

This is one reason why legal victories, while important, never tell the whole story.

Marriage equality mattered. Anti-discrimination protections matter. Representation matters. None of these achievements should be minimized. But one of the problems with the queer “End of History” narrative is that it confused inclusion with liberation.

The political theorist Cathy Cohen has spent decades arguing that inclusion within existing institutions is not the same thing as transformation. Winning access to an institution does not automatically dismantle the structures that produced exclusion in the first place. Legal victories can improve lives dramatically while leaving deeper assumptions about gender, sexuality, race, class, and power intact.

In retrospect, marriage equality became something larger than a legal victory. It became a symbolic endpoint. Many people treated it as proof that the major battles had been won.

Like Fukuyama’s thesis, this mistake came from confusing a major victory with the conclusion of the story.

History rarely works that way.

The institutions change.

The conflict adapts.

The panic finds a new target.

The anti-trans movement did not emerge because older anxieties disappeared. It emerged because those anxieties found a new vessel.

And that brings us to perhaps the most powerful force shaping our current political moment: nostalgia.

If the queer “End of History” imagined a future of inevitable progress, the contemporary backlash is powered by a fantasy of returning to an idealized past.

Nostalgia tells a simple story. There was once a proper family. A proper man. A proper woman. A proper America. Everything worked until modern society came along and ruined it.

The problem is that history keeps refusing to cooperate.

The backlash is not trying to preserve history.

It is trying to preserve a specific story about history.

Those are not the same thing.

The nostalgic vision of the 1950s depends on forgetting queer people existed in the 1950s. It depends on forgetting that women challenged gender roles long before social media. It depends on forgetting that families have always taken multiple forms and that gender nonconformity did not suddenly emerge when somebody invented TikTok.

The past was always messier than nostalgia allows.

Queer visibility keeps reminding people of that fact.

And perhaps that is why Pride feels different right now.

Not because the movement has failed.

Not because history is moving backwards.

Not because progress was an illusion.

Pride feels different because many people mistook visibility for victory.

They assumed Pride emerged after acceptance.

Historically, Pride emerged because acceptance did not exist.

The first Pride marchers were not celebrating a world that welcomed them. They were creating one. They understood something that the queer “End of History” narrative forgot: visibility is not a finish line. It is an ongoing act of resistance.

Every backlash campaign, every attempt to remove books from shelves, every effort to erase identities from public life, every panic about drag queens, pronouns, or Pride events ultimately revolves around the same demand.

Be less visible.

Be quieter.

Take up less space.

Go back into the closet, even if nobody calls it that anymore.

Pride exists because generations of LGBTQ people rejected that bargain.

It exists because they understood that invisibility was never safety. It was simply a different form of vulnerability.

People often ask why Pride still exists.

Pride exists because people refused to disappear.

It exists because every generation encounters someone who insists they should be quieter, smaller, less public, less themselves.

And if Pride feels different this year, perhaps that’s because history is reminding us what Pride was for in the first place.

Not to celebrate the end of the struggle.

But to make sure the people writing the next chapter know we are still here.

No one alive now could tell you her true name, or what her voice sounded like. No one could swear where the woman ended and the sermon began, but everyone knew the lesson, because the lesson was everywhere. It stood in city squares, carved into stone: a maiden in finery with a broom in her hand, eyes lowered as if humility were a crown. It gleamed in palace corridors in gold leaf. It was stamped into coins and whispered into girls’ ears the way you whisper a spell.

They called her Saint Cinder.

They said she was kind when others were cruel, virtuous when others were greedy. They said she worked without complaint and endured without bitterness, and that she was rewarded for it. Not because a fairy took pity. Not because chance leaned her way. Not because the world is often luck dressed up as justice. No. In this kingdom, she was rewarded because she was worthy.

Each year at the Feast of the Glass Slipper, girls who had come of age gathered beneath the statue with heads bowed and hands folded, as if womanhood began with learning to take up less space. Bells rang. Incense curled. One by one, the girls stepped to the high priest to receive a coin: glass slipper on one side, a motto on the other.

Be kind. Be patient. Be hardworking.

They repeated it until the words lost all meaning.

The coin was a promise, heavy with a particular kind of optimism. Girls would become women who rubbed the coin between thumb and forefinger when the day was long and their hands were raw and they needed to believe that the world had rules and if you followed them, you would be rewarded.

