“I have a horrible feeling I’m a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, mannish-looking, morally bankrupt woman who can’t even call herself a feminist.”

Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fleabag: The Original Play

I never choose peace over proving a point. This is at times a disservice to the conversation being carried wherever it is that I find myself. It is easiest to be a feminist when in the face of men, as they so often have only the most limited understanding of women’s issues. What I am bad at however is preserving the moral higher ground when I am talking with women. Devil’s advocate is a preferred occupation. I do like glittery things and I would like an easier access to them. I wouldn’t be opposed to being handed more things. There is also the quiet suspicion that women are expected to arrive at their politics purified. Men are allowed ideological apprenticeships — long awkward periods of learning where they say the wrong thing and adjust slowly. Women, particularly feminist women, are expected to be immediately coherent. Any inconsistency becomes evidence that the entire framework is unserious.

But political clarity rarely emerges from moral perfection. It emerges from friction. From arguing too loudly at dinner tables. From reading something that makes you uncomfortable and then spending three weeks trying to explain why.

The label “bad feminist” is appealing precisely because it admits the mess before anyone else can weaponise it. The tidy version of feminism — the one that behaves impeccably in debate, shops only at ethically approved retailers, never enjoys anything frivolous, never contradicts itself, never loses patience in an argument  — has always felt suspiciously theoretical to me. Real people rarely arrive to politics as finished products. We drag our contradictions with us: our vanity, our impatience, our liking for expensive lipstick and cheap arguments that sound nice and right in the moment.

Labels promise clarity but they often function more like containers. Once you are inside one, people expect you to behave according to the instructions printed on the side. A feminist should think this, dislike that, boycott these things, read those authors, never laugh at the wrong joke. The moment you slip, the word becomes conditional. The membership card trembles. The modern problem is that politics increasingly behaves like a performance review. You are expected to arrive already fluent in the language of the movement you claim to belong to. Hesitation reads as ignorance; revision reads as betrayal. But political thinking has never been tidy. It is usually a long sequence of partial understandings, abandoned positions, and uncomfortable recalculations. A feminism that cannot tolerate that process risks becoming less like a movement and more like a personality test.

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” — Margaret Atwood

This sentence compresses an enormous asymmetry into a single line. It is not that every man is dangerous, nor that every woman lives in constant terror, but that the baseline calculations of safety are different. One group moves through the world worrying about humiliation; the other, about survival.

Language itself does not stay still long enough for political identities to remain stable. The vocabulary of feminism shifts every few years as new ideas appear and older assumptions are questioned. Words that once sounded radical become ordinary; words that once sounded acceptable suddenly feel embarrassingly outdated. A person can wake up one morning to discover that the position they held yesterday now has a new name, or worse, an accusation attached to it. The result is that many people spend more time worrying about the correct terminology than about the conditions the terminology was invented to describe.

When feminists talk about “men” they are rarely talking about individual personalities so much as a structure that distributes risk unevenly. Social categories behave statistically, not personally. That distinction tends to disappear the moment the conversation becomes defensive.

Patriarchy is strange in that it injures even the people it privileges. Boys are taught early that vulnerability is suspicious, tenderness embarrassing, fear emasculating. If women are socialised into accommodation, men are socialised into distance. The emotional illiteracy that results does not only harm the women they will potentially  love; it isolates the men themselves. None of this excuses misogyny, but it explains why dismantling it benefits more than one side. A social system that requires half the population to dominate and the other half to endure is not working particularly well for anyone.

I don’t hate men, I hate misogyny. And over the years have found they are its most common perpetrators.

It does make sense. When we say all men we mean men as a social group. We mean the social group overwhelmingly represented in all branches of government. The ones with power logically are the ones with the ability to harm.  It is not about wanting to antagonise individual members of the opposite sex, rather recognising the patterns that have emerged from years of historical systemic and social oppression. An argument has been made many times before, resting upon the fact that men are the first to be killed in times of war or genocide. Men being killed is a mercy that women are not given. They are taken as sex slaves. Women and girls are only kept alive because they are seen as property – killing men is seen as killing their ‘owners’.

Men have trouble knowing and understanding the concept of horror itself. Old horror novels, the ones we still study in class seldom fail to move us any way though they recycle the same weak tropes. “he woke up in a pool of blood” well isn’t that great! Most women do that every month. If anything it is a mercy that it happens as it saves women from seeking access to abortion care, which is not even guaranteed when inscribed in law because they can still refuse to grant it.

Men’s greatest fears are always just being women. 

I’ve been longing to say this out loud. Women are born with pain built in. It’s our physical destiny—period pains, sore boobs, childbirth, you know. We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives. Men don’t. They have to seek it out. They invent all these gods and demons so they can feel guilty about things, which is something we do very well on our own. And then they create wars so they can feel things and touch each other and when there aren’t any wars they can play rugby. We have it all going on in here, inside. We have pain on a cycle for years and years and years, and then just when you feel you are making peace with it all, what happens? The menopause comes. The fucking menopause comes and it is the most wonderful fucking thing in the world. Yes, your entire pelvic floor crumbles and you get fucking hot and no one cares, but then you’re free. No longer a slave, no longer a machine with parts. You’re just a person.

fleabag

Every generation of feminists eventually irritates the one that came before it. The younger ones are accused of frivolity, of caring too much about language or aesthetics or identity. The older ones are accused of rigidity, of having mistaken the battles they fought for the final shape of the movement. This friction is not necessarily a failure. Political movements that survive for centuries do so precisely because they refuse to remain identical to themselves. Each generation inherits unfinished work and a slightly different world in which to do it.

