Published in our Fall 2025 issue

We are living through an ugly period, not least in the arena of gender. It seems everyone you talk to has an incel acquaintance, a son obsessed with Andrew Tate, or an aunt with an unhealthy fixation on public toilets. Misogyny, not new so much as newly shameless and overt, is all the rage. The visibility briefly achieved by transgender people has turned into a spotlight glare, a heightened hostility translating into a wave of legislative attacks that not only undo the modest steps taken toward civil equality over the last two decades but leave trans people worse off than before.

Some call this a “backlash,” but I think the term is misleading. The picture it conjures is that something happens, provoking a counterreaction. I hit you; you hit me back. An army advances and is forced to retreat. Politics is often like that: a wave of protest leads to a crackdown; gains by a minority trigger resentment. But political events can also resemble a collapsing house. This seems to me the better model for understanding the political upheavals we are living through. For all the efforts to blame the embattled state of so-called “liberal democracy” (in truth, neither meaningfully liberal nor democratic) on some other thing—Russia, social media, Donald Trump—its fundamental weakness lies within.

Perhaps the same goes for what has come to be called the “anti-gender” movement: a global right-wing reaction against a loose collection of things including women’s rights, trans people, gay marriage, and drag queen story hour. It’s easy to blame the media or the “manosphere,” but it’s worth asking whether there might be anything about liberal feminism that helps to explain its collapse. That does not have to mean that feminism has “gone too far.” It might instead reveal a sense in which our dominant strain of feminism has not gone far enough: too focused on elite representation in the prevailing order, it has failed to advance the interests of women in general and to stand against the things—neoliberalism, austerity, war—that harm women disproportionately. In any case, the present mood does not seem to me to have come out of nowhere. It feels like the fuller-throated expression of a rumbling that was there all along, just below the surface of a superficial consensus that was more grudging, and more fragile, than many realized.

It’s easy to blame the media or the “manosphere,” but it’s worth asking whether there might be anything about liberal feminism that helps to explain its collapse.

The three books under review all make arguments that might be brought to bear on our present predicament, with varying degrees of illumination. Judith Butler’s latest, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, at least partially avoids the temptation to scapegoat some external threat or discrete enemy within. While Russia and the Catholic Church loom large, Butler sees the ultimate villain as neoliberal capitalism, which, they argue—Butler now uses the gender-neutral pronoun—has given people plenty of reasons to be afraid. Butler’s top three are climate change, economic precarity, and police violence. Borrowing from psychoanalytic theorist Jean Laplanche, Butler suggests that justified anxieties over these things have been displaced onto a “phantasm.” Rather than fearing what we actually have reason to fear, people are terrorized by the amorphous specter of “gender.”

The proponents of the anti-gender movement are not against gendered norms and roles and distinctions. On the contrary, they are keen to defend a semi-mythical “traditional” order in which boys are boys and girls are girls and nothing troubles this binary divide. Thus, as Butler observes, those who claim to be against “gender ideology” are really defending a gender ideology of their own. As with that other whistle-word “critical race theory,” few who use the term “gender ideology” seem to be quite sure what it means, but they don’t let that stop them—indeed, as Butler also points out, the very vagueness enhances its phantasmic power. They know that it has something to do with a proliferation of pronouns, assorted forms of gender-bending, and corruption of the youth, and that is enough.

The shape of Butler’s analysis is familiar. It’s commonly said that people are led to scapegoat immigrants or Muslims because of justified feelings of disenfranchisement and disenchantment with the political and economic status quo. There is often a good deal of truth in this sort of diagnosis. Certainly it is better and more illuminating than saying that people just hate immigrants inexplicably, or because of innate racism, or because something-something-social-media. Telling people they have a legitimate but misdirected grievance can also have a strategic advantage over telling them that everything is actually fine.

But it’s a story that has to be told with some care and nuance. Simply as strategy, I doubt the Trump-supporting right would take well to being told that what they are really afraid of is climate change. Then there are matters of substance. In many accounts, so-called “populism” is disproportionately pinned on the poor and dispossessed—making it easy to forget that, in the United States and in Britain, much of the anti-immigrant nationalist sentiment behind Trump and Brexit has come from relatively wealthy white property owners. While it is plausible that some kind of displacement of fear or grievance is involved in anti-gender sentiment and status panic more generally, the particular psychoanalytic story that Butler tells faces a number of difficulties.

First, it strains credulity that a fear of climate change is at work, even at a deep level of repression. Antipathy toward trans people or trans-inclusive politics is uncommon among younger people, who are the people most conscious of ecological issues and rightfully fearful of the effects of climate catastrophe. Displaced fears need not be conscious ones, of course. But Butler provides no positive reason for thinking that opponents of gay rights are moved by an unconscious fear of global warming.

