The Feminist Fourth Wave
The Feminist Fourth Wave
Where to begin? Well I guess the best place is to define what we mean by a "feminist wave". What is a wave? Well for my purposes here, this will be about goings on in my country, the United States, though many of the events overlap with related happenings in many other countries in and around the same time frame. With that established though, it's common to see the term "third wave" used more to describe what's seen as an ongoing period of liberal consensus in the feminist movement that began sometime in the 1980s and is argued to persist today, so it's all one continuous thing, defined by perceived ideology, in this way of thinking. I think this perspective is narrow and fails to account for some highly important developments over the last decade specifically. I also think it more common for people to define a feminist wave in other ways that correspond to surges of activity of some kind more than ideology. Taking both of those things into account, what's really the best way to define a wave of women's advocacy?
Definition 1. Is a wave best defined as a period wherein it's more common than usual for women (or men) to identify as feminists? Well the common historical rates of that hover around 20 to 35% of the American female population, but those can be contrasted with sudden yet short-lived drastic surges in popularity that occurred in the late 1980s (corresponding to the launch of the then-aptly-named Feminist Majority) and once again beginning by roughly early 2016 and lasting through 2023. Throughout that period, surveys on the subject found feminist identification among women generally hovering well above 40% and most often in majority territory, peaking at 61% in the summer of 2020 at the zenith of the George Floyd protests. These surge periods could be considered feminist waves, although I think it's the most narrow possible definition. (See: Gallup's historical tracking poll, 2013 Huffington Post/YouGov poll, 2015 Vox poll, 2016 Washington Post poll <-- surge begins here, 2020 Pew Research survey, 2023 American Enterprise Institute survey, 2024 YouGov poll <-- back to normal.) The surge period, which was clearly underway by early 2016, corresponds to the launch of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and to a wide swath of prominent celebrities ranging from Beyonce Knowles and Taylor Swift to Emma Watson and beyond near-simultaneously proclaiming themselves feminists and defining the term for the public as "equality of the sexes" or "gender equality", belief in that. Suddenly, most of the female population discovered that "I've been a feminist all along and didn't know it!" because equality in the abstract is always popular whether feminist identification is or not. Feminist identification fades from popularity, by contrast, when it becomes more common for the public to perceive it as non-egalitarian.
Definition 2. A more common definition of a feminist wave though would be a period of measurable uptick in street and (these days) online activism. This definition traces the beginning of the most recent North American wave roughly to the infamous SlutWalks of 2011 and its zenith by this metric could be surmised as 2017: a year that began with the first Women's March becoming the most-attended single-day protest action in American history up to that point and ended with Time magazine naming the Me Too movement their Person of the Year. "Feminism" was also the most-searched term in Webster's Dictionary that year. Other arguably related 2017 trivia includes that, for example, all three of the highest-earning Hollywood blockbusters of that year (in the U.S. anyway) had female lead characters for the first and so far only time since 1958. An elevated scale of women's protest continued in subsequent years, but with dropping attendance. The start of the second Trump term this year was marked by a renaming of the Women's March event to "People's March", i.e. no longer women-centric, and drew just 25,000 or so attendees, in comparison to the several million of the original version from '17.
Definition 3. A perhaps still more aesthetic and clarifying definition might be according to political cycles though. Frankly, I think you'll find that political culture has a way of being reset, and therefore shaped to some considerable degree, by elections. When one party wins the presidency, for example, suddenly the opposition party tends to see a surge of public interest and popularity, along with the ideas that are viewed as corresponding to those parties. For example, left wing political opinions, vaguely and broadly defined, are seeing an upswing in popularity right now here in the U.S. since Trump's election. But while history may rhyme with itself, it doesn't repeat, and so no two periods are totally alike; not even two periods of liberal upsurge. The current one doesn't seem to be benefiting the women's movement much, for example, as feminists are commonly blamed for Trump's victory last year and there is seen to be a need for a greater focus on economic populism to better reach the working class. Anyway, by this metric we could define the fourth feminist wave as beginning back at the start of 2007 with the election of Nancy Pelosi to the position of Speaker of the House (a genuinely monumental and unprecedented historical advancement for female representation in the government at the time) and concluding with the defeat of Kamala Harris by Donald Trump last year, with arguably peak period of 2016. In 2016, for example, the Democrats had a female party chair (Debbie Wasserman Schultz), a female presidential nominee for the first time ever (Hillary Clinton), and a female party leader in the House of Representatives (the aforementioned Nancy Pelosi). Since that time, all of that has been reversed and we are now back to all men all the time, at least at the top. Essentially, after Pelosi was first chosen as Speaker of the House, it became more common for women to run for president, yet today it feels inescapably unlikely that we will see another female nominee for the highest office in the land in the foreseeable future after back-to-back defeats, let alone the election of an actual female president. While this definition can be symbolically useful in a lot ways though, it's obviously ultimately a bit superficial.
