Within the fourth-wave of feminism, the Internet is a powerful tool that has changed the game in terms of accessibility, making what was once only available in limited, elite amounts in women’s and gender studies courses is now available for the general public. Who we listen to and what we share as feminists are no longer restricted by those with the money or means to publish or go on TV. Now, anyone’s think-piece can be shared to millions of people regardless of age, race, or socioeconomic class background. In the last couple of decades, intersectional feminist beliefs have become widely accessible, no longer a product of academia or selective literature.
Feminism has evolved to adapt to the norms of a new generation of activists who now get most of their information from the internet. Younger activists have expertly utilized mass media to advocate for the causes they believe in. In the past couple of years, topics that challenged white, cishet, male power structures have gone from being discussed in specific communities to being incredibly publicized conversations. We can see this in cultural events such as the large Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, which not only made people more aware of systemic inequality, but resulted in companies and schools legitimately being held accountable for their racism. Generation Z has been able to legitimately make radicalism trend, resulting in a major uptick of feminist advocacy.
As a community, we have reached a new age of communication and education, transforming which information gets shared to the public, and what remains hidden. Despite this, the evolution of mass media has reflected itself in the patriarchy as well. Anti-feminist media has utilized mass media to spread a belief that feminism is anti-man and feminists are attempting to create a society that pushes men to the back. Terms such as “SJW” , which means social justice warrior, and “feminazi” have skewed the motivations of the feminist movement and attempt to add a malicious undertone that doesn’t exist in the first place. Individuals such as Joe Rogan and Rush Limbaugh, and organizations such as Fox News and Infowars declare that feminism is the one thing holding men back from self-improvement, and is the reason for every negative issue in a man’s life. Unpopular at work? All of your coworkers are feminists, and they don’t want to talk to you anymore. That girl you like won’t have sex with you? She’s a feminist and doesn’t want men in her life. This epidemic of misinformation about feminism has severely limited the viability that social media can truly achieve in reaching a general public that should know about feminism much more accurately.
The feminist movement has been evolving to be inclusive for as long as it has existed. While feminism has been exclusive in the past (hence the usefulness of social media), feminist activists, teachers, researchers, and leaders have worked to make the movement as intersectional as it can be. Right-wing anti-feminism results in a decline of productive change in the feminist movement. If more people are turned away from feminism, it won’t have the community it needs to hear every woman’s voice.
bell hooks expertly sums up the feminist movement in this excerpt from Feminism is for Everybody. “Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression… As all advocates of feminist politics know, most people do not understand sexism, or if they do, they think it is not a problem. Masses of people think that feminism is always and only about women seeking to be equal to men. And a huge majority of these folks think feminism is anti-male. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media.”
hooks not only offers her personal take on the definition of feminism, but addresses a growing counterculture to the movement, a spread of miseducation that attempts to paint feminism through an evil lens.
hooks stresses that feminism is not an anti-male movement, and has only been given that perspective from “patriarchal mass media” and pop culture that villainize feminist thought and activism. Despite hooks writing that definition over two decades ago, the mass media she warns us about has continued to thrive with the evolution of social media.
Anti-feminist tactics have been incorporated into almost every aspect of gender-based discourse on the internet, and it has been incredibly successful. Right now, there are entire sexist and misogynist communities with misinformation that feeds the basis of their beliefs. For example, men’s rights activists, a counterculture movement that combats feminism with activism that centers men’s “struggles,” further pushes the belief that feminism is inherently anti-male. MRA has gone so far to advocate for the eradication of feminism, pushing the belief that feminism only does harm against men. The “Incel” community, which stands for “involuntary celibate” blames feminism on their lack of dating and sex. The core belief of this community is that an incel’s inability to find women to date or have sex with is purely about “woke” movements like feminism that keep women away from men.
Counterculture like this has taken important feminist teachings, such as consent, and manipulated them into contributing to men’s so-called downfall. Core values of the feminist movement have been corrupted to feed a narrative of hostility and hatred. These manipulated beliefs change the way that feminism is perceived by both men and women, or anyone susceptible to enough manipulation. Soon enough, feminist teachings become words with double meanings and considered “evil by association.”
You can see this happening to Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term intersectionality in her piece, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” in 1989. Since then, this term has transformed from a critical legal theory into one of the most popular terms within the feminist movement. With that popularity, anti-feminist advocates have made their mark with the word, manipulating its definition to indicate that intersectionality is meant to usher in a new world where white, cishet, men are no longer respected. This racist-sexist meaning that has been attributed to intersectionality is dangerous. What’s most important to note about the issue is the fact that it simply isn’t true. As a result, intersectionality, which is a theory that describes how multiple forms of discrimination and violence intersect, such as racism and sexism, has become, in white supremacist racist-sexist circles, a word with a malicious undertones. This campaign is not singular, as it’s part of the effort to manipulate feminism’s entire purpose.
