Feminism is in the midst of an identity crisis: What is feminism? What does it mean to “be a feminist”? The gap has created an opening for a few media-savvy writers and thinkers to refashion the movement in their own image: a “women’s rights” movement that uses anti-capitalist language to make things like unprotected sex and unpaid labor look like liberation.
References in this Episode
“Why women are feeling more burnt out than ever! Feminism debate with Isabel Brown vs Bronte Remsik” on The Eileen Fisher Podcast that will definitely raise your blood pressure
Turning Point USA’s propaganda I mean influencer program to help their creators “seamlessly integrate the message of freedom into their online presence”
“Gender pay gap? Culprit is ‘greedy work’” from the Harvard Gazette, about Claudia Goldin’s famous Nobel Prize-winning work into the gender earnings gap that was apparently omitted from the TP USA influencer curriculum
“Female Physicians Earn an Estimated $2 Million Less Than Male Physicians Over a Simulated 40-Year Career” by Christopher M. Whaley, Tina Koo, Vineet M. Arora, Ishani Ganguli, Nate Gross, and Anupam B. Jena in Health Affairs, Volume 40, No. 12
“Marriage and Babies Really Do Make Women Happier” by Wendy Wang in the super-real and statistically rigorous Institute for Family Studies perspective on why married women with children are the happiest in society, though you’ll have to click through to read the full article where it was originally published in *checks notes* the Daily Mail
“I’m 30. The Sexual Revolution Shackled My Generation” by Louise Perry for The Free Press1
“Evangelicals and Domestic Violence: Are Christian Men More Abusive?” another banger from W. Bradford Wilcox2 at the Institute for Family Studies that asked a bunch of women in high-control patriarchal environments whether their husbands ever got physical with them and then reported that they all said no, nothing to see here3
“The Feminists Insisting That Women are Built Differently” by Helen Lewis for The Atlantic
“The Marxist Case Against Abortion” by Jonathan Culbreath for Compact Magazine
Labor productivity and capital intensity, United States, 1850 to 2016 from Our World in Data
Marx on Gender and the Family: A Summary, by Heather Brown in Monthly Review
“The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” by Gayle Rubin (1975)
“The Soft-Girl Revolution: How Young Women Are Rejecting ‘Girlboss’ Culture for a Life of Leisure” by Stephanie McNeal for Glamour
“Far-right feminists? The exploitation of women’s rights and what’s behind it” by Viola Dombrowski for The Progressive Post
“The link between a lack of reproductive rights and domestic violence” by Amna Nawaz and Shoshana Dubnow for PBS News
“Complexities and Nuances in Radical Right Voters’ (Anti)Feminism,” by Gefjon Off in Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, Volume 30, Issue 2, where you’ll find the diagnostic table for this fuckery that we discussed toward the end of the episode
Bonus Reading & Resources
Lily Alexandre’s video about 2010s pop feminism
“Tradwives and Femcels” from Lux Magazine
A very bangin’ paper on this phenomenon called “The Reactionary Turn in Pop Feminism” by Jilly Boyce Kay in Feminist Media Studies
altogether now! bari weiss again, somehow
you all will never fucking believe the depth of the brad wilcox diabolical lies lore
if you’re a fan of this style of super hard-hitting interrogation that poses tough questions like “will husbands beat their wives less if the wife goes to church multiple times per week?", check out his completely serious book soft patriarchs, like soft girls but for christian nationalists
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