Definition 4. My personally preferred definition of a feminist wave though is an uptick in intellectual ferment around women's advancement. By this broadest definition of all, the fourth feminist wave could be thought of as beginning as far back as 2004 with the launch of Jessica and Vanessa Valenti's Feministing blog (which you may remember for popularizing the term "sl*t-shaming", among other things); an event that served as the dawn of the feminist blogosphere that eventually (from 2012) included the radfem-adjacent Feminist Current blog I became absorbed with for a time myself, along with many others (the most prominent, of course, being the well-known Jezebel blog (founded in 2007, during the time of Hillary Clinton's first presidential run, for historical perspective) that's now on life support after a couple of sales, but still survives today). Online musing, engagement, and activism has been a defining feature of the feminist fourth wave that has distinguished the whole of it from earlier ones and significantly impacted the course of its development. By this final possible definition, the fourth feminist wave could be said to have peaked roughly around 2017-22, beginning with the #MeToo movement and running through the glory days of r/FemaleDatingStrategy (one of my favorite chapters of the recent wave) before slowly starting to recede more into the background amid emerging birth rate panic. Oh yeah, there were also influential books and papers corresponding to this wave, but I find that their significance pales in comparison to the online stuff overall.
CHAPTER 1: SEXY AND WOKE (BEGINNING-2015)
Whether we define this wave as beginning in 2004 with the founding of the Feministing blog or in 2011 with the first SlutWalk or somewhere in-between, one thing about it is clear: the underlying mindset behind it started really right from where the feminist third wave (essentially late '80s/90s feminism) left off. It's choice of imagery, naming and focus, was sexually charged in a manner that proponents call "owning your sexuality" and the rest of us call engaging in self-objectification so men will like you better, and its ideals leaned heavily individualistic. The movement's focus was on reaching a new generation of young women where they were. A blogosphere that frequently revolved around fashion talk and celebrity gossip and other stereotypical feminine vanities emerged to accomplish this feat, with an order of pro-choice commentary and complaints about the income gap and a narrowly-defined rape culture thrown in on the side, all presented with an air of wit and style befitting a hip young crowd. This was minimal feminism and maximal outreach, perhaps in a certain way appropriate to a moment in time when the women's movement was very unpopular. It was, after all, the age of Spike TV, Ignite Ministries, The Sopranos, Grand Theft Auto, being a P.I.M.P., the peak of Hooters' and Howard Stern's popularity, the age of Twilight and "suicide girls" (remember those?) etc. etc. etc. Christina Aguilera was getting "Stripped" and George W. Bush was a popular president for about half the decade. Epstein was doing his pedo island thing and nobody cared. Feminists were constantly lambasted in the video gaming publications that I consumed and on many popular television programs. That was the cultural backdrop. Just about anything was an improvement over that climate and it followed logically in a way that the up-and-coming feminists of the new scene felt compelled to be apologetic about feminism's angrier, more principled past (what with its unfashionably prudish concerns about the sexual objectification of women's bodies and whatnot) and to embrace aspects of the culture that surrounded them in order to be relevant. This was not for me.
