Maybe, in 2025, a feminist looks like a gender abolitionist

I, once again, find myself unable to stop thinking about a question Cartoons Hate Her recently asked. This time, it’s What Does a Feminist Look Like in 2025?

Returning to Alabama and Trump 2.0 have changed my opinions on this, and other elements of “wokeness.” (I’m hardly alone in re-evaluating wokeness, it should be said.)

I think my attitude, before, was essentially, “Shoot for the moon, land among the stars.” Even if occasionally ham-fisted and ineffectual, woke shit is generally better than throwing up our hands and simply accepting current levels of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.

Having now lived in red, blue, and then red again areas, I’m much more sympathetic to the idea that maybe wokeness impacted redder areas and communities in fundamentally worse and more alienating ways than bluer areas.

“Defund the police” is one example.

US policing is horribly broken, as anyone with two functional brain cells and a shred of integrity can admit. As a recovering libertarian, I have a knee-jerk affinity for defunding any and every government program I dislike. I dislike few government institutions more than the police.

The only problem with defunding the police is that it fails to solve any problems and also creates new problems. I absolutely hate to admit this, but more cops do equal less crime, especially those that disproportionately hurt Black and bottom-half families. That’s a big part of why Black and bottom-half families (the kinds of voters the Democratic Party has lost and needs to win back) want more cops, not fewer. I learned this while writing a whole series (part one) on why and how cities should “professionalize the police” instead.

“Defund the police” advocates associated the Democratic Party with a policy voters hate. But when it comes to their stated aim, they were far less successful.

Another kind of wokeness I’ve re-evaluated is “standpoint theory.” Whites should listen to Black people on racism and able-bodied folks should listen to disabled people on ableism. Pretty anodyne, really. Yet dummies have taken that idea to its illogical conclusion, using it to harangue anyone with the temerity to ever say anything about any topic until and unless they can prove they’ve had direct personal experience with it. Freddie deBoer accurately describes it as “leading otherwise sensible people to decide that they can’t comment on issues of vital public importance because they do not hold the perspective of the marginalized.”

There’s a pattern here. Academics name and describe a useful idea. Then various thinkfluencers present this idea to the masses with all the nuance and precision of a 90s talk show host covering a moral panic. If they’re very successful, as with the idea of “unconscious bias,” a whole ecosystem arises to cash in.

Which brings me to what might be a near-perfect narrow encapsulation of the broader phenomenon: “DEI training.”

Unconscious bias and systemic racism exist and are bad. We can, and should, effectively and usefully educate adults about them. Nominally, this is DEI training’s goal.

In reality, however, mandatory trainings make the people who need them most even more racist. Everyone else reverts back to their starting point within weeks or months.

There’s no conspiracy here. The motives are misaligned. Institutions implement DEI trainings primarily to help them meet other, pre-existing, more easily achieved and measurable goals around, for example, public relations, recruiting, and legal liability. If they also make their people less racist, all the better.

Well-trained, expert instructors are expensive. It costs orgs even more to incorporate DEI into their hiring, firing, promotion, training, and measurement procedures. So, they don’t. Which means what actually happens tends to be, at-best, annoying.

I’m responding to what’s happening by paying a lot more attention to what I’m calling the “radical center” of US politics: PPI, Adam Conover, Trae Crowder, Jeremiah Johnson, The Bulwark, Noah Smith, Matt Yglesias, Cartoons Hate Her.

But, to get the point of this post, let me state that in the 2010s, I was a “feminism” defender.

I understood even then that it was easy to misconstrue that word as being pro-woman, and thus anti-man. The word “feminism” implies that men are the problem.

It didn’t help that much of academic and (what many saw as) “mainstream” feminism ignored, if not opposed, ideas and policies that might benefit men primarily or exclusively.

But, as I said many times back then, feminism is and was the movement against sexism. We don’t have another movement or a better word for that.

I used to think that if we could just educate more men about “real feminism” we could get most of them on board.

Now, in 2025, as with wokeism more broadly, I’m less sure the juice is worth the squeeze.

In the past three or so years I’ve probably read and listened to more men talk about gender than in the last 15 years combined.

I’ve learned that masculinity is much more important to more men than I could have imagined. Masculinity is defined and defended as “not femininity.” For bottom-half men, their masculinity is far more tenuous. That makes performing it even more important to them.

A lot of young, primarily bottom-half men are not only, or even primarily, opposed to the “excesses” of “mainstream” or “extreme” feminism. A large percentage of them are opposed to actual feminism, based on its actual contribution to their actual status losses to women.

Feminism implies that women are sexism’s primary victims. It may be men who are hurt most often and most profoundly by the idea that people should punish each other, even with violence, for failing to correctly perform their gender.

The foundational problem is less masculinity, or femininity. It’s the concept of gender itself.

CHH wrote her question in response to right-wing Twitter melting down about a famous model dressing her toddler son in “girl clothes.” It’s hard to imagine a reality in which anyone takes notice of a female toddler wearing “boy clothes.”

Right-wing Twitter is big mad that the model quoted her friend in an interview, saying “It was hard to come to terms with the fact that I was bringing yet another white man into the world. But now I adore him and can’t imagine it any other way.” I guess they think the model is trying to force her boy to act like a girl, which in their minds is somehow way worse than the default, which is for boys to literally beat each other for acting like girls.

I’m old enough to remember a time when it was intolerably girly, and therefore shameful, for a grown man to shit his pants and cry, in public, over something a model said five years ago.

Listen, I love masculinity, as a mere collection of traits. Courage, chivalry, or honor are genital-independent characteristics that anyone can, and everyone should, develop. My biggest problem with right-wing men right now is that they are, to a one, weak losers utterly devoid of them.

I’m wondering whether, when it comes to gender, as a concept, the juice is worth the squeeze.

I think I’d prefer letting clothes simply cover the wearer’s genitals without denoting anything about their configuration. I’d like a family’s breadwinner to be whoever earns more money or likes working more, regardless of whether they sit or stand to pee. I’d like words like sexism, patriarchy, gender war, and, yes, feminism, to become anachronisms.

I think the middle ground between woke purity testing and helplessness in the face of reaction is listening to the people whose minds you’re trying to change and considering their emotional and material realities. I think the bottom line for “feminism” is that it’s going to be hard to name and address the harms of gender until men and women are listening to each other about how it impacts their lives.

The fundamental problem with “wokeness” is that it tended to fail to achieve its stated aims while making it harder for people to listen to each other across identity lines.

Any term (or idea or policy) that makes that listening harder probably may not be worth the trouble.