The kingdom taught there was a right way to suffer. They did not call it suffering. They called it virtue. They had a Book for it, bound in leather and kept in chapels and kitchens alike. In the square it was read like a lullaby. In servants’ rooms it was read like a work order. The Book promised that goodness was a ladder and every rung would be counted.

Reward follows obedience, it said.

Grace comes to the patient.

Blessed are those who endure.

And there was another promise, quieter but just as binding: service in the palace was itself a reward.

Because the palace was a shrine. Saint Cinder had lived there. Her portrait watched the halls like a blessing you could earn by proximity. To scrub those floors, they said, was a step on the ladder to reward. Families did not pray for wages. They prayed for placement: a daughter in the palace kitchens, a niece in the laundry rooms, a cousin in the scullery. Better to serve in Saint Cinder’s house, mothers said, than to be paid in any lesser place.

So the palace did not pay its women, because payment would have meant admitting it was work. Instead they were paid in promises that had never been kept.

At dawn the bell rang and the world below the stairs began moving. Water hauled. Fires fed. Pots scrubbed until knuckles split. Floors mopped until knees throbbed. The palace above woke slowly, as if comfort were an inheritance. The palace below woke like a body jolted upright: fast, obedient, necessary.

There was a scullery girl who had heard the promise all her life. Coin in pocket. Motto in mouth. Hands rough from lye. She had been kind, patient, hardworking

And still the slipper did not fit.

The week before the Feast, a list appeared on the pantry door, sealed with the crown’s crest: loaves, pastries, roasts, wine—abundance as proof the story worked. Pinned beside it was a Decree of Virtue, written in polite language that made violence sound like care: longer hours, no leaving the palace grounds “for protection,” penalties for idleness, insolence, impurity.

The Head Cook read it twice and forced brightness into her voice. Saint Cinder endured, she said. Saint Cinder was rewarded.

That morning, a woman slipped on wet stone and fell hard. For a heartbeat the kitchen stilled, as if the shrine might recognize pain.

It did not.

Pick her up, the Head Cook snapped. We can’t stop.

If you can stand, stand. If you can’t, we’ll find someone who can.

Blessed are those who endure, someone murmured, and the scullery girl felt something inside her go cold.

That night she read the Book by candlelight, and the promises looked different in the dark. Reward. Grace. Endure. She thought of the decree. She thought of the woman on the bench, already replaced in the line.

And she remembered the Old Cook’s whisper, half a laugh, half a warning.

She wasn’t a saint. She got lucky.

Luck dressed up as justice.

Before dawn, before the bell could command their bodies into motion, the scullery girl set her slipper-coin on the prep table.

Clink.

The Old Cook met her gaze and nodded in understanding. She set down her coin, worn nearly smooth by years of prayer and optimism that were never rewarded.

Clink.

A third coin appeared. Then a fourth. The Young Girl held hers trembling for a long moment, then set it down too.

Clink.

The Head Cook entered and went still.

What is this? she hissed.

The scullery girl lifted her chin. I won’t spend my life waiting for a reward that never comes. My mother did, my grandmother did, we have all been waiting, but the truth is that they expect us to suffer as a virtue until we die.

The Head Cook’s eyes flicked to the decree, to the crest on the seal, to the list that demanded miracles from bodies already breaking. The scullery girl spoke again, and the sentence sounded like a door unlatched.

If they can decree our virtue, she said, they can pay for it.

Silence. Then the Head Cook reached into her apron and placed her own coin on the table.

Clink.

On the morning of the Feast of the Glass Slipper, the square filled with ribbons and incense. Priests lifted their hands. Girls pressed coins to their lips and made bargains with the future. Up in the palace, nobles waited for the banquet that would prove the story true.

In the kitchens, the bell rang.

No one moved.

No flour. No knives. No fire.

Messengers came with threats wrapped in velvet. A priest came clutching the Book. The women stood shoulder to shoulder, back straight and arms at their side, and listened without bowing their heads.

Then they walked out together, empty-handed, aprons still tied, hands still scarred. They moved into the square and stopped at the base of Saint Cinder’s statue. The scullery girl placed her coin on the stone.

Clink.

Another coin followed. Then another. Soon the statue’s base glittered with slipper-stamped promises returned like bad currency.