The significance of this moment in time also overlapping with the dawn of the tube porn phenomenon really cannot be overstated. Before 2005 when YouTube came out, the internet was already increasing the volume and commonality of men's pornography consumption and to a far more limited degree women's as well, but contemporaneous surveys made it clear that it remained a small minority of both populations (some 25% of men and 5% of women as of 2002) regularly viewing porn (as in at least monthly) because the internet's main pornographic offerings were all pay sites, often owned by the traditional industry giants (Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler) and the free content that was available online was really all just ads for those pay sites. But once YouTube established a new streaming video concept, inevitably a new generation of pornographers seized upon the new format and ultimately this led to the de facto replacement of the traditional pornographers with today's free video streaming sites like PornHub and XVideos. Over the intervening decade or so that this transition was taking place, the commonality of at-least-monthly pornography consumption among American men and women alike more than doubled, reaching majority territory among men, and the median age of first exposure dropped to as low as 11 in the (deliberate) complete absence of age verification systems. These developments were contemporaneously dubbed a new sexual revolution by the press and celebrated with minimal criticism in most liberal publications. The larger media climate seemed to feel jealous and in need of getting in on the action to stay connected to the mindset of the new generation. Media in general became noticeably more sexualized, particularly when it came to women's bodies.
I highlight this backdrop to make some sense for you of what I liked to call the pornification of the feminist movement, which found expression in and around this time frame in many ways. The SlutWalk movement. "Free the Nipple". In France and eastern Europe, even an ostensibly radical feminist group was getting attention by using female public nudity as a protest tactic. (Spoiler: Femen was created by a man. I'll be you couldn't have guessed that.) Theoretically these were women's advocacy movements, but I think few people remember any such content. For example, the SlutWalks began in April of 2011 in Toronto after a local cop said that if they wish to avoid sexual violence then "women should avoid dressing like sluts", so in theory these were anti-rape protests. The main thing I remember from it all though was scenes of men ogling, laughing at, and photographing scantly-clad marchers, perhaps for future masturbatory purposes or other humiliation. Free the Nipple, meanwhile, was a campaign created in 2012 during pre-production of a film of the same name with the goal of legalizing public toplessness for women of the kind New York authorized around 1990. Of course, so far zero New York women, to my knowledge, have been stupid enough to take advantage of this right and I just can't imagine why. And Femen...sighs...well it was just sad to see even the supposedly radical feminist movement transparently being used as a parasitic, immensely hypocritical vehicle of male sexual exploitation of women.
The development that most epitomized all of this to me occurred in 2013 after Robin Thicke released a song called Blurred Lines about how no doesn't really mean no, which became the pop hit of the year and featured a straight-up softcore porn online music video featuring an abundance of lady nipples, skin-toned panties, and degrading positioning. (Spoiler: All the men were fully dressed.) One Miley Cyrus helped him perform the rapist international anthem, appropriately attired, at that year's MTV Video Music Awards, whereupon she, and she alone, became the subject of the predictable public backlash. In response, Cyrus defended herself by suddenly proclaiming that she was "one of the biggest feminists" and joined Free the Nipple to prove it. This entire dynamic exemplifies the sheer stupidity and rarely-concealed misogyny of this whole era in American culture.
That's not to say there were no good or worthwhile feminist scenes or forms of activism around during this window of time by any means! The Everyday Sexism Project, founded by British writer Laura Bates for the purpose of encouraging (mainly) girls and women to speak out about and raise awareness of often more casual and typical forms of gendered treatment they receive in their everyday lives, was one that I participated in myself. In a similar vein, in October of 2014, the YouTube video 10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman went viral by powerfully documenting 108 incidents of catcalls, stalking, and other street harassment a normally-dressed woman endured simply for walking the streets of New York. Projects like these served to prove a problem existed in society. Being a lifelong, avid video gamer though, the effort I was personally most invested in in and around this time was the defense of Anita Sarkeesian's Tropes vs. Women in Video Games web video series analyzing in-depth and critiquing the representation of women in video games throughout the history of the medium.
Anita's defenders were mainly headquartered over on the r/GirlGamers subreddit. She faced a great volume of harassment and death and rape threats for her efforts and was forced to flee her home more than once over a couple of especially plausible ones during 2014's infamous Gamergate campaign "for ethics in video game journalism", which happened partially in response to the publication of her Women as Background Decoration videos within that series. Anita's tone and work differed from what was typical at the time in that she had notably been an early critic of the SlutWalk movement and of liberal "choice feminism", and to some extent hook-up culture itself, was known to speak of radical feminism in positive terms, and her Tropes vs. Women series included extensive critiques of "mainstream" pornographers and of prostitution that generated backlash from liberals (example) in addition to conservatives and conversely positive coverage over on the contemporaneously radfem-adjacent Feminist Current blog I mentioned before. In fact, that was how I first discovered the Feminist Current blog.
