Last week, a young female barrister was called a ‘feminazi’ after complaining about a sexist message sent via LinkedIn. How did this clunky bit of wordplay become so widespread – and could it ever be reclaimed?

There is nothing new about the term “feminazi”; there is something very new in what it can do. It originated in the 90s, with the shock-jock Rush Limbaugh (though he claimed it came from an academic, Thomas Hazlett) using it to describe, in his improbable phrasing, “a feminist to whom the most important thing in life is ensuring that as many abortions as possible occur”. It didn’t really catch on in the noughties, this being an unobservable category. More broadly, the word was meant to indicate women who shut down their opponents with authoritarian orthodoxies, against which ramparts an ordinary interlocutor had no hope. And, more recently, this is how it has surfaced, a word around which people – Men’s Rights Activists (or MRAs) – can mobilise when they feel that a feminist has gone too far. Typically, this mobilisation would happen on social media, but that it is gaining traction in the mainstream media is illustrated this week by the case of our designated lady-neo-fascist, Charlotte Proudman.

The barrister objected to the fact that a senior lawyer had sent her a sexist message on LinkedIn. (As is so often the case with a story that begins with social media, lesson one is that, whatever you think of the people on Twitter, they are not as bad as the people on LinkedIn). “I appreciate that this is probably horrendously politically incorrect,” wrote Alexander Carter-Silk, somewhat undermining his subsequent defence that he was merely commenting on the photographic quality of the image, “but that is a stunning picture.”

Barrister at centre of sexism storm 'overwhelmed' by support Read more

Some felt that Proudman acted too strongly, not in objecting in the first place, but in publicly shaming Carter-Silk, disseminating a screenshot giving his full name. The Daily Mail went in for the kill, calling her a “‘feminazi’ barrister”. “It would be funny if it wasn’t so aggressive,” says Laura Bates, of Everyday Sexism. “The press have dug out her late father’s estate. They’ve dug up stuff about her dead grandmother. They’ve dug up a conversation she had with a friend on Facebook. It’s actually breathtaking, that they do all that while maintaining that the really disgraceful thing is public shaming, which these high-achieving men have suffered, that it’s disproportionate and unfair.”

Once you are a known feminazi, there is no limit to the amount of opprobrium that will come your way. “It was designed to be scary, pour encourager les autres,” says Helen Lewis, deputy editor of the New Statesman, and periodically a feminazi herself (as decreed by Twitter).

Feminazi is not in itself a hurtful word, since it conveys, above all, the traits of its user, which mainly cluster around a lack of intellectual sophistication. “Obviously,” says Lewis, “the idea of conflating a liberation movement with Nazism is just deeply ignorant. It’s self-undermining, because it’s so over the top.”

Laura Bates concurs: “It’s a desperate attempt to demonise us, and it’s frustrating, because if it wasn’t such an offensive word, you could actually start to embrace it and own it.” And yet, of course, because the insult isn’t just to feminists, but also to the victims of totalitarianism past and present, it’s not something feminism can simply decide to own.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Laura Bates: ‘It’s a desperate attempt to demonise us.’ Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

It also has the tang of that self-congratulating “clever” wordplay (Tony B.Liar, Camoron, Nu Liebore, ConDemNation, Nobama) that doesn’t work and isn’t playful, with a tin ear for the fact that jokes with language have to be undertaken at blood temperature, otherwise they’re not funny (this isn’t true of all humour. Other jokes can be rigid and cold, and are better for it; just not punning).

Naturally, there is texture to the meaning of the word, beyond simply comparing women who love equality to mass murderers. The cultural freight is tacitly but very obviously a certain type of feminist – white, privileged, middle-class, with access herself to the levers of power and influence, who uses her position and the certainties of her ideology to shut people down whom she considers beneath her (the feminazi considers everyone beneath her), ignorant of the hypocrisy of that position (because she’s also thick). In this sense, it’s a modernised, amped-up version of “professional feminist” or “career feminist”, and it has been used against women who do anything to defend themselves or one another since women appeared in public life (Harriet Harman is the mother of feminazism).

Intellectually, it has a lot in common with arguments against leftwingers – that the holders of any privilege at all, even if it’s historical, would not have benefited from the pure equality that they preach, and therefore shouldn’t be preaching it. It’s a position in which, basically, unless you are Jesus, you should just admit you are fundamentally self-interested and shut up. This has to be said opaquely, because otherwise it would sound shonky, so it is often conveyed by a shorthand or a pejorative made-up word.

But at some level beneath open debate, it does work, and feminists can be tainted by the inference that their love of equality is just a power-grab.