What about economic precarity? The poverty and insecurity sown by neoliberalism might well be among the factors creating receptive ground for a gender panic (and “culture wars” more generally). But as with nationalist and anti-immigrant sentiment, we should be wary of overstatement. The anti-gender movement is both demographically and politically heterogeneous. There is the religious right, particularly significant in the United States. Then there are the “gender critical” feminists, generally secular and liberal or left-leaning, who are particularly prominent in Britain (Butler devotes a chapter to them). The latter have no problem with gay people or gay marriage—some prominent figures are themselves lesbians—but are laser-focused on the “trans issue,” opposing trans inclusivity on putatively feminist grounds (e.g. concerns about the supposed threat posed by trans women in particular to “women’s safety,” the alleged reinforcement of gender stereotypes through perceived pressure to transition, and claimed unfairness in women’s sports). Critics of the gender critical feminists call them TERFs: “trans-exclusionary radical feminists.”

Many object to the term. TERFs dislike it on the grounds that it’s normally used pejoratively; they regard it a slur. Others reject it on the grounds that TERFs are not in fact radical feminists, or perhaps even feminists at all. However you feel about it, the referent is clear enough. The stereotypical TERF is white, middle-aged or older, and comfortably off. She is likelier than younger women to have lived through a period of what she sees as much more thoroughgoing male domination, at home and in the workplace, from which she has only belatedly escaped. But if economic precarity touches her, it is mostly through its effects on her younger relatives (who, for their part, are unlikely to share her views). As with incels, the stereotype is no doubt an oversimplification: not all TERFs are rich, and not all are white. But the pattern has some basis in demographic reality, and in any case there is no evidence that this group is disproportionately characterized by economic deprivation. As for Butler’s final suggestion, neither the TERF nor the Rust Belt Trumpist is especially likely to be lying awake at night worrying about being on the receiving end of police violence.

Maybe I’m being too literal-minded. You don’t have to be economically precarious to be affected by living in a world of widespread economic precarity. You don’t have to be stopped and searched or beaten by police to be troubled by rising authoritarianism. The factors that Butler identifies do create a world that is not very nice, and it is not implausible to suppose that this has complex and detrimental psychological effects on all of us, which sometimes manifest in an embrace of reactionary politics. But this is just to say that the analysis becomes more plausible the more vaguely it is rendered. At times it appears that Butler’s method was to work backward, from an identification of the objectively bad and frightening things to the conclusion that these must be the legitimate roots of the illegitimate fear of “gender.”

A gap remains to be filled by an analysis that stays closer to the phenomenon, in all its detail and diversity. Regarding the TERF in particular, a reader of Wendy Brown might draw a connection to the “wounded attachments” of liberal identity politics—excessive investment in oppressed identities struggling for recognition. (Butler, Brown’s partner, does gesture to the concept in passing but applies it differently, to explain not undue attachment to marginalized identities but the reactionary qualities of wounded “whiteness.”) In this scheme, “womanhood” has only lately achieved some measure of standing or protection, and the ground that has been won must be defended from even the slightest perceived incursion.

My own hunch is that TERFism has a lot to do with the dynamics between generations, with attitudes to youth. There seems also to be an element of irritation—not always misplaced—at modes of thought and expression perceived to be fuzzy, insubstantial, or evasive, in any case pervaded by bullshit, as is seen in the pronounced antipathy to “postmodernism” from the right and some corners of the left alike. (Similarly, the vague specter of “identity politics” is reviled partly for its supposed elevation of the first-person authority of “lived experience.”) The strong reactions suggest the perception of a threat of some kind: to solidity, surety, security—the world of facts or science or just common sense, where spades are spades, girls are girls, and boys are boys. (Ironically, the tragi-farcical attempt to police the boundaries of a narrowly biological definition of womanhood can end up reproducing sexist stereotypes—precisely what TERFs accuse their trans-inclusive counterparts of doing.) In this sense, perhaps we are dealing with fear after all. But while Butler seems at times to suggest a story of this sort (TERFs—one imagines them clad in “adult human female” T-shirts—“pound the table in the manner of positivists”), the overarching thesis of Who’s Afraid? tends to displace a more nuanced narrative.

At other times, Butler indulges in a form of table-pounding of their own. What the anti-gender camp is saying about gender is not true, dammit! Indeed, it is often the very opposite of the truth: for instance, gender non-conforming people are cast as a threat, but they are the ones who are being threatened. Butler is correct, but there is a sense in which this is not the point. Of course anti-gender ideology isn’t true: by Butler’s own lights, its psychological origins and function have little to do with truth—that’s why it doesn’t dissolve on contact with reality. The same goes for the pronouncements of the Catholic Church. What, the Pope is spouting reactionary nonsense about gender? Is the Pope Catholic?

Few who use the term “gender ideology” seem to be quite sure what it means, but they don’t let that stop them—indeed, as Butler points out, the vagueness enhances its phantasmic power.