Well, Sarkeesian's views were a sort of mixture of radfem and woke politics at the time and eventually she abandoned the former in favor of a complete embrace of the latter in a way that I noticed right after Trump's election in 2016.This brings me to the subject of wokeness. I throw the term around, people throw the term around, but what does it mean? When I think of wokeness, I think specifically of intersectionality theory and the general politics thereof. It's a worldview that says, among other things, that it is wrong for women to prioritize our own interests and instead must find and make common cause with men of color, gay men, disabled men, poor men, sex buyers, "the trans community", literally anyone belonging to any religious minority group, and so on and so on in order to realize the defeat of patriarchal social systems because these things are all deeply interwoven and connected to each other, you see. It's pertinent to say as much because this was the time period when wokeness really came to infect the mainstream of the women's movement in a big and defining way. Intersectionality theory had been around for some time already, of course, but as Rebecca Traister has aptly documented, it was really the 2008 primary contest between Hillary Clinton (a white woman) and Barack Obama (a black man) that served as a turning point in the way the movement thought about issues of race and identity more broadly. It was felt that the primary contest had exposed sexist elements in the Obama camp and racist ones in the Clinton camp and that there was, accordingly, a need to focus on reconciling demographic (racial in particular) differences. In a way, one could construe the Kamala Harris nomination years later as a logical conclusion of this project. I'd say there's been both good and bad to intersectionality politics, but personally tend to view them as distinct from what I'm about at the end of the day.
CHAPTER 2: HIGH-VALUE DATING (2015-22)
The year 2015 marked the beginning of a new chapter in the history of women's advocacy. That new chapter began with, and was in many ways caused by, the presidential campaign of Donald Trump and his subsequent election. I'll draw your attention to this chart from a few years back:
(Source)
You'll notice that before 2017 -- the year Trump first assumed office -- American women were generally contented with the overall treatment of their sex by society. After Trump's election, never again. I point this out to highlight the profound and historic impact this one pig alone has had on women's overall immiseration and consciousness of their interests as a class. Though 2016's was an election won on a legal technicality and not on, y'know, getting the most votes, it was nonetheless an election that proved men would rather vote for a rapist than a woman; sooner a man with no prior experience in government whatsoever than a consummate professional who was female; that society would hypocritically penalize a woman for inauthenticity after robbing her of her very name. This was not about victory, it was about humiliation. Gendered humiliation specifically. As much was, in my estimation, the main reason the Republicans nominated Trump to represent them in that particular contest in the first place.
Everyone knew Hillary Clinton was going to be the Democratic Party's candidate that cycle right from the outset. The only questions were what margin she'd win the nomination by and who her Republican opponent would be. Trump was a deliberate choice of opponent calculated to respond specifically to that candidate; the first female major party nominee in the nation's history. He was not just a man and not just a sexist, but a cartoon. Upon launching his bid for the presidency, he had to sell the Miss Universe beauty pageant. He'd created the first ever casino in Atlantic City to feature an in-house strip club. He'd been featured on the cover of Playboy magazine and had to buy the silence of his first wife on a rape accusation to the tune of $14 million plus properties. His current wife was/is a former fashion model 24 years his junior, i.e. easily young enough to be his daughter. When a debate moderator questioned how he talked about women, he responded with a veiled threat, the downstream effect of which ultimately cost that moderator her job at Fox News (though, being a certifiable pick-me, she eventually forgave despite the fact that he never apologized to her for anything and now the two enjoy a one-sided friendship, pff). It seemed like half his (granted high-turnover) campaign staff at any given point in time had a police record that involved battery of at least one woman. Indeed, much of the marvelous Trump family fortune itself originated from a brothel Donald's grandfather had run for miners. In other words, one did not have to look far to find evidence that Trump saw members of the female sex as scarcely more than slabs of meat because the evidence was everywhere and overwhelming. Nominating not just a moid, but that moid to go up against the Democratic Party's first female nominee ever was a deliberate choice. That choice was about humiliation. Then, as the election itself approached, came the Access Hollywood video and the corresponding testimonies, the Howard Stern recording where he boasted of walking in on teen girls undressing in their locker rooms, the revelation of him berating a pageant contestant for her weight...and then the pig's victory despite it all. Or was it "despite it all" or more like because of it all? There was no way to read the outcome but as a validation of sexual predation itself and women responded accordingly.
