What are the greatest threats to feminism today? This question was put to me as a panellist at the Bristol Women’s Literature Festival. It’s difficult to answer, because there are so many threats to the movement. But first of all, what do I even mean by feminism?

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For me, feminism is a global, political movement for the liberation of women and society, based on equality for all people. Although I use the word equality in that definition, feminism is about so much more than that. If feminism were solely about women’s equality with men, that would wrongly suggest that the world is just fine as it is; that all men are doing great (which they aren’t) and that all women need to do is to get to where men are.

Feminism is one of the oldest and most powerful social movements in history; it is a revolutionary movement, and that means change. There is so much wrong with the present system that we can’t just tinker round the edges, we need to start again; our end point cannot be equality in an unequal world. This is also the reason why feminism is not struggling to simply reverse the present power relationship and put women in charge instead of men (though this is a common myth about feminist politics). Feminism is about change, not a changing of the guard.

If we are to correct our unbalanced world, then we need to get rid of patriarchy as a system of social governance. By patriarchy, I mean male supremacy; I mean a society where every avenue of power – especially mainstream institutions of power – is overwhelmingly dominated by men. You don’t have to go far to find this, and it isn’t a preserve of foreign countries or dictatorial regimes; the UK is patriarchal, just like the rest of the globe. It may look different and take different forms, but it’s the same old male supremacy.



Westminster politics, for example, is nearly 80% male, and overwhelmingly white; we are still waiting for a government that looks like the people it dares to govern. Business leaders, the judiciary, senior police, management in education and the media: wherever you look you will find that power is in male hands. This is sexism, base, raw and simple. It means that our society is shaped by one half of the population alone; that it reflects, aggrandises and normalises its group perspectives and its image of power.

But this power structure is cracked, it always has been; that’s why it has to be constantly propped up through force, violence and the threat of violence. This ancient imbalance has brought us to the brink of planetary crisis, it has ripped out chasms between countries and people. The situation is not natural; we cannot possibly look at things as they are and say so it was meant to be. We should try to change it however we can, and that’s where feminism comes in.

The obvious threats to feminism today are the same as they have always been, the main ones being the existence of patriarchy and the backlash from that system when it hits out against any challenges to its continuation. However, there are more insidious and less obvious threats. These dangers hide in plain sight, and come partly in the form of a version of feminism known as “choice feminism”.

This term is used to refer to a common phenomenon, whereby the language of liberation, taken from feminist political theory, is turned on its head and used against women. Choice feminism can be found particularly in media representations of what feminism is and what women’s empowerment might look like. There is an attempt, unfortunately fairly successful, to reduce feminism to simply being the right for women to make choices. Not choices about whether to stand for parliament, or instigate pay transparency in the office or lead an unemployed worker’s union, or form a women-only consciousness-raising group in their town; far from it.

These modern and edgy decisions that face the feisty, sassy, liberated woman of today … Excuse me while I am sick

Instead, there are choices about what amount of makeup to wear, whether to go “natural” or try mascara that makes your eyelashes look like false eyelashes, or what diet drink to buy, or whether or not to make the first move with a man – or other such modern and edgy decisions of the sort which face the feisty, sassy, pull-no-punches liberated woman of today. Excuse me while I am sick.

People make decisions every day, they make them within a set of limited options and within a context that shapes not only what choices are on offer, but also which ones are seen as most attractive or less risky. People tend to make safe decisions, ones that will not set them apart from others, and ones that are socially sanctioned and rewarded. Also, let’s get real for a minute: we actually make all sorts of boring decisions every second, from whether or not to get a drink of water to whether or not to take an umbrella. There is nothing inherently feminist in making decisions.

Nor is it the case that by definition any choice a woman makes must be feminist simply because she is a woman enacting her supposed “right” to make choices. That’s not a right. Rights would be equal pay with the man sitting next to you doing the same job; rights would be a country where the 80,000 rapes committed every year no longer happen; rights would be affordable childcare that doesn’t cost over half your wages; rights would be not having to put up with sexual harassment in the street on a daily basis; rights would not be a society where two women are murdered every week by their male partners; rights would not be getting surreptitiously sacked when you become pregnant.

What if we chose to be feminist? What if we chose to organise together to change the world to something better? What if we decided to finish the job our sisters started more than 40 years ago and end the power imbalance between women and men? That of course is the collective strength we represent, the revolutionary potential that has to be tamed and distracted.