“I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves.” Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Wollstonecraft’s sentence is often quoted because it feels deceptively modest. Power over oneself sounds almost apolitical, like a matter of personal discipline. But historically it was radical precisely because women were rarely recognised as fully self-owning beings. Their labour, their sexuality, their reproduction, even their legal identities were mediated through men. Autonomy was not a personality trait — it was a political demand.

One of the quiet contradictions of modern economies is that they rely heavily on work that is still treated as though it costs nothing. Care work, emotional labour, the invisible logistics of keeping households functioning—these tasks remain disproportionately performed by women while being valued the least in financial terms. Entire economic systems quietly assume that someone, somewhere, is performing this labour for free or for far less than it is worth. Equality in the workplace means little if the second shift waiting at home remains structurally invisible.

The problem of course, lies in a fundamental misunderstanding of what lies between equality and equity. This fake fairness we push forward by trying to get everyone treated the same is a disservice to the moral push. Treating everyone the same way does not mean everyone is equally cared for. And I say this less as a vocabulary issue and more as an understanding one. Because right now in most countries, the people in power, when they feel so inclined, are rooting for equality and not equity. Equality is a beautifully symmetrical idea, which is perhaps why it photographs so well in policy language. Equity, by contrast, requires acknowledging that the starting lines were never drawn evenly. Treating everyone the same only feels fair if you ignore the distance some people have already had to travel before the race even begins.

What do we really own anymore? Our music is streamed, our films are rented, our software expires monthly. Even housing increasingly feels temporary, with rent swallowing the possibility of ever holding the keys to something that is actually ours. Ownership, in the traditional sense, has been quietly dissolving.

And yet if you look at what women have historically passed down through families, it is rarely land or businesses. It is jewellery: thick gold chains, bracelets, rings that outlive the people who wore them. These objects endured because they were one of the few forms of wealth women could safely keep. Portable, concealable, sellable if things went wrong. What appears ornamental was often a form of financial insurance.

So when women are criticised for being materialistic, it is worth remembering that for a long time material objects were one of the only forms of security available to them. It is less just criticism and more like historical amnesia.

Jewelry becomes an heirloom partly because it is portable power. In societies where women could not reliably inherit land, property, or businesses, value had to shrink itself into objects that could be hidden in drawers, stitched into hems, carried across borders. A necklace could survive a marriage, a widowhood, even exile in ways legal rights often could not.

What looks like decoration sometimes began as insurance.

Feminism has always had a complicated relationship with consumption. On one hand we are told liberation means independence, earning power, financial autonomy. On the other hand we are scolded the moment that independence purchases anything decorative. A woman buying jewellery is frivolous; a man buying a watch is an investment. The economy has always been happy to take women’s money while remaining suspicious of women enjoying the things they buy with it.

Pain is an essential part of the grooming process, and that is not accidental. Plucking the eyebrows, shaving under the arms, wearing a girdle, learning to walk in high-heeled shoes, having one’s nose fixed, straightening or curling one’s hair—these things hurt. The pain, of course, teaches an important lesson: no price is too great, no process too repulsive, no operation too painful for the woman who would be beautiful. The tolerance of pain and the romanticization of that tolerance begins here, in preadolescence, in socialization, and serves to prepare women for lives of childbearing, self-abnegation, and husband-pleasing.

Andrea Dworkin, Last Days at Hot Slit

The difficulty is that many of us participate in these rituals knowingly. We understand the politics of beauty standards and still book the appointments. We critique the industry and still enjoy the lipstick. Hypocrisy is the accusation usually levelled here, but that assumes participation cancels awareness. In reality most women simply learn to operate inside a system they did not design. Refusing every beauty norm entirely is treated as deviance; performing them perfectly is treated as compliance. There is very little neutral ground. But one must acknowledge that we were socialised in this same society we criticise. We are both subject and onlooker of all the dynamics we have been discussing. Certainly it touches on potential internalised misogyny we all must deal with but it also predestines us to think and picture beauty the same way. Who doesn’t want to be surrounded by beautiful things? 

None of this means women must abandon beauty, or pleasure, or the glittery things entirely. The problem has never been the flowers themselves; it is being offered bouquets instead of rights. Ornament is harmless when it is optional. It becomes oppressive the moment it is expected to substitute for autonomy. There is no need for flowers or anything pretty without fundamental rights. 

Perhaps being a “bad feminist” simply means refusing the fantasy of ideological purity. It means arguing badly sometimes, wanting frivolous things, changing your mind in public, learning slower than the discourse would prefer. Labels promise certainty. Living rarely delivers it. The work, inconveniently, continues anyway.

Misogyny rarely disappears outright; it tends to modernise itself. Instead of openly claiming that women should not have rights, the conversation shifts to whether those rights are inconvenient, impractical, or culturally disruptive. Power rarely announces itself as prejudice anymore. It prefers to sound like reasonableness, like concern for balance, like a request that everyone simply calm down and stop exaggerating the problem.

Much of the hostility directed at feminism is really hostility toward ambiguity. People prefer movements that are simple enough to summarise in a sentence. But feminism has never been a single argument; it is a collection of overlapping ones. It contains radicals and reformists, academics and activists, women who reject beauty culture entirely and women who enjoy it without apology. Expecting a perfect internal consensus from something this large is like expecting a city to speak with one voice. The disagreement is not evidence of collapse. It is evidence that the conversation is still alive.

Labels are less like definitions and more like coordinates. They tell people roughly where you stand, not everything you contain. “Feminist” functions this way for me. It does not mean I have solved the contradictions of living under the structures I criticise. It does not mean I behave with the composure political movements supposedly require. It simply means I recognise the imbalance and refuse to pretend it is natural.

If that makes me a bad feminist, it might also make me an honest one.

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