Part of the problem is Butler’s tendency to assume an underlying harmony of interests which the phantasmic role of “gender” serves to obscure. If only people understood the truth about gender, Butler seems to say, they would see that there is nothing to fear. Gender is not the existential threat depicted by the Catholic Church; it is just a matter of people living their lives in peace and freedom. Advocates used to joke that if you don’t like gay marriage, simply don’t get one. “Trans rights to self-determination take no one else’s rights away,” Butler writes in similar fashion. Of course, that is precisely what is at issue between self-described gender critical feminists and their opponents, at least when it comes to the limited number of legal or public policy disputes where a clash of rights can even be imagined (e.g. equal protection claims regarding bathroom access or sports eligibility). For what it’s worth, I am with Butler on this, but given their stated hope that their first trade book might persuade those on the other side (or those as yet undecided), it would have been useful to do more to show that the oft-asserted clash of rights in these cases is illusory.

That said, there is a sense in which queer and trans people and feminists (at least, if they are doing feminism right) are a threat, albeit a threat to something that deserves to be threatened. Subversions of the gender binary, or of patriarchal power, should be threatening from the point of view of those who are deeply invested in them. And this investment will not be altered by correcting people’s factual errors. Equally, while Butler’s frustration over the refusal of the critics of “gender ideology” actually to read any of the offending material is understandable, it’s not obvious that it would help much if people did so—not so much because it is scary as because most of it is awful. No offense to gender theory: most of everything is awful. The point is a serious and simple one. In a thoroughly messed-up world—and that is what any radical social critic, by definition, believes the world to be—it stands to reason that most of everything is likely to be correspondingly messed up. That, in a manner of speaking, is what critical theorists of the Frankfurt School tradition such as Theodor Adorno always said. There are no islands of innocence. Everything is tainted, not least critical theory itself.

I think this last point helps account for the strange unease I feel in the face of the current upsurge of anti-feminist feeling. The anti-gender movement is hateful and wrong about more or less everything. But what they are attacking is not always something I can defend with much enthusiasm. The feeling I find hard to shake, if also hard to pin down, is that the form of feminism that has prevailed in recent times is partly responsible for the wave of reaction we are witnessing. The problem is not just this feminism’s cozy relationship with liberal capitalism, though a feminism forged against the political and economic status quo might well have proved less brittle. The problem is the form that feminist critique and advocacy have often taken: insistently moralist and individualist, even while using the vocabulary of structural injustice and oppression.

In that sense, it is right to call what we’re experiencing a backlash, albeit not against feminism at its finest. Rather, as Sarah Banet-Weiser has argued, a “popular feminism” that equates liberation with personal empowerment and zero-sum advancement has found its dark reflection in a “popular misogyny” that promises to do the same for men. Contemporary anti-feminism’s demonization of women as calculating and untrustworthy “hypergamists” might likewise be seen as an inverted image of a feminism that has effectively equated womanhood with depoliticized goodness or righteousness. One expression of this is in the omnipresent demand for increased “representation.” Few who call for more women in power as a demand of justice can resist adding some promissory note about the therapeutic effects that a woman’s touch might bring, to the boardroom and the battlefield as much as to the political party.

But feminism’s achievement of a certain institutional and cultural hegemony, however shallow and however precarious, is a weapon that can be used for good or ill—and since women are not angels but flawed and compromised human beings, it is no surprise to find it used in both ways: as self-defense and resistance against the everyday injuries and indignities that a sexist status quo inflicts; and more cynically, for convenience, advancement, interpersonal point-scoring or petty revenge. The point is not that things have “swung too far in the other direction,” as some would put it. The larger context is still one in which women are systematically disempowered and in which violent misogyny has deep roots, as the current groundswell testifies. Hegemonic feminism appears in this setting as little more than a carnivalesque reversal of the kind that has always been part and parcel of patriarchy (where it goes by disparaging terms such as “hen-pecking” or “wearing the trousers”), but now with a feminist face: a sphere of a limited, cathartic comeuppance playing out within a structure which remains in fundamental respects stubbornly unmoved. 

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Even those who eschew the cruder forms of essentialism are susceptible to the thought that the souls of the oppressed, as the souls of victims rather than perpetrators, are somehow in better condition than those of their oppressors. Yet this is far from reliably true. Women, Sophie Lewis writes in Enemy Feminisms, are “horrible, quite often. Feminists, even, are part of the problem.” Nobody should really need this pointed out. You know it, for example, if you’ve ever seen the way some women academics behave toward other women, especially their juniors. But in a context in which we are so often asked to act as if we didn’t know it, where the lectures on the importance of supporting women in power (regardless of their policies) are trotted out like clockwork at every election cycle, and where it is seen as a failure of sisterly solidarity to point out such minor details as Kamala Harris’s acquiescence to genocide, it bears repeating.