Girls, the priest snapped, this is not the way.

We have done it your way, the scullery girl said, voice carrying. We have been kind. Patient. Hardworking.

We have been paid in stories, the scullery girl said. We want wages.

Wages, not blessing. Not closeness. Not the privilege of scrubbing floors where a saint once walked.

Work is worship, the priest spat.

It’s work, the scullery girl replied.

People looked from the coin pile to the women’s hands to the palace balcony. Everyone knew the palace did not cook its own meals. And now, on the holiest day, the great hall waited empty while the square listened to the sound of truth.

The crown conceded later, not because it was kind, not because a saint softened anyone’s heart.

It conceded because it was hungry.

They tried to call it charity. They tried to announce it as generosity from a merciful throne. But wages do not feel like blessings when they land in your palm. They feel like weight. Like recognition. Like the naming of what was always true.

Not every wedding ends servitude; some polish it until it shines.

But even polished chains still clink when you drop them on a table. And that year, on the Feast of the Glass Slipper, the sound of clinking was louder than any bell.

Once Upon a Revolt: A Critical Reflection on Writing Feminist Fairy-Tale Revisions

Why fairy tales? Because for many of us, fairy tales are our first lessons about love, gender, work, and what a “happy ending” is supposed to look like.

They’re where we learn that beauty means goodness, that romance is destiny, that patient suffering gets rewarded, and that the endless labor women perform somehow doesn’t count as labor at all. These stories sink deep because we hear them when we’re young, and their lessons often linger long after we’ve stopped believing in magic.

But fairy tales have never been fixed stories. They have always been rewritten, adapted, edited, and retold. There is no single “original” version sitting untouched somewhere in the past. Every generation reshapes these stories to reflect its own values, fears, and assumptions.

That’s why I see rewriting as more than a creative exercise. It’s a way of asking new questions about stories we’ve been taught to accept. What happens if we don’t stop at “happily ever after”? Who benefits from the ending? What problems does the story ask us to ignore?

The Scullery’s Revolt grew out of those questions.

Traditional Cinderella stories often treat hard work, obedience, and suffering as virtues that will eventually be rewarded. Cinderella works. Cinderella endures. Cinderella remains kind. Then she wins the prince.

But what if that isn’t justice? What if the problem isn’t that Cinderella needs a better employer or a better husband? What if the problem is the system that depends on her unpaid labor in the first place?

At its heart, The Scullery’s Revolt is a story about work, class, and the way women are often taught to accept exploitation as virtue. Cinderella’s labor keeps the household running, yet the story asks us to see that labor as proof of her goodness rather than evidence that she’s being taken advantage of.

The central idea of the story can be summed up in a single line:

“We have been paid in stories. We want wages.”

For generations, women have been offered symbolic rewards instead of material ones. We are told that sacrifice is noble, that service is fulfilling, that being chosen is a prize. Fairy tales often package those ideas into romantic endings.

This story asks what happens when the workers refuse that bargain.

Rather than focusing on one woman escaping the system, The Scullery’s Revolt shifts its attention to collective action. The magic doesn’t break because a prince arrives. It breaks because the people doing the work decide to stop.

In that sense, this isn’t a rejection of fairy tales. It’s an attempt to reclaim them. I still love fairy tales. I love their wonder, their symbolism, and their emotional power. But I also think they’re worth arguing with.

Sometimes the most interesting thing you can do with a fairy tale is ask what happens after the princess realizes she deserved better all along.

Not poverty.

Not healthcare.

Not childcare costs.

Not the fact that buying a house now requires the combined income of a surgeon, a software engineer, and whatever dragon currently sits atop a mountain of gold.

No.

The real crisis facing America is apparently that gay people are existing too publicly.

This year Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared June “Fidelity Month.” Other conservatives have promoted alternatives such as “Nuclear Family Month” and “Strong Families Month.” Representative Andy Ogles decided subtlety was overrated and celebrated by posting that homosexuality has no place in America.

Every year it is the same ritual.

Pride Month begins.

LGBTQ people celebrate surviving another year.

And conservatives respond as though someone has broken into their home and stolen heterosexuality.

As a lesbian historian, I have to admit that I find this fascinating.