Helen Lewis notes: “Even among relatively progressive men, there’s a denial that sexism actually exists. They don’t think people who are like them, but female, experience any discrimination at all. They will concede that working-class women might, or that black women might. And, partly, there is a point there – the most privileged group after straight, white middle-class men are straight, white middle-class women.” And yet, of course, if the price of your privilege is that you are not allowed to say anything when someone undermines your professionalism by banging on about your tits, one might question how meaningful that privilege actually is.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest To coin a phrase: shock-jock Rush Limbaugh came up with the term feminazi in the 90s. Photograph: Eric Risberg/AP

What keeps this word going is not the dimension of its meaning, though: it has a plain, mechanical power, which Bates describes. “It’s a term that flags something to other attackers. It’s very much part of a group attack, like a trolling thing. I would associate the word feminazi with a mass attack, somebody signalling to their mates: ‘I’m having a go, here, come and join in.’ And then you get bombarded. For me, the worst stuff is when you get really detailed emails from people telling you they’re going to rape and kill you. And there’s something different again, someone who is abusive and angry, but genuinely wants to have a debate with you about why you’re ruining society. This is more about showing off.”

Seasoned feminazis are pretty mellow about the term, and seem pretty mellow, too, about this slow-twitch of the eel’s tail, where one minute they are going about their feminist business, and the next minute 150 people are yelling at them on Twitter about how incredibly stupid they are that they can’t just accept men are better. But, actually, this resilience is hard-won, and when a non-professional feminist finds herself in a public conversation about feminism, the punishment is enough to put her off permanently.

Before the case of Charlotte Proudman, the most recent furore was that surrounding Tim Hunt, the professor (you will remember) who made the hilarious, witty comments about how women shouldn’t be scientists in case they ruined your train of thought by making you want to bang them. He was immediately fired from all kinds of jobs (most of them, in fairness, just honorary posts), after which there was a backlash against the feminazis who had called for such disproportionate punishment. The fact that feminists had not, in the main, called for his dismissal from anything, and the groundswell response was one of light-hearted ridicule, was considered irrelevant.

One female scientist, who doesn’t wish to be named, and who made some very mild public comments about Tim Hunt at the time – “I said, it was a joke, it wasn’t an appropriate joke. Sexism itself isn’t the problem any more, it’s unconscious bias” – describes what happens once you have been deemed a feminazi. “Pretty much in a few days, we were terrified. I was shaking with fear. These people [on Twitter] have these terrible avatars, death masks, African tribal masks; they’re anonymous; they’re really cruel and they’re really violent. The beady eye turns towards you and you are inundated with hate.

“It is enough of a deterrent. I have not said one word about Tim Hunt since. It isn’t worth it. Life is too short. I used to be quite well known for speaking about women in science. I don’t want to do it now, I can’t. I don’t have the moral fortitude to handle that kind of aggro. I’ve got a stressful job.”

She adds, in dispassionate terms but clearly still passionately affected: “You can’t defend being a woman without getting this level of shit. Other groups are protected somehow. It is absolutely fascinating, the dynamics that make feminism a threatening thing.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Zoe Quinn: the video-game developer found herself in the middle of ‘Gamergate’ in January 2015. Photograph: Samuel Kirby

Here the word becomes indivisible from the crowd it can gather, a kind of roaming army to enforce silence on the subject of sexism. There’s a huge asymmetry in the emotional effort it takes to drum up these rows and the emotional toll they take.

Feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez says: “Because feminism is experiencing this new wave, more people are talking about it, more women are saying, ‘Yes, I am a feminist.’ And with that comes the attempt to shut women up and delegitimise what they are saying. It’s not engaging with any of the facts of inequality; it just dismisses women on the basis that we’re authoritarian. It’s a very anti freedom-of-speech term to use, and it’s so often used by men who claim feminists themselves are anti free speech. No one seems to notice that women are routinely silenced. It’s a very dishonest engagement.”

Seasoned feminist campaigners tend to stress how unaffected they are by these swarm attacks, that they are habituated and unruffled; women tend to minimise the impact, on the basis that they are thick-skinned, or old enough not to care. But when the beady eye of the feminazi-hunter is upon you, it tends not to be because you are a well-known feminist, with an established feminist profile and the attendant support that would go with that; rather, it is because you are a person with some occupation besides feminism, who dared to say a feminist thing.

The obvious other precursor to Charlotte Proudman is the case of Zoe Quinn, the video-game developer who had to go into hiding for the feminist act of merely being a woman, in an industry whose sensibility turned out to be violently misogynistic. It’s salient because there seems to be a collective, unspoken agreement that the way to neutralise feminism as a movement is not to attack its well-defended core, but rather to make the penalty for supporting it too high for anyone with a life outside to even contemplate. “With feminism,” Bates concludes, “there is this sense that it must be everything about every part of you, and that makes every part of you seem like fair game, something that can be attacked.”

That is the core appeal of the word feminazi, for those to whom it appeals: that it obliterates one’s other life. Just as one could never be a Nazi and a keen gardener and an Abba fan, so one could never be a feminist, and a barrister and like knitting. If you want a life, live it; and if you want to be a feminist, take your punishment.