Maude Nificent

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Nyadol Nyuon is a lawyer, writer and adviser.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on March 7, 2026 as "The crisis in feminism".

There is a pattern in history that keeps repeating. It is that every meaningful stride towards equality has always been met with a coordinated backlash and a corresponding retreat into grievance and contempt. The same pattern of backlash is happening to the feminist movement and to its vision to advance gender equality.
The intensity and reach of this backlash is cited to claim that feminism is in crisis. If feminism is in crisis, however, it is because our society is in crisis. The backlash directed at feminism is only illustrative of that deeper and broader societal crisis, which precedes and exceeds it.
That said, a crisis in feminism and equality, affecting as it does half of our population, remains an important measure of the status of our nation’s common health.
One explanation for the backlash against feminism and gender equality is the rise of the so-called manosphere. The manosphere is a predominantly online cultural phenomenon that promotes misogynistic, anti-feminist and anti-gender equality beliefs and mindsets. Its contents have been linked to changes in young men’s attitudes and behaviours towards women and girls. The manosphere is real and causing harm. That is not in dispute. However, focusing on the manosphere as a lens through which to understand the threats to feminism and gender equality, or as an indication of where to direct our efforts, risks mystifying rather than clarifying the depth of what we need to confront, understand and address.
A fuller account must begin by recognising that the relationship between the manosphere and its impacts on the current state of feminism are embedded within a larger context. That larger context includes a decline in democracy and trust in institutions, rising economic inequality, the invention of social media and the privatisation of the public square it has enabled. It will also require understanding the specific manner in which those forces have hollowed out feminism’s capacity to progress greater gender equality. It will require admitting to the feminist movement’s own failures to deliver or sustain its promise of gender equality accessible to all women


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#Feminism #Auspol #NyadolNyuon

Mar 6 at 11:53pmWeb
Show threadMaude NificentMar 6

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To complete this complicated picture, we will also need to recognise that underneath all of these modern challenges lies a very old human tendency to deny the full humanity of others.
In his 2011 book Less Than Human, David Livingstone Smith writes that dehumanisation is not a way of talking. It is a way of thinking, and one that comes “all too easily” to us. If there is a single thread that ties together the diverse concerns about democratic decline, the manosphere, the trad wife movement and the internal tensions within feminism itself, it is this shared mechanism of dehumanisation.
This might appear as a serious allegation, especially placed as a charge against feminism itself and its claims to advance gender equality. It is. My core argument is that everyday banalities have as much to do with harm as those we deem evil or calculating. These banalities arise from a lack of clarity, the confusion that follows misunderstanding, and even the sense of righteousness that attaches to our good intentions, our impulses to protect them and our resistance to give them up. These, too, are failures in their outcomes. They stop us from grasping that other people are as real and complex as we are. Instead, they allow us to flatten that complexity in order to manage rather than meet it.
The manosphere shares this failure. Its world view is grounded in denying women their full humanity by reducing them to things. This is allegedly due to the progress women have made. Women’s progress, the manosphere claims, is a direct result of the disempowerment and emasculation of men. To them, equality is a zero-sum game. You do not have to go to the dark corners of the internet to find this thinking. Scott Morrison captured the political version when he said he wanted to see women rise, but not at the expense of men. The sentiment smuggles in the assumption that women’s advancement is a cost men must pay, that equality is a transaction in which something is lost when power is shared. It is a framing that takes issue with progress itself.
The manosphere doesn’t just blame women for the problems men face. It blames them for all the problems society faces. Nick Fuentes, a prominent figure in the American far right, made it plain. He has stated that women are “our number one political enemy” because they constrain everything. He went further, saying women are the ones making us sympathetic to poor people, who in his view are also predominantly brown people. To the manosphere, removing women’s political influence removes the social pressure towards solidarity across race and class lines. In a single statement, misogyny, racism and class contempt are revealed not as three separate prejudices but as the same project, each one holding the others up.

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Show threadMaude NificentMar 6
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Fuentes can be dismissed as extreme, but the logic he states crudely appears in more respectable precincts. The billionaire Peter Thiel wrote in a 2009 essay that the extension of the franchise to women had rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” an oxymoron. When challenged, he clarified that he did not want to disenfranchise women, but even this remains instructive. His clarified position holds that women voting produces outcomes that are undesirable – namely support for welfare spending and, as Fuentes put it more bluntly, sympathy for poor and brown people. The crude version and the theorised version share a logic. One is dressed in libertarian political philosophy; the other is not dressed at all. The destination is the same.
That misogyny intersects with racism and class should surprise no one. They are siblings, all children of the same kind of thinking that refuses to treat others as fully human and denies, through cultural, political and economic means, their inclusion among those who matter. We have often underestimated this link, at our own peril. The online attitudes that grew into the movements that now shape our current moment, including the crisis of feminism and democracy, first sharpened their tools and deployed them against Black people, trans people and immigrants. Under the principle of defending “free speech”, dehumanisation of others was practised and refined. We largely tolerated it and gave it a platform. Now the chickens have come home to roost.
We are finding out that the “sunlight theory” – the belief that exposure would serve as a disinfectant – was only half right. Exposure was also a greenhouse. Mainstream media invited these voices onto panels and into op-ed pages, framing hatred as a perspective demanded by balance. Mainstream politicians, sometimes out of conviction, sometimes out of calculation, treated movements built on contempt for entire groups of people as legitimate expressions of community concern. What occurred was a form of institutional laundering. It was through this that contempt left the online fringe and acquired a weight and dignity it had not earnt and could not deserve. Today we live in a world that is the product of these years.