Not because I object to fidelity. Fidelity is great. I am broadly in favor of not cheating on your spouse. I am also broadly in favor of returning shopping carts, using turn signals, and not microwaving fish in office break rooms. These are all admirable goals that make you a baseline not horrifying human being.

What I object to is being lectured about fidelity by people whose political movement has spent the last fifty years producing enough infidelity scandals to fill an entire wing of the Library of Congress.

That is the part I cannot get over.

For decades conservatives have insisted that they are the guardians of marriage. They built an entire political identity around the claim. Feminists were threatening marriage. Working women were threatening marriage. Birth control was threatening marriage. Gay people were threatening marriage. Gay marriage was definitely threatening marriage. Drag queens were threatening marriage. Somewhere along the line, I suspect a Labrador retriever and an improperly folded fitted sheet were probably accused of threatening marriage too.

The point was always the same: conservatives stood between civilization and collapse.

The rest of us were the barbarians at the gate.

Which would perhaps be more convincing if so many of the self-appointed guardians of marriage did not keep getting caught with their pants down, setting fire to their own marriages.

Take Newt Gingrich, one of the architects of modern conservative politics. Gingrich spent years positioning himself as a champion of family values and moral responsibility. During the Clinton impeachment proceedings, he helped lead the moral outrage over Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. The problem was that Gingrich himself was engaged in an affair during roughly the same period.

Now, to be fair, hypocrisy is not a crime.

If it were, Washington would look like the aftermath of a particularly aggressive police raid.

But there is something uniquely impressive about standing on a soapbox to condemn infidelity while simultaneously participating in it. It takes a level of confidence normally associated with people who attempt to pet wild bears or claim they could win in a tennis match with Serena Williams.

Then there is Mark Sanford, who somehow managed to turn an affair into one of the greatest accidental comedy routines in American political history. When the South Carolina governor disappeared for several days in 2009, his staff explained that he was hiking the Appalachian Trail. It was a wonderfully wholesome explanation. Rugged. Outdoorsy. Virtuous.

Unfortunately, Sanford was not hiking the Appalachian Trail.

He was in Argentina visiting his mistress.

Most political scandals fade into obscurity. Mark Sanford’s became folklore. To this day, “hiking the Appalachian Trail” remains one of the funniest euphemisms in American politics because it perfectly captures the sheer audacity of the lie.

And these are not isolated examples. They are part of a much larger pattern. Again and again, some of the loudest voices warning Americans about moral decline have demonstrated a remarkable inability to follow the standards they insist everyone else should live by.

If Mark Sanford’s contribution to political history was turning an affair into a geography lesson, former Senator John Ensign demonstrated that family-values hypocrisy could be every bit as spectacular without requiring an international flight. Ensign built much of his public identity around conservative Christian values and traditional marriage. Then it emerged that he had been carrying on an affair with the wife of a close friend and campaign aide. The scandal spiraled into ethics investigations and accusations of attempts to conceal the relationship, ultimately helping to bring an end to his Senate career.

And look, politicians cheat. Politicians have always cheated. If infidelity disqualified someone from holding office, Congress would occasionally resemble a ghost town. The issue isn’t that John Ensign had an affair. The issue is that John Ensign belonged to a political movement that spent decades insisting that its authority rested on protecting the sanctity of marriage. When you appoint yourself the nation’s marriage counselor, people are naturally going to notice if your own relationship advice appears to consist primarily of “do as I say, not as I do.”

Then there is Larry Craig, who spent years supporting conservative social policies and opposing LGBTQ rights before becoming nationally famous for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with his legislative accomplishments. Craig’s arrest in an airport bathroom became one of the defining political scandals of the 2000s, not because it involved a policy dispute or corruption investigation, but because it once again exposed the strange tendency for some anti-LGBT politicians to find themselves at the center of exactly the kinds of stories they had spent years condemning.

And honestly, by this point we’re not even talking about individual politicians anymore.

We’re talking about an entire ecosystem.

The televangelists deserve their own chapter.

Jimmy Swaggart built an empire warning Americans about sin, immorality, and the decline of traditional values before finding himself embroiled in prostitution scandals. Ted Haggard rose to become one of the most influential evangelical leaders in the country and a prominent opponent of LGBTQ rights before a scandal involving a male escort brought his career crashing down.

These were not obscure figures operating on the fringe of conservative politics. They were some of the most visible and influential voices in the family-values movement. They made careers out of telling Americans who should marry, how they should behave, what counted as morality, and which relationships were acceptable.