Enemy Feminisms is an eye-opening and highly engaging run-down of feminist women being mostly awful across history. Partly, this is a matter of digging up dirt on revered feminist figures in danger of being sanitized by history: your regular reminder that Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for example, was a massive racist. But Lewis also unearths some feminist forebears and traditions that are less often celebrated or even remembered: the pioneer of colonial feminism, May French Sheldon; the feminist wing of the Ku Klux Klan; the former Suffragettes who rushed to embrace fascism in the aftermath of World War I.

Lewis is not the first feminist to write at length on reactionary women. Andrea Dworkin—herself an enemy feminist in Lewis’s eyes—also wrote a book on them: Right-Wing Women, first published in 1983, was reissued by Picador this year. In her new foreword, Moira Donegan calls it “one of Dworkin’s most ambitious, exacting, and essential books.” But while Dworkin was concerned with women who styled themselves as anti-feminists, Lewis’s focus is on those who defended reactionary and even patriarchal positions from an explicitly feminist direction. To some, that will sound like a contradiction in terms: these people may call themselves feminists, but they’re not really. Butler thus remarks at one point that “a transphobic feminism is no feminism.” But for Lewis, this is to take the easy way out, an evasion that ignores the extent to which the feminist commitments of the figures involved were both sincere and well-integrated with their other politics. This is not to excuse them or to accept them as “problematic” friends, Lewis makes clear. We should not attempt the “bonkers task of ‘calling in’ people with opposite aims to our own.” Enemy feminisms are real feminisms; but they are real enemies, too.

The anti-gender movement is hateful and wrong about more or less everything. But what they are attacking is not always something I can defend with much enthusiasm.

The question of what to call them can look like one of semantics. “That’s not feminism!” and “That’s not my feminism!” may be more or less emphatic ways of saying the same thing: that the purported feminism in question fails to be properly feminist. (The same goes for other political terms, such as “socialism.”) In fact, Lewis—who uses the gender-neutral or feminine pronoun—does not seem to adhere strictly to one policy. Women’s investment in the slave trade, they write at one point in the book, “underwrote a gruesome culture of feminine empowerment in the antebellum South, and decades later, some feminists would show themselves ready to defend this legacy as echt feminism.” (Does that imply that pro-slavery feminism was not, in fact, echt?)

Still, for Lewis, there remains a viable sense in which enemy feminisms, with all their pernicious exclusions, count: “All of this was feminism,” they insist, “not liberatory feminism, but feminism in the sense that it contested a patriarchal constraint placed upon a certain group of women, no matter how few.” This may be true, at least at the level of the rhetoric or self-conception of the feminisms in question, but it misses an important meaning of refusing the feminism label altogether. The point is not just to say that the would-be feminism in question is (very) bad but also to say that it fails—and fails as feminism—even for those it purports to include and represent, because any liberation that is only for an elite subset of women will turn out to be no true liberation at all, for anybody. As Dworkin puts it in Right-Wing Women: “Only the freedom of all women protects any woman.”

Lewis would agree, I think. Regarding the KKK feminists who defended lynching on grounds of protecting white women’s virtue, they write: “This only ‘works’ in the way a suicide vest works, because the vigilantism of the lynching of the ‘black rapist’ enacts the lynchers’ ownership of female sexuality almost as much as it expresses their anti-blackness.” In other words, it’s not that racist feminism is bad because it is feminism for white women only (though that would be bad enough). It’s that it fails properly to contest the constraints of patriarchy even for white women. In that sense, it is not feminism after all, by Lewis’s own criterion. But in a way, that is Lewis’s point: not that enemy feminisms succeed as feminism (for any women), but that the unsavory elements are “baked in,” as Lewis puts it, in such a way that we cannot feasibly pick out the feminist bits and discard the rest. The whole is tainted.

This phrase—“baked in”—comes up a lot, not just in Lewis but in contemporary discourse writ large. It’s part of a welcome move to acknowledge the historical entanglement of vaunted ideals with practices now regarded as repugnant: in particular, the entanglement of liberal ideals of “freedom” and “equality” with realities such as colonialism and slavery. But it is often easier to agree that such connections go beyond mere accident or coincidence than it is to spell out exactly what the relationship is between the enemy elements and the rest of the body of theory and practice in which they occur. (This perhaps explains the frequent resort to metaphors, “baking in” and even “entanglement” among them.) There is a range of possibilities here, from compatibility to strict entailment. Lewis goes for something in between: “elective affinities,” of the kind Max Weber posited between Protestantism and capitalism. There is something about (certain kinds of) feminism that builds in an affinity with political nasties like colonialism and fascism. For example, a feminist essentialism that regards women as softer and more nurturing may be pressed into the service of colonialism, as illustrated by Sheldon’s conviction that the natives could be better and more humanely conquered by a feminine hand. Of course, it is possible to be an essentialist without being a colonialist: the affinity falls short of entailment. But the two can easily go together—and often enough have.

