Feminists have been wary of the idea of naturalness because it is so often used against women. Sexism feels natural to lots of people. And, as Shulamith Firestone said at the beginning of The Dialectic of Sex, "This gut reaction—the assumption that even when they don't know it, feminists are talking about changing a fundamental biological condition—is an honest one." As far as most of what we know of history and culture goes, gender equality is the exception, not the rule.

This is why feminists are feminists—it's why there needs to be a name. Social, political, and economic equality is not the default. The reason Whedon can stand up at the podium and say that equality is natural is because all these feminists he doesn't talk about, from Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth on up, have fought exhausting battle after exhausting, grinding battle to get to this point. "Feminist" is a movement, a history, a faith, and a hope for change—as Firestone says, "if there were another word more all-encompassing than revolution we would use it." Saying equality is natural sounds like a good thing, but Whedon uses it rhetorically to ignore the entire history of feminism. Instead of acknowledging his foremothers, he can just offer up standard-issue self-aggrandizing self-deprecation, spontaneously generating words that will (with appropriate caveats of course) perhaps change the face of feminism and make all those feminists he's not talking about anyway obsolete.

History's not that easy to avoid, though, as Whedon demonstrates by accidentally reproducing white feminism's often rightly maligned take on race. His argument hinges on insisting that there's no equivalent to the term "racist" for gender ("sexist" not being good enough basically because Whedon says so). The upshot is that racism is positioned as something everyone agrees exists, establishing a rhetorical baseline to work from. In the first place, this just isn't true; “racist” is an extremely fraught and contested term just like “sexism.” (See here for just one recent example.) And in the second place, if you're talking about racism and sexism in the same breath, it seems like it would be a good idea to acknowledge, however briefly, that women of color exist, and that for many of them the experiences of racism and sexism are not necessarily separable. It would perhaps be useful also to point out that the biggest problem with the term "feminist" is not formal but historical. It's become so associated with exclusively white, middle-class issues that many women of color feel it doesn't represent them—thus Alice Walker's effort to create a more inclusive term, womanism.

Whedon, then, delivers a speech on the term "feminist" without any reference to feminist history, without any apparent awareness of feminist theory, and without even any demonstrated knowledge of the most important objections or conflicts around the term "feminist," the use of which he is purportedly discussing. Instead, from his position as celebrity and writer, and, one fears, from his position as white man, he takes it upon himself to simply define feminism himself so that he can discard it. The result is what Tania Modleski acidly referred to as "feminism without women"—equality as erasure.