At a certain point, this stops looking like a collection of isolated incidents and starts looking like a recurring franchise.

The names change. The details change. The press conferences change. The apologies change. But the basic structure remains remarkably consistent. Someone spends years warning America that moral decay is coming from feminists, gay people, secularists, reproductive rights advocates, or whatever group conservatives happen to be panicking about that week. Then, sooner or later, that same person ends up standing behind a podium explaining why the standards they demanded for everyone else should not be applied quite so strictly to them.

That is what makes Fidelity Month so unintentionally funny.

What makes this pattern so revealing is that it never seems to change the underlying conservative story about marriage.

When a family-values politician gets caught having an affair, nobody concludes that heterosexual marriage has failed as an institution. Nobody suggests that straight people should lose the right to marry. Nobody writes think pieces wondering whether opposite-sex attraction is compatible with stable family life. Nobody spends the next thirty years insisting that heterosexuality itself is a threat to civilization.

Instead, we are reminded that individuals are complicated. People make mistakes. One person’s bad behavior should not be used to condemn an entire group.

And that would be a perfectly reasonable position if conservatives applied it consistently.

The problem is that they don’t.

For decades, LGBTQ people have been expected to answer not only for our own relationships but for the perceived consequences of our existence. Gay marriage was supposedly going to destroy marriage. LGBTQ visibility was going to undermine families. Pride itself was presented as evidence of social decay. While conservative politicians, pastors, and pundits were treated as individuals responsible only for their own choices, queer people were treated as representatives of an entire category of humanity.

That double standard is the entire game.

The irony becomes even sharper when conservatives complain that Pride Month gives LGBTQ people some kind of special recognition. Pride did not emerge because queer people wanted a parade. It emerged because queer people were denied things that everyone else received automatically. People lost jobs, homes, custody of their children, military careers, legal protections, and relationships because of who they loved. Pride exists because exclusion created the need for visibility.

Straight people never needed a Pride Month because straight people already had the culture.

They had the television shows.

They had the movies.

They had the churches.

They had the schools.

They had the politicians.

They had the advertisements.

They had the tax code.

The nuclear family was not some forgotten institution struggling for recognition. It was the centerpiece of twentieth-century American life. For generations, American culture celebrated heterosexual marriage so relentlessly that it became less of a family structure and more of a national mythology.

Which is why these annual attempts to invent alternatives to Pride Month always feel so strange. They are presented as celebrations of marriage, fidelity, and family, but they arrive wrapped in resentment that LGBTQ people are being acknowledged at all. The message is never really “let’s celebrate strong families.” The message is “why are we talking about gay people?”

And after decades of warnings that LGBTQ people would destroy marriage, the historical record is difficult to ignore. Marriage equality arrived. Society survived. The institution of marriage survived. The republic survived. The lesbians bought houses. The gay men got married. The bisexuals continued explaining bisexuality to confused strangers.

The only thing that consistently struggled under the weight of all those dire predictions was the credibility of the people making them.

A woman is angry.

A marriage ends.

A dating app fails to deliver a government-issued girlfriend.

Somewhere, in a dimly lit office lined with unread sociology books, Detective Anti-Feminist lights a cigarette, stares out into the rain, and mutters the only theory he has ever had.

“It was feminism.”

The evidence? Irrelevant.

The motive? Female autonomy.

The method? Probably a podcast.

The suspect? A woman who once said “patriarchy” in a tone he didn’t enjoy.

Welcome to the world of anti-feminist analysis, where every social problem is a crime scene, every structural explanation is escorted out of the room, and feminism is always found standing over the body holding a copy of The Feminine Mystique.1

The case is closed before the detective even arrives.

Case File One: The Lonely Man

The first body on the floor is male loneliness.

This one is real. Men are lonely. Men are struggling. Men are isolated. Men are often taught from childhood that vulnerability is weakness, emotional intimacy is feminine, care is women’s work, and friendship is acceptable only if it happens near a grill, a ball, or a podcast microphone.

There are plenty of clues here.

Economic precarity. Declining community life. Work culture. Social media. The collapse of third places. The way masculinity trains men to confuse emotional repression with strength. The fact that many men have been told their whole lives that the only acceptable source of intimacy is a romantic relationship with a woman, preferably one who also functions as therapist, social secretary, emotional support animal, and domestic appliance.

