Nonexistent body diversity on the catwalk. Stay-at-home girlfriends painting a life of financial dependence as aspirational. A 21-year-old actress being told she looks “old” in the media.
The vibe shift is clear. The strides society has made in normalizing conversations around body-positivity, challenging gendered double standards, and promoting female autonomy are firmly in the rearview mirror. Now, we’re enjoying the fresh hell of an antifeminist cultural backlash.
We should have guessed where we were heading when the tradwives took over our FYPs. Their elaborate spectacles of female servitude, served up to us like a series of made-from-scratch, non-GMO content canapés, were initially regarded with skepticism. But now they’re being welcomed without reservation onto the front rows of fashion week.
The cultural regression around feminine empowerment has foreshadowed a much graver change in public opinion. According to a new global study—which also emphasized a chasm in opinion on topics of gender equality between Gen Z men and women—a significant portion of Gen Z (36 percent) and millennial (39 percent) women believe that we have “gone so far in promoting women’s equality that we are discriminating against men.”
As the stats above make clear, antifeminist backlash isn’t just coming from men but from women, too. This is even reflected in voting patterns. Here in the U.S., young female voters were 7 percent more likely to vote for Trump (a man alleged to have committed crimes against multiple women) in the 2024 election than they were in 2020.
Why women would vote for Trump, someone who clearly does not act in the best interests of women, seems, on the face of things, unfathomable. But it speaks to a potential shift in how women understand their place in the world.
All the way back in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir wrote her feminist tome The Second Sex. And while it would be great to think that something written over 70 years ago would have no relevance to today’s gender relations, that’s not the case.
In this work, she argues that women sometimes act in “bad faith”—where they might conform to social expectations and norms around their own subjugation, rather than embrace freedom and responsibility, due to their own internalized patriarchal beliefs.
So, can feminism really ever go “too far”? For me, the simple (obvious) answer is no. To me, feminism is a movement to promote equality between different genders. Part of this equality is about eradicating static gender roles—the ones that say men have to be tough, silent, breadwinners, and women have to be soft, submissive caregivers. The norms that suggest any gender fluidity between these poles doesn’t exist. Ultimately, it’s about giving people the freedom to explore the full spectrum of their humanity, rather than forcing anyone into a predetermined role.
Where the backlash around feminism seems to be gathering steam is across a cultural effort to re-enshrine gender roles as fixed, definite, and absolute. We see it in gendered cultural propaganda across TikTok, where short-form videos targeted to women talk of infantilizing “girl math” and “girl dinner,” while men get pushed aggressive “self-improvement” content that funnels them into the man-o-sphere and the nefarious, anti-women content that lurks there.
In broader culture, there’s a shift toward content that reiterates that a woman’s greatest achievement is either building a perfect home or being a shiny object for public consumption, rather than a messy, real person navigating life.
IRL, the idea that gender and sex are fixed and produce traditional, unquestionable gender roles—that men should be allowed to be men without worrying about the “woke police” and that domestic environments and hair salons are women’s natural habitats—increasingly feels like a belief that many people swallow.
Ultimately, choice—supporting women who genuinely want to embrace the stay-at-home life—is an important aspect of contemporary feminism. But it’s also important that we all scrutinize our choices and beliefs in order to get closer to our authentic selves. That way, we can know that we made our choices ourselves, rather than bowing to any cultural pressure. And while all of this soul-searching and questioning can seem futile in the face of what we’re up against, it’s worth it.
The cultural chokehold of figures like Andrew Tate can make it feel like the fight for feminism is well and truly over—like we might as well give up, give in, and stop hammering on about our rights when half of the world doesn’t seem to care in the slightest about our well-being, dignity, and quality of life.
But we can’t let the tide of anti-feminism wash away our fight to live in a world of gender equality and true freedom for all.