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(Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, two popular right wing influencers)
This miseducation warps the perception of what feminism is for younger children, the impressionable audience that a right-leaning community could have no trouble manipulating. My own introduction to feminism, as it was for many boys and girls my age, was shaped by the political environment at the time we were coming of age, which was during the wake of the 2016 presidential election when Clinton and Trump were running. The appointment of a president with a history of rape allegations ignited a fuse of anger in thousands of women.
One of my formative memories of feminism was taking the PATH train with my family to the World Trade Center in New York, where we walked with the Women’s March in 2017. Not long after that, I ran for class president, with the main goal of bringing a girl’s perspective into the only government I could work for. I had been inspired to create as much actual change as I could by the feminist movement. Meanwhile, anti-feminist counterculture was getting into the minds of the people around me. When I complained in class about how the boys refused to pick me for their team in PE or when I pointed out that I was the only girl who was playing at the time, they snickered and claimed that “I was too sensitive.” Even my women relatives, who I assumed would be with me throughout any disagreement, would challenge me when I started to discuss feminism in the media. My aunt, one of the strongest women I know, scoffed in anger when my cousins and I talked about toxic masculinity, claiming we were making “issues out of nothing.” I was confused, as I believed that feminism was a necessity for the world we found ourselves in, not something that I would suddenly become insecure about. Nevertheless, I decided that maybe letting go of those passions was for the best, and I pushed down my beliefs because I desperately wanted to fit in.
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(A sign from the 2016 Women’s March)
I remember clearly when I realized how lost I truly was. In middle school, I was laughing with my male friends at the lunch table. Somehow, the conversation had shifted to the pink tax, the phenomena of selling the same product with a different design and selling it at a higher price to girls and women. We discussed why we thought it wasn’t really a big problem, asking “Why should someone complain about something so small?” I pivoted the conversation, and started to talk about how some women didn’t have access to products like these at all. I prefaced my point with, “Sorry, I’m going to talk like a feminist for a second,” so as not to spark a negative reaction from my friends. My teacher at the time looked up from her desk, looked at me with intense seriousness, and said, “Caroline, you should never apologize for being a feminist.”
I got quiet, suddenly realizing how pathetic I sounded. “Why did I say that?” I asked myself. So my friends didn’t find me annoying? But I thought the pink tax was important, as well as the larger issues I had brought up. How low was I to abandon something I felt so strongly about just for a couple of boys to like me?
Educating myself on feminist theory has made me understand that I did not have access to a larger feminist narrative. I realized that the reason why the women in my family had the same reaction to the boys in my class was because they were lost in the patriarchy as well. My role models need the same feminist teachings from women who have spent their entire lives trying to understand and fight the powers that be.
Now in high school, I’ve started to understand the mindset that I had in my adolescence was a deliberate manipulation by the patriarchy. In my high school feminism class, we analyzed a number of Black queer feminist theories to truly understand why we fight for liberation. The piece that impacted me the most was Audre Lorde‘s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” an exploration on the power structures put into play against women. The master’s tools are tools utilized by members of dominant American society, such as white, cishet men. They are strategies that have been put into play to keep power structures favoring them. I came to the realization that these tools had not only been affecting me on a societal level, but on a personal level as well. It was these tactics that caused me to push down what I believed in.
While I have most likely been impacted by a number of the master’s tools, the ones that have warped my perspective the most are the dangerous interventions against feminist education and a not so thinly-veiled fear of an intersectional feminist uprising. The reason why any argument that dares to challenge the current patriarchal system is immediately shot down, the reason why your family rolls their eyes at the dinner table when you say phrases such as “internalized misogyny” or “intersectionality,” is because patriarchy is working as hard as they can to keep the narrative unchallenged.
While access to feminist thought in schools is part of the larger plan within the master’s tools, we can combat that by remembering the core values of who needs the most protection from a patriarchal system. Using the lessons from Black queer feminist perspectives, we can build our own toolkit to stay informed, and understand our priorities. While I may have been disconnected from this toolkit in my coming-of-age, I now have the understanding I need to fulfill the advocacy I’ve been pushing towards my entire life. As lost as I was, I found a light at the end of the tunnel in the form of intersectional feminism. I’m hopeful that if I was able to find my way back, the people who built my insecurity, who are lost in their own right, will find their way back too.