My Depature from feminism.

Why I No Longer Identify with Feminism: Quitting the toxic gender identity squabble

For a considerable period during my university days, I was a card carrying feminist ally. How could I not be?

These were the days that opened my naïve eyes to the extent of abuse, violence and disadvantage that my female contemporaries routinely dealt with. Indeed, as the years ticked by, and more and more women confided stories of rape, incest, beatings and other forms of dehumanizing cruelty, my conviction in the movement was fired to a high sheen. In my world, women were saintly victims while men were vile predators. Yet, I have also come to realize that women are as sexist as men and that, far from being flawless pillars of virtue, they are as dishonest and self-seeking as any other. Women, like men, are simply human – members of a gendered, hierarchical species; social mammals who cluster around tribal norms and seek, by any available means, to control their environment and big note themselves.

My retreat from ‘capital F’ Feminism was initially propelled as much by the atrocious, victimizing behavior of some of the women I knew as by any theoretical switch in political alignment. Once it became impossible to deny that women could be as cruel and chauvinist as their male counterparts, the monochromatic ideological tenor of my erstwhile beliefs became duly diluted.

However, this wasn’t what finally drove me away. Neither was I tempted by the simplistic sloganeering of the so-called men’s movement, nor attracted to the dumb dichotomies gender discourse or the paranoid reductionism of conspiracy. In fact, I still support the broad goals of #metoo and consider things like ‘she was asking for it’ and ‘quiet, the boys are talking’ to be indefensible catechisms that excuse and enable sexist entitlement. Unfortunately, Feminism’s initially humanist (and humanizing) project has morphed into a pathologizing ideology. Masculinity is toxic. Romeo is a rapist in waiting. Maleness is a lesser condition.

These are the hallmarks of a mindset not so different from the one women fought so hard to change. This thinking – somewhat ironically – is rooted in age-old gender assumptions, where the individual is blurred out in a sea of chromosomal profiling. Because of this, all men are complicit in systematic patriarchal oppression. Half the population is thus reduced to a singularity, and that singularity has been found wanting.

Drilling down, my point here is that the lurid theatrics of middle-class Feminism in the social media age is little more than a rehash of righteous/extremist drama and, therefore, has become counterproductive, and in my view, is putting the broader, emancipatory goals of the women’s movement in jeopardy.

Of course, Feminism is not the first (nor will it be the last) well-intentioned philosophy to collapse into zealotry. Just as Christianity once championed the public burning of heretics and Islam has given license to the madness of suicide vests, Western Feminism has boiled itself down to a dehumanizing chant. In its ideological blindness it has borrowed the tactics of totalitarianism – nominating an out-group, demonizing and pathologizing that cohort, exaggerating a sense of crisis and then simplifying a complex psycho-social dynamic into a bunch of blunt dichotomies. Thus, in place of a cogently argued case for the end of harmful gender norms and the cruelties they result in, what we now have is the spectacle of outrage. Another-blaming circus of noise and polarization. As though the serious business of gender politics were a reality TV show. In other words, a lurid, cynically engineered confection of dispute designed to light up the switchboard.

But careful – let’s not simply mirror the extremism we’re calling out. Obviously not all Feminists are narrow ideologues. Neither do they all participate in the rolling newsfeed of reductionist rancor that has come to dominate and distort the current discourse. Furthermore, I would argue that the bedrock humanist principles of Feminism are hard to reasonably contest. In addition, there are countless millions of women worldwide who continue to endure the often-deadly brunt of inhumane cultural practices. Meanwhile, we still live with (and routinely overlook) the fact that far more women are killed by their partners or other family members than by deranged jihadis or dangerous strangers.

Clearly, there are ongoing issues of violence and injustice in the ‘gender space’ but the censorious, puritanical tone of contemporary bourgeois Feminism is no longer fit for the purpose of working towards positive solutions.

Indeed, the blame reflex (and the in-group/out-group binary that supports it) goes to the heart of my current disquiet with Feminism. I am no longer able to align myself with a movement that has lapsed into the basic intellectual follies of confusing correlation with cause and with insisting upon a monocausation model that seeks to regard everything through an either/or lens. Therefore, just as I would hesitate to suggest that evolutionary factors explain everything, neither would I posit narrative conflations like The Patriarchy as single source answers. The abject failure of contemporary middle class Feminism to deal with the multi-variate inputs of the gender equation has rendered it cringeworthy. Along with its dehumanizing vision of both men and women, its frequently counterproductive outcomes, and its bullying mantras of ideological control, this oversight has helped to turn Feminism from liberation struggle to elite bourgeois plaything.

To be fair though, Feminism finds itself at this difficult mid-point in its political evolution not simply because of its reduction to chain store disposability – nor even because it lacks a genuinely enervating raison d’etre – but because it is caught between its own success and its unrealized ambitions. In addition, the dam wall breached by social media has inundated the discourse with white noise. It is harder for nuanced, deeper thinking voices to make themselves heard in a vomit of outrage. The resulting distortion, (towards polemic and away from constructive dialogue), has come at a bad time for those genuinely wanting an end to gender-based cruelty.

What we require is a more balanced and reasonable discussion, one that looks beyond the bubble of Western bourgeois comfort and acknowledges both progress and roadblocks; yet instead, we have a succession of clickbait dramas. Pitchfork mobs make news. The quiet work of incremental change doesn’t have anywhere near as many friends.

This is a shame because the core work of Feminism, like all humanizing movements, is critical to the way we organize and conduct ourselves in society. At its best, it asks us what kind of world we want to live in. Do we want sex-segregated silos, where ring-fenced men and women eye one another off with suspicion? Do we want the genetic happenstance of genitals (or ethnicity, etc) to cement people into pre-determined roles and/or confer plenty or penury? Indeed, is it right to judge someone before they are even born? And to what extent does nature underwrite nurture?

Having jettisoned the subtlety, science and subversive spirit to tease these conundrums apart, Feminism is now a ho-hum orthodoxy. Worse, a mere brand. A victim of its own marketing. Scarcely more than an F word.

However, not all is lost – and herein lies next-gen Feminism’s big challenge. Can it resurrect itself and re-engage with those it is currently alienating? What’s more, how can it regain its intellectual discipline and resume its role in helping to make the world a kinder, less restrictive place for all of us?

In the meantime, I’ll just leave you to bicker in the sandpit with the same vicious troglodytes that have poisoned the public square in the name of feminism.

Adios.

Nana Muigai