In the case of those Suffragettes who turned to fascism (Emmeline Pankhurst’s daughter Adela eventually joining their ranks), Lewis makes a number of suggestions as to the source of the affinity. At some points, the focus is on the “violence” committed by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU): although the Suffragettes mainly targeted property, they did carry out a number of actions that risked human lives—something which, as Lewis notes, many of their contemporary liberal celebrators (some of whom are currently cheerleading the criminalization of a more thoroughly nonviolent group, Palestine Action) would rather forget. At other points, “terrorism” is cited as the connection. Implicitly defining it as violence toward civilians, Lewis suggests that any movement that “relies too heavily” on terrorism “lurches inexorably to the right.” You don’t have to find violence against civilians unproblematic to ask whether this is the case, however. Did the FLN’s use of terror in the struggle for Algerian liberation result in a lurch to the right? Would Lewis claim with Michael Walzer that its use of terrorism was in any case morally wrong? Or is the problem only with relying “too heavily” on terror, in which case, how heavily is too heavily? Could the Suffragettes (or the FLN) have achieved their ends as effectively in more peaceful ways? Understandably reluctant to open that can of worms, Lewis doesn’t say.

At other times, Lewis locates the affinity between feminism and fascism in the hierarchical, aestheticized nature of the WSPU, which on this score was not unlike the British Union of Fascists. There may be something to this suggestion, but as with the point about violence, it’s not fully explicated, and uniforms and hierarchy, clearly enough, do not always spell fascism. Quoting an essay by Asa Seresin, Lewis further contends that the former Suffragette Mary Richardson’s “‘sex-negative’ love for women was already inextricable in 1914 from ‘her brewing fascist inclinations.’” The only illustration of Richardson’s alleged sex-negativity that Lewis offers is her professed dislike for a painting she had slashed in protest at the imprisonment of Emmeline Pankhurst: the painting, Richardson later said, was “sensuous,” and she disliked the way men “gawped” at it. Whatever you make of this, it seems some distance removed from fascism.

Maybe this isn’t the crucial point, though. An affinity may be weak enough that it is possible for things to go in more than one direction. But once things have in fact gone in one of those possible directions, the claim may be, there is no going back. Or, to return to the baking metaphor: it may not be inevitable that any particular ingredient gets added to the mix, but once it is baked in, there is no getting it out again. In that case, it’s not possible to say of someone like Mary Wollstonecraft: “Good on feminism, shame about the empire stuff.” Because as Lewis relates, Wollstonecraft’s defense of the “rights of woman” was already bound up with that stuff: she argued against the subjection of women partly on the grounds that it was somehow un- or pre-British—primitive, even—and that giving women rights held the key to making the British Empire better and stronger.

It might be countered that Wollstonecraft was only making a clever strategic argument. But Lewis is rightly skeptical of the temptation to make this sort of excuse. What reason is there to assume that Wollstonecraft cannot have thought anything that we think would be a bad thing to think, other than a defensive reflex which requires goodies to be always and in every way good? Isn’t it more likely that Wollstonecraft, showing no signs of being an anti-imperialist, was in fact an imperialist? Why wouldn’t she be? The same goes for the Suffragettes. They were, after all, mainly white British ladies living at a time when fascism was on the ascendant. It is plausible that some of them went fascist not because some positive affinity paved the way or pulled them along but because nothing was standing in the road to stop them: whether their movement was proto-fascist or not, it was not anti-fascist.

This still leaves the question of what we are to do about it all. I don’t know about you, but if I had baked something truly nasty into a cake, I would probably throw the cake away. Is that what we should do with enemy feminisms? Lewis’s answer seems to be: it depends. On the one hand, they reject a “purgative approach” and urge the need to recognize the double-edged character of the legacies of Wollstonecraft and others: “It is thanks to and despite people like Wollstonecraft—both!—that feminism can be a force of reaction even as it is an insurgent force.” We should “reject pantheons and, instead, practice remembering and admiring flawed comrades whom we care for, in part, by criticizing them.” But Lewis is equally clear that “a commitment to ‘impurity’ in politics (a commitment I think of as key to anti-fascism) must walk hand in hand with the courage to draw lines and fight people if necessary. Even kin.”

Thinking that the world is going to the dogs because of immigrants or “gender ideology” is a delusion. But is it more or less of a delusion than the liberal attitude that things were basically okay until circa 2016?

This is sound and salutary advice: a tonic against the twin tendencies of a selective hagiography about the feminist past and the vapid but ubiquitous demand for us to “all just get along” in the present (no, we are not all on the same side). But something troubles me in a common way of drawing the line, not so much about where it is drawn as about the criteria used to draw it. On this approach, whether someone falls on the wrong side depends on how bad they are. And for many purposes, the principle works well enough. But I worry that, abstracted from specifically political judgment, it can reintroduce a kind of moralism—a species of the politics of purity Lewis is (rightly, I think) trying to get away from.