Detective Anti-Feminist examines all of this carefully.

Then he throws it directly into the river.

“Interesting,” he says. “But have we considered that women got jobs?”

This is the magic trick. The loneliness is real, but the analysis is a clown car with a badge. Instead of asking why men have been discouraged from building deep emotional relationships with each other, anti-feminists ask why women are no longer legally, economically, or socially trapped into solving men’s loneliness for them.

Feminism did not make men lonely.

Patriarchy promised men dominance and forgot to teach them intimacy.

But that would require the detective to investigate the actual crime scene, and unfortunately, he is very busy drawing devil horns on Gloria Steinem.

Case File Two: The Dating App Massacre

Next, we arrive at the dating app crime scene.

Bodies everywhere. Hinge prompts. Ghosted conversations. Men holding fish. Women developing the thousand-yard stare after reading “low-body counts only” for the four hundredth time.

Nobody is happy here.

Possible suspects include profit-driven platforms, swipe mechanics, gamified attraction, algorithmic sorting, declining social spaces, rising economic insecurity, and the general horror of trying to market your soul with six photos and a sentence about tacos.

Detective Anti-Feminist surveys the wreckage.

He notices that apps are designed to keep people using them, not necessarily to help them leave happily paired off into the sunset.

He notices that loneliness has become monetizable.

He notices that everyone is tired, overstimulated, underpaid, and being forced to flirt through the world’s least romantic interface.

Then he spots the real clue.

A woman has standards.

“Dear God,” he whispers. “Feminism.”

This is where the anti-feminist argument always starts doing interpretive jazz with a concussion. If a woman chooses marriage, motherhood, domesticity, or traditional femininity, that is natural. If she chooses education, independence, divorce, childfreedom, or refusing to date a man who thinks foreplay is a coastal elite conspiracy, she has been brainwashed.

Apparently women have agency only when they choose correctly.

Which is not agency.

That is compliance in a hat that says “women want me, fish fear me.”

Case File Three: The Disappearing Wife

The detective’s next case concerns the mysterious disappearance of the endlessly available wife.

Once upon a time, women married younger, stayed married more often, had fewer legal options, fewer economic options, fewer reproductive options, and fewer socially acceptable escape routes.

Anti-feminists look at this and call it stability.

@unfuckamericatourhow about letting women live their own lives charlie #unfckamerica #NationalGroundGame #charliekirk #charliekirkisweird #Maga #trump #elonmusk #democrat #republican #politics #political #news #fyp

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Historians, being cursed with access to documents, call it context.

It is very easy to romanticize “traditional marriage” when you glide past coverture, marital rape exemptions, employment discrimination, unequal divorce laws, domestic violence, reproductive coercion, and the fact that many women were not choosing marriage so much as being herded into it by law, economics, religion, and cultural terror.

But Detective Anti-Feminist does not concern himself with such unpleasant details. He prefers vibes.

He finds a woman who got divorced and asks what went wrong.

She says, “I was doing all the housework, childcare, emotional labor, and life management while also working.”

The detective nods.

“So feminism ruined your marriage.”

She blinks.

“No, I think it was the man who thought me asking him to unload the dishwasher was a hate crime.”

The detective writes down: feminism.

Case File Four: The Angry Woman

Now we arrive at the most baffling case of all.

Women are angry.

No one knows why.

It is one of history’s great mysteries, right up there with “What happened to the Roanoke colony?”2 and “Why does every man in a Facebook comment section think he understands the fall of Rome?”

Detective Anti-Feminist arrives at the scene. There are clues everywhere.

Women denied bodily autonomy.

Women underpaid.

Women harassed.

Women assaulted.

Women expected to work like they don’t have families and parent like they don’t have jobs.

Women watching reproductive rights get treated like a seasonal privilege.

Women told that their anger is unattractive by men who have built entire political movements out of grievance, resentment, and yelling into microphones.

The detective studies the evidence.

“Clearly,” he says, “feminism taught women to hate men.”

No, babe.

Women’s anger did not materialize from the mist because feminists forgot to be nice. It comes from centuries of being told to smile while being denied rights, safety, education, money, political power, bodily autonomy, and basic personhood.