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Show threadMaude NificentMar 6

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That world includes an expanding Overton window, encompassing the growing backlash against feminism. This backlash is contributing, even among younger women, to the erosion of feminism’s persuasive power, relevance and capacity to hold the cultural ground it has won. These external pressures should not be taken to fully account for the erosion, however. Part of the problem lies within. In its current state, feminism risks becoming less a force for structural transformation than a form of affirmation, more comfortable with representation than redistribution and altogether better at gathering than at challenging power. All of this gradually reduces a powerful movement into a cupcake revolution, as its existence becomes marked by symbolic performances conducted over teas, lunches and International Women’s Day speeches more concerned with the vocabulary of liberation and freedom than the actions that would give them meaning.
What we have largely witnessed in mainstream feminist spaces is the rise of educated, middle-class and predominantly white women into positions of institutional visibility and power, presented as the evidence of achievement in gender equality. That is not nothing, but such presentation contains a warning as uncomfortable as that found in the manosphere. Feminism is a site of power, and a site of power will, unless it works very deliberately, continue to reproduce the behaviours of power. Those behaviours determine whose interests are prioritised by the movement and who enjoys the gains of feminist and gender equality progress. It is not controversial to observe that the gains of feminist progress are not equally shared, while the impacts of gender inequality continue to be borne disproportionately by those already marginalised through class, race and other compounding factors.
Many women of colour, working-class women and women at the intersection of multiple disadvantages will tell you that some of the most psychologically unsafe spaces they inhabit are progressive spaces where gender equality is loudly proclaimed without real accountability for who is included in that equality, who is managing its terms, and whose needs and interests are prioritised. A fundamental reason why mainstream feminist spaces can be sites for toxic solidarity is because the deferral of race and class is framed not as a failure of solidarity but as a strategic sacrifice: attend to these concerns now and you risk fracturing the coalition, losing ground, slowing progress. These arguments take on even more urgency when there is, as is currently the case, a backlash against feminism and the progress women have managed to attain.


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Show threadMaude NificentMar 6

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We have been warned about the danger of the feminist movement becoming what it seeks to oppose. Toni Morrison’s essay “Cinderella’s Stepsisters” made it plain. She addressed an audience of educated women directly as they took their place in the world, noting that they will have the power to decide who shall flourish and who shall wither. Morrison called our attention to an important issue: it is one thing to have power, to want power, and completely another thing to use that power. If we are not careful, she warned, women gaining access to social, economic and political power would not in itself uplift all women. When a social movement leaves many women behind, it not only struggles to be relevant but actively harms.
I wish to be clear. These are not arguments grounded in an expectation of a perfect feminist movement. They are arguments for a self-aware feminist movement. Only a movement that is self-aware retains, as a kind of living exercise, the possibility of developing approaches that more accurately map onto the realities it seeks to improve or change. A movement that mistakes its own blind spots for strategic wisdom, or that defers them to attend to the urgency of external pressure, will over time lose its constituency and the moral authority that are its most important assets. Without such recognition, it will continue to experience attacks from the outside while also bleeding out from the inside.
That is why I addressed the internal concerns within feminism with a seriousness that appears to surpass the attention afforded to external factors, including the manosphere. It is because it is only from that internal ground that feminism can sustain any claim to project its moral arguments for gender equality outwards.
——
FIN

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on March 7, 2026 as "The crisis in feminism".

#Feminism #Auspol #NyadolNyuon

Show threadChookMother 🇩đŸ‡ș🩘Mar 7
@maudenificent Excellent. Thanks for posting. Confirms my thoughts that the anti- woke movement is a backlash against feminism.
Show threadStephen CollinsMar 7
@maudenificent here's a gift link for the article - https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/share/22748/2kl2cS1P
The crisis in feminism and the rise of the manosphere

There is a pattern in history that keeps repeating. It is that every meaningful stride towards equality has always been met with a coordinated backlash and a corresponding retreat into grievance and contempt. The same pattern of backlash is happening to the feminist movement and to its vision to advance gender equality.

The Saturday Paper
Show threadMaude NificentMar 7
@trib
Thanks!
Show threadDroppie [opensoc]Mar 7

@maudenificent it seems not to matter how many dozens+ of articles i read on subjects of discrimination. on the "other" side of my mid-sixties, when an earlier mythology might have opined that by now i should understand the world with its human virus, & be comfy in my skin, i am emphatically unable to tick either box. i simply, absolutely, fundamentally, do not understand bad humans. i am utterly unable to grasp WHY so many humans have chosen to get their jollies by being arseholes to other humans. saying it doubtless makes me sound like a moron, & really i prolly am, but i just cannot fathom that WHY thing. i barely understand myself, so understanding others is like, reaches for pap clichés, rocket science. i can only try to understand others by trying to project my own values onto them, which is demonstrably a failed process. i don't see another peep [metaphorically, given my hermititude post-2009] & decide they are responsible for my sadness, my woes, my failures, my not being in the 1%, etc. it simply never crosses my mind. hence, knowing that my outlook is so diametrically incompatible with that nasty thing called The Real World, leaves me permanently confused, & scared. sigh.

#discrimination #bigotry #racism #misogyny #homophobia #transphobia #AsteroidNow #misanthropy

Show threadMaude NificentMar 7

@msdropbear

i get you in a parallel sort of way, and cannot call anyone a morron...
i like to think i am accepting of people’s need to define their own gender, but at the same time, simply, absolutely, fundamentally, do not understand gender at all.
and in that regard, i have two choices, to insist others see the world the way i do, or to accept it without feeling threatened or that anyone is in anyway diminished

i’m with you though, about not understanding pure arseholery

i mean
 wtf
💐

Show threadDroppie [opensoc]Mar 7
@maudenificent đŸ€—đŸ’œ