There’s a paradox here. In the attempt to avoid dirtying our hands with anything too nasty, we commit ourselves to the idea that what we do touch isn’t that bad. But that, in turn, runs the risk of dirtying ourselves through apologism. If I deem Wollstonecraft worth the time of day, am I saying that her pro-colonialism is a minor matter? Hence the self-ratcheting tendency of this approach: it becomes more and more difficult to find anything sufficiently untainted that we do not feel the need both to distance ourselves from it and to sniff out others’ failure to do so.

The worry is heightened when badness comes to be equated with something like culpability. One sign of a residual moralism in Lewis’s account lies in their tendency to anticipate and rebut arguments to the effect that such-and-such problematic figure was merely a “child of their time” and therefore cannot really be held responsible for their repugnant views. On racist, pro-lynching feminists, they write:

But while this cultural script was pervasive and powerful, it is quite wrong to imagine that white women had little agency in the matter. Plenty of white women, such as the Texan suffragist Jessie Daniel Ames, didn’t just resist these suicide-vest gestures but organized bravely and effectively against them, banding together in the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. Conversely, other white women participated actively in the lynch mobs, and many spectated.

This move is common in the “baked in” genre of critiques of liberal thought. It can be useful as a way to preempt the argument that whatever dirt has been dredged has nothing to do with liberalism per se since “everyone was a racist back then,” as if no other view was thinkable. But Lewis’s point seems subtly different. As the reference to “agency” suggests, the point is to show that enemy feminists were culpable: they could have done otherwise, but didn’t.

This form of argument, though understandable as a rejoinder to dismissive or defensive brush-offs of legitimate critique, has never struck me as quite adequate. It’s the same form that we sometimes encounter from the right in the context of things like crime or drug addiction: it can’t be blamed on poverty or trauma, we are told, because plenty of people experience those things and don’t turn to crime or drugs. Such arguments hardly establish that factors like poverty are irrelevant, and the difference between individual outcomes may have as much to do with chance or circumstance as with “free choice” or “moral character.” But the turn to metaphysical questions of free will and responsibility strikes me as a turn in an unhelpful direction. Does it matter whether Mary Wollstonecraft, or Mary Richardson, or Adela Pankhurst, could “help it” (whatever that means)? The significance of the question is perhaps more carceral than political: the sort of thing that is taken to be relevant to questions of punishment but little else. And when the people in question are long dead, there is even less reason to ask it.  

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Andrea Dworkin died twenty years ago. For Lewis, she clearly falls on the wrong side of the line, notwithstanding the promise of some of her early work. The recent, partial revival of Dworkin’s ideas is, Lewis has written, “a terrible idea.”

And indeed, if there is going to be a line, then Dworkin must fall on the wrong side of it—if not for the “femmephobia” with which Lewis charges her and her close collaborator Catharine MacKinnon, or the “anti-trans” sentiment that Lewis identifies in her endorsement of “arch TERF” Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire (1979), or her embrace of carceral measures against sex work and sex workers which many (such as the feminist writers Juno Mac and Molly Smith) have persuasively argued to be politically and humanly disastrous, then certainly for her proposal in a late and little-known text, Scapegoat (2000), that the solution to male violence against women might be for women to set up a homeland for themselves, modeled on the Jewish state of Israel. Oh dear, is perhaps all one can say, especially at the present juncture. As bad ideas go, it doesn’t come much worse. Dworkin, it’s fair to say, is seriously tainted.

So it would be foolish to try and defend her on the basis that the bad bits are not that bad. Nor is it clearly the case that those bits are separable from the rest. The enemy elements in Dworkin may be neither excusable nor neatly excisable. But exactly for that reason, Dworkin might be a good illustration of the limitations of a threshold conception that makes degree of badness the criterion for exclusion. Because despite everything, her writing seems to me to possess an illuminating power that should not be too lightly discarded.

For one thing, Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women offers the kind of tighter-fitting psychological analysis that is lacking in Butler. Like Butler’s, her analysis emphasizes fear. But for Dworkin, the women who oppose feminism are not irrational or mistaken in the sort of way Butler’s story would imply. They are correct, at one level, in their judgment as to what is to be feared: endemic male violence. They see that the world is a truly dangerous place for women, and they make their bet (and their beds). They seek the protection, albeit a dubious one, of home and marriage (or as Dworkin puts it, they opt to be brutalized by one man rather than many). “They know that they are valued for their sex—their sex organs and their reproductive capacity,” Dworkin writes, “and so they try to up their value: through cooperation, manipulation, conformity; through displays of affection or attempts at friendship; through submission and obedience.” They see power, in other words, and try to appease it by showing that they are on its side. It’s a survival strategy, albeit one that entails the “maiming of all moral capacity.” The right-wing woman “ransoms the remains of a life—what is left over after she has renounced willful individuality—by promising indifference to the fate of other women.”