Maybe the rage has a source, maybe that source is not just us being unpleasant, maybe it’s in response to actual systemic injustice.

Just a tiny thought to consider, Detective Anti-Feminist.

Never mind, he’s gone already.

Case File Five: The Algorithm Did It, But Feminism Was Nearby

One of the funniest parts of this entire genre is watching people blame feminism for the personality damage caused by social media.

Someone is rude online.

Feminism.

Someone makes a lazy TikTok.

Feminism.

Someone uses therapy language like a medieval weapon.

Feminism.

Someone says something stupid on a podcast.

Feminism, probably, somehow. The podcast host once mentioned she owned a cat. BINGO!

No, babe. Social media made everyone insufferable. Different beast. Feminism didn’t invent algorithms that reward rage bait.

The internet has taken every ideology, hobby, fandom, movement, and minor disagreement and fed it into a machine designed to turn attention into money. Outrage performs well. Nuance does not. The algorithm does not care if you are discussing feminism, football, baking, theology, skincare, or whether Captain Janeway made the right call to kill Tuvix.

It wants conflict.

It wants engagement.

It wants everyone slightly deranged and refreshing the app like a poltergeist throwing chairs around a colonial era home.

That is not feminism.

That is capitalism with push notifications.

Case File Six: The Missing System

Here is the biggest problem with the anti-feminist detective.

He cannot investigate systems.

He can investigate vibes. He can investigate women being annoying. He can investigate one TikTok he saw and has been emotionally processing for eleven months because it made him personally feel bad. But systems? Institutions? Incentives? Cultural expectations? Legal structures? Economic pressures?

No.

Too complicated.

Too many books.

Not enough villain lighting.

That is why patriarchy gets treated like a vibes-based insult instead of a system. Feminists saying “patriarchy harms women and privileges men as a class” is not the same as saying “every individual man is evil.” That distinction matters, and skipping it is how you end up shadowboxing an argument you hallucinated instead of engaging with feminism.

Patriarchy is not “men are bad.”

Patriarchy is the social, political, economic, and cultural system that has historically organized power around men and masculinity. It hurts women, obviously, but it also traps men inside a narrow, emotionally stunted version of manhood and then calls the cage “natural.”

But if Detective Anti-Feminist admits that, the whole case falls apart.

Because suddenly feminism is not the villain.

Feminism is the witness.

Worse, feminism might be the person who called 911.

Case File Seven: The Terrible Discovery

At the end of the investigation, after ignoring every clue and accusing every woman with a tote bag, Detective Anti-Feminist stumbles upon feminism’s actual argument.

Women are people.

Men are people.

Gender systems shape everyone’s lives.

Power matters.

History matters.

Autonomy matters.

Relationships should not be built on domination, dependence, fear, or legally enforced helplessness.

Men should be allowed emotional depth.

Women should be allowed full humanity.

The detective is horrified.

Because this is not villainy.

This is a political and intellectual tradition that, at its best, asks us to build a world where people are not trapped by gendered scripts written by dead men, advertisers, pastors, lawmakers, bosses, and podcast hosts with ring lights.

The irony is that many anti-feminist essays claim to want the same things feminists have been arguing for: mutual respect, vulnerability, emotional honesty, interdependence, and relationships not built on dominance.

They just want all of that without naming the system that makes it difficult.

They want the benefits of feminist critique without the inconvenience of feminism.

They want the diagnosis, but only if the doctor promises not to say patriarchy.

The Case Remains Open, Unfortunately

Anti-feminists keep writing essays about how feminism made men the villains.

But feminism was never primarily talking about villains.

It was talking about systems.

The people obsessed with heroes and villains are the ones turning every sociological conversation into a Marvel movie with worse dialogue and more resentment.

The real mystery is not why feminism gets blamed.

The real mystery is how anti-feminists keep walking past every useful clue.

Economic precarity?

Ignored.

Social media?

Ignored.

Capitalism?

Ignored.

Patriarchy?

Declared inadmissible.

Men’s emotional socialization?

Too gay, probably.

Women’s autonomy?

Suspicious.

Feminism?

Arrest her immediately.

And so Detective Anti-Feminist closes another case.

The culprit remains feminism.

The evidence remains missing.

The point remains untouched, lying quietly in the corner, waiting for someone with a working flashlight and a basic understanding of structural analysis to open the door.