My father wrote the book on misogyny, I have become an anti-feminist

Internet feminism has not made us happier, ladies

My father literally wrote the book on misogyny — a centuries old hatred that caused immense harm across the world. Yet I, his only daughter, have come to view feminism not as misogyny’s antidote, but rather its latest iteration.

“Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice” was published in 2006, a time when misogyny was far from a mainstream topic of conversation. The book details how female power was perceived as a threat, with terrible consequences, across all cultures. It found misogyny so ingrained as to be “part of the common sense of society,” and “pervasive, persistent, pernicious, protean.”

Sixteen years later, we are living with a new phenomenon — let’s call it Internet feminism — that dominates our culture. Most of its adherents would claim to be warriors for female liberation, but in fact they deliver the opposite.

Internet feminism is based mostly on middle-class and elite women passing judgement on the lives and behaviour of others. Does anyone remember the fate of the walk-on girl? Walk-on girls were pretty, young women in tight dresses walking onto the stage before some sports, in particular the working-class stalwart, darts. In the tidal wave of female-driven prudishness that came after the Weinstein earthquake, these jobs were a no-no and the tradition was ended. And it was called a win for women. The depth of condescension masquerading as concern was made clear, accidentally, by a caller into a popular UK radio show, who gave her name as Tilly.  The show’s guest was a walk-on girl called Jade (these two names could not any more perfectly have captured the class-based difference in taste that was at play here) who was defending herself and her right to her job. Tilly, a yoga teacher, with breathtaking arrogance and a deep inability to see her own hypocrisy, told Jade she should get better educated and that would help her realise that her well-paying job was, in fact, demeaning.

In Internet feminism, using your body for yoga is virtuous. But using your body for darts is wrong. 

If one of the key aspects of patriarchal societies is controlling women’s sexuality — and it is —then we are no longer living in a patriarchal society.  Take Tinder its 1.6 billion daily swipes? (2018 numbers.) The fantasy of faceless sex in Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying was an idea that gave older generations of women a titillating thrill: now it is considered normal. 

The gates of the sexual marketplace have been busted wide open. But instead of leaving a world of balanced male-female relations, our freedom has left us with less understanding of our mutual sexual needs.  And that is partly because Internet feminism’s denial of female sexual agency.

Sex has always been a power game — and women have been power players since time immemorial. Today however, judging by headlines and #MeToo, we are not the masters of sex but its helpless victims.

In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, the internet was awash in stories from young women being propositioned by lecherous men. The young woman was always aghast, horrified, and frozen in place by the utter shock that a man might want to have sex with her. It seemed this new generation of young women, having grown up in the most sexually permissive climate in recent memory, entered into the workforce as sheltered and pious as Samuel Richardson’s ultra-virtuous 18th century maiden Pamela.

Running on a parallel track to these put-upon heroines of Internet feminism, we see an entirely different kind of woman thrown up by popular culture.

My father wrote: “Women might be held in contempt on the street, but walk into any Catholic Church and you find a woman on a pedestal being revered, even worshipped.” Years later, that can be re-written as “scroll through Twitter to find countless women detailing their own vulnerability at the hands of beastly men, but in the church of Beyonce women lustily sing along to songs about being a boss, and being sexually available.” 2020 was the year two female rappers gained chart dominance with WAP, which, for anyone living under a rock, is not an acronym for wireless access points.

Misogyny has always looked upon female beauty with suspicion if not hostility. So why is it that in past centuries — when women were not in control of depictions of themselves — artistic representations of the female form found beauty in the reality of women’s bodies? And why is it that now, when women artists have far greater control over their work, no longer shackled by the dreaded male gaze, they have morphed themselves into hyper-sexualised stripper robots? 

Mainstream culture is hostage to an arms-race of sexual explicitness, even as feminists teach girls that a cat-call from a fat bloke on the street is tantamount to rape.

Meanwhile, Gen X-ers like myself have arrived at middle-age, dealing with family, children, divorce, career and economic uncertainty.Turns out, we are pretty unhappy. My childhood was dominated by my parents’ social and work life. Now, adults’ lives are dominated by their children’s social and school life. Exhausted from complicated schedules, overwhelmed, we spend our evenings drinking alone — and did so long before the pandemic made it compulsory.

For many, men only add to their burden. Middle-class women have traded away competence in their male peers in favour of “equality.” Good, middle-class ‘male feminist’ husbands might favour paternity leave or giving a child the mother’s last name, but when the washing machine breaks, they’re helpless. The woman has to find — and pay — a different man (competent and most likely non-university educated) to do the job. This is, to put it mildly, frustrating. Especially to a woman who is simultaneously running a home and a family and competing in the professional sphere. 

If it sounds like I’m underplaying the existence of woman-hatred in our current environment, it’s because I am. The problem isn’t that misogyny doesn’t exist, or has never existed. The problem is that, although it is no longer the dominant discourse, mainstream conversation continues to push the idea that it is. In the last few years, that discourse has been completely dominated by women who, through education and work, swapped out their own source code for a completely new moral code that teaches that they can, and therefore must,  do everything and be everyone. Most harmfully, it encourages male atrophy. The feminist credo of “having it all” translated into “doing it all,” and that has left women depleted. 

The history of misogyny is real and cruel. But there is another history that runs parallel to it that is equally as real: the collaboration and love between men and women which, through the centuries, ensured the survival of our species. That narrative has been lost, to the detriment of all.

The opposite of misogyny is not hatred of men. The opposite of misogyny is mutual understanding and affection between the sexes. But feminism, in its confrontational as opposed to collaborative approach, has now settled into a position of being the “common sense” of society, and it needs to be challenged.

Reading with my father, Jack Holland, author of Misogyny: a History of the World’s Oldest Prejudice