It doesn’t work—not really. Nothing does. As another tainted (because TERF-y) feminist icon, Carol Hanisch, argued in her famous essay “The Personal Is Political,” such “personal solutionary” moves are all doomed to failure. But the women who pursue this strategy are not simply deluded, according to Dworkin. “They see the world they live in,” she writes, “and they are not wrong.” In this sense, right-wing women are more correct than those liberal feminists who imagine that it is possible for women to live well and authentically in society as it is presently constituted, or that with a reform here or there, all could be well. In Dworkin’s view, “equal pay for equal work” is not the “simple reform” that some feminists imagine it to be; “it is revolution . . . impossible as long as men rule women.” With equal pay still not a reality, she has yet to be proved wrong. Dworkin’s point is a version of a more general one aptly made about the liberal defense of ideals such as equality. Actual equality—even equality of opportunity—would require radical upheavals to society of the kind liberals are unwilling to countenance, arguably up to and including the overthrow of capitalism: without getting rid of the present economic model, you can’t get rid of large wealth inequalities; and without getting rid of those, you can’t have equality of opportunity either. In this sense, it is a revolutionary ideal. And by refusing to recognize the implications of their own ideals, liberals resign themselves to something far more unrealistic—equality without the preconditions of equality—than the more overtly radical proposals they decry as utopian.

Adorno’s claim that “only the exaggerations are true”—he was making a point about psychoanalysis—might equally have been written by Dworkin, or with her in mind.

Whether or not you ultimately agree with Dworkin’s analysis of what attracts some women to right-wing and anti-feminist positions, it has certain advantages—in terms of demographic sensitivity and respect for the rational faculties of those involved—over more coarse-grained material analyses that invoke generalized ills such as deindustrialization and poverty (which, again, is not to deny that these have their place in the wider picture). It also helps to clarify what’s so grating about dominant liberal explanations of “right-wing populism.” Invariably, the assumption is that the populist critics of the status quo are more wrong than its defenders. In many ways, of course, they are. Thinking that the world is going to the dogs because of immigrants or “gender ideology” is a delusion. But is it more or less of a delusion than the liberal attitude that things were basically okay until circa 2016? At least on this score, the proponents of “horseshoe theory”—according to which left and right “extremes” resemble each other—are onto something.

Likewise, on Dworkin’s story, the position of the right-wing women she analyzes is in some ways closer to her own radical feminist stance than either is to liberal-feminist common sense. Some might see this as proof of the crypto-reactionary essence of “cultural feminism” à la Dworkin. The history of collaboration of some feminists from this tradition with social conservatives and the religious right—right down to today’s gender critical feminists—is certainly suggestive. But Dworkin’s analysis raises the possibility of seeing things the other way around, or at least, as double-edged: apparent opposites carrying the latent possibility of a flip to the other side. Lewis even makes a similar point: just as antisemitism, the “socialism of fools,” was right to target financial capitalism but wrong to target Jews, enemy feminisms “typically” begin “with a radical impulse . . . an awareness that something is deeply wrong in gendered life.” The trouble is that they “cop out,” misidentifying the problem as “a glass ceiling, a wage differential, an office sex pest, a pimp, a foreign rapist, a male doctor, a husband’s drunkenness, ‘the’ penis, or ‘gender ideology’”—instead of gender itself.

But it is not Dworkin’s particular analysis of right-wing women—or any particular thesis of hers—that interests me most. There is something else, by its nature hard to articulate: a kind of duality of consciousness that you experience when reading her, which maps onto a corresponding duality or ambivalence that I think exists in the consciousness of many women (certainly in mine). On one level, you can read Dworkin and think, “This obviously isn’t true. The way she writes, you would think that a woman couldn’t walk down the street without being gang raped and flayed alive. I’ve just been to buy a pint of milk. What’s she talking about?” This connects to a half-guilty feeling that being a woman is actually kind of fine, at least for some of us. Maybe other women have it harder; maybe we’ve been lucky. Or maybe this whole feminism thing is actually a bit of a grift, a card to play or a research vein to tap, something that was good while it lasted but which relied on people, men, not daring to question it too much lest they never got laid again. But now we’ve had our bluff called. The men’s rights crowd are out in the open now, and they have safety in numbers. Worse, maybe they have a point: maybe everything actually is fine for women; maybe we are milking it . . .

We don’t actually think this, of course: not really. No sooner does the feeling raise its head than we reach for our notes—on the pay gap, the figures on sexual violence—to show that yes, there is (still) a problem. And there is. We can see it in black and white, but we can’t always feel it as more than an abstract truth. Until, of course, something happens to make it suddenly very concrete. It’s a bit like a physical symptom that comes and goes, and in the in-between times you trick yourself into thinking you must have imagined it.

The experience of reading Dworkin is similar. Every so often, you come across a passage like this one: “The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the existence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her suffering. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings.” And you think, on one level, that this is nonsense: of course people think that women are persons. But on another level, at least sometimes, you know exactly what she’s talking about. These moments are like strobe lights, illuminating everything in a flash, just for a moment.

I think it is Dworkin’s determination to capture this second way of seeing—for her, the singular truth—that makes her seem to many so obviously crazed, histrionic, and even hateful. The truth as she sees it cannot be captured through the medium of a conventional prose that piles proposition on stable proposition to build a permanent and unbreachable edifice. It is instead a matter of battering through the ideological wall that blocks our view. As Dworkin describes her own method:

My only chance to be believed is to find a way of writing bolder and stronger than woman hating itself—smarter, deeper, colder. This might mean that I would have to write a prose more terrifying than rape, more abject than torture, more insistent and destabilizing than battery, more desolate than prostitution, more invasive than incest, more filled with threat and aggression than pornography.

Whether or not you think this ultimately works (whatever it might mean for it to “work”), it’s interesting to note the parallels between Dworkin’s approach and the approach of those critical theorists who shared with her a conviction of the world’s elusive darkness, even as they differed as to its source. A famous line of Adorno’s, that “only the exaggerations are true”—he was making a point about psychoanalysis—might equally have been written by Dworkin, or with her in mind. And Dworkin’s line in Right-Wing Women that “morbid intelligence abhors the cheery sunlight of positive thinking and eternal sweetness” could be a line from Adorno’s Minima Moralia. But intelligence, as Dworkin reminds us in the second chapter, has a politics. It matters not only what is said but who says it (“While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact”). As Dworkin elaborates in a particularly astringent paragraph:

Women have stupid ideas that do not deserve to be called ideas. Marabel Morgan writes an awful, silly, terrible book in which she claims that women must exist for their husbands, do sex and be sex for their husbands. D. H. Lawrence writes vile and stupid essays in which he says the same thing basically with many references to the divine phallus; but D. H. Lawrence is smart. Anita Bryant says that cocksucking is a form of human cannibalism; she decries the loss of the child who is the sperm. Norman Mailer believes that lost ejaculations are lost sons and on that basis disparages male homosexuality, masturbation, and contraception. But Anita Bryant is stupid and Norman Mailer is smart. Is the difference in the style in which these same ideas are delivered or in the penis? Mailer says that a great writer writes with his balls; novelist Cynthia Ozick asks Mailer in which color ink he dips his balls. Who is smart and who is stupid?

From this perspective, it is little surprise that Dworkin’s “exaggerations” are not taken with quite the seriousness with which those of the Frankfurt School are received. Reviewing Dworkin’s Intercourse for the London Review of Books in 1987, the respected historian Roy Porter managed to say it all with his opening salvo: “You only have to read the torrent of filthy abuse pouring out of this diatribe against sex and men to see that Andrea Dworkin is a sick lady. It’s one long hysterical denunciation of sexual intercourse as really bad news for women. The way she rants on is of course the give-away symptom of sexual frustration. Clearly she can’t be getting enough of it—not surprising for someone overweight and ugly like her!” Adorno, for his part, may not always get an easy ride from his critics, by any means, but neither his intelligence nor his sanity is seriously questioned. Nor is Adorno—no oil painting himself—routinely called fat or ugly.

Still, Lewis is right to detect something distasteful in the rehabilitation that Dworkin is currently undergoing in Guardian-reading liberal circles. It has something of the hippie wigs in Woolworth’s about it, a faint parallel of Soviet kitsch. Perhaps the double vision comes into play here, too. As with other common-sense-shattering philosophies like Freudian psychoanalysis, it is possible to read Dworkin and to hold the more outrageous bits, so to speak, in brackets (most Freudians probably don’t really believe that you want to fuck your mother, for example). A split consciousness can make it possible in some sense to subscribe to radical ideas without this making any discernible difference to how you live your life, or even much difference to the way you think. Dworkin is at risk of being neutralized, made abstract rather than concrete—the fate which she in all her writing strives above all else to avoid. Worse, she may be reduced to her worst bits, rendered no more than a spicy champion of reforms like the Nordic Model (which criminalizes the purchase of sex) that would in practice not explode the system she railed against but only exacerbate its cruelties.

Maybe the way to think about how to engage with enemies and friends alike is not in terms of drawing lines on the basis of some judgment of the balance of good versus evil present in a given case, but instead in terms of the direction in which our engagement moves us—and that depends not only on the objects but also on the nature of our engagement; not only on our friends and enemies, but on us. Dworkin revivalism is bad news if it entrenches a status quo of carceral solutions shorn of a wider social critique. But if there is something to hold onto in her thinking, it is the sense of something dark just below the surface of ordinary life (or even on the surface, hiding in plain sight), and the paradoxical ability to shine a light on that darkness. Seen in that light, the ugly eruptions of the present moment should come as no surprise.

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