Women began banding together immediately after Trump's ethically dubious election victory and well I think we here in this community know that the result was the first Women's March and that it drew a hitherto unprecedented (in this country unprecedented anyway) total of several million to the streets, mostly protesting against their country's decision to legitimize male sexual aggression and violence against women. I was there too. Well you know this, Cloven Hooves, just as you're familiar with the #MeToo movement that surged into mainstream visibility with its revelations about prominent film director Harvey Weinstein later in the same year. What I'm trying to highlight here is the connection between these things; the fact that Trump's election changed the climate in such a way as to instill genuine fear in women across the country and even beyond. There is no question in my mind that Me Too wouldn't have become the sweeping cultural phenomenon that it did had Hillary Clinton won the previous year's election instead. One might think of the likes of Harvey Weinstein, Larry Nasser, Bill Cosby, pedo Senate candidate Roy Moore (remember him?), with their hundreds of victims, as essentially fall guys for that most obvious predator of all who was untouchable (so to speak). And no, it mostly certainly was not just some movement of elites as it's been sometimes vilified by detractors. Across the country, and indeed much of the world, victims of sexual harassment were dramatically emboldened to give voice to their suffering and to seek out some kind of justice for themselves and did exactly that. Sexual harassment complaints and lawsuits jumped significantly in and around this time frame. There was something cathartic and liberating about the whole experience and we were in pain and terror and needed that encouragement and catharsis. This is where the story of this feminist wave ends though in the telling of liberals because that's where they wanted it to end. In truth though, it was just the beginning. The real beginning.
Hints that something bigger than critiques of what we formally call sexual harassment and rape was in demand were noticeable when Kristen Roupenian's short story Cat Person, published in the New Yorker in December of 2017 (i.e. a few months into the #MeToo surge), went viral online. It's worth noting that this popular fictional story wasn't about the typical stuff of Me Too accounts. It was instead a story about the nature of modern-day dating that resonated very broadly with women. Simply put, it's about a 20-year-old student who is conned into sex by a 34-year-old man through deceptive texts (that frequently involve cute running jokes about the man's ostensible two cats that our victim eventually notices don't seem to exist in his home; hence the title of the piece). A witty and charming man in text messages proves to be a charmless liar in real life. Following her disgusting sexual experience, she resolves to break up with him. Yet still not wanting to offend the parasite, she struggles for the right words and ultimately gets a friend to impersonate her for the breakup text, following which he begins to pursue her...yeah. That so many women found this fictional tale relatable turned out to be an early sign of things to come.
The next stop on our journey into the last decade's dating revolution is the Aziz Ansari case. Ansari, of course, was/is an award-winning actor who claimed to be a supporter of the Me Too movement and wore one of those cute little Time's Up pins while he was accepting a win in the Best Actor category at the Golden Globes at the start of 2018. One of his dates was repulsed by that, which she saw as hypocrisy based on her experience with him, which she went public with in response. Her account can be read here. The summary version is that, on their one date, he had rushed through dinner at the bar he'd invited her to before bringing her back to his apartment, then immediately kissed, fondled, and performed oral sex on her, which she reciprocated. But when things kept escalating with Ansari saying he'd go get a condom within minutes of their first kiss, Grace (a pseudonym) said she felt uncomfortable at how quickly things were moving and voiced her hesitation. He seemed to acknowledge, but kept pursuing and aggressively pestering her for intercourse for an hour, accompanied by a few more make-out sessions that Grace was clearly reluctant to keep participating in. She was finally allowed to leave in tears after enough resistance, but not without multiple assaults. It's clear from her account that the 34-year-old actor had simply aimed to get the 22-year-old woman drunk so that her resistance to having sex on their first date would be down. This was, in other words, a classic case of what we generously call a "bad date", i.e. one wherein a woman narrowly avoids rape. The Atlantic, the New York Times, the New York Post, CNN, and more all came out with statements denouncing Grace for her story, although it's worth pointing out that this was no mere rumor; Ansari acknowledged that it happened, claiming it was simply a matter of miscommunication. This was the point where the press largely jumped ship on the Me Too movement for its perceived direction -- the kind of questions it was leading to -- and it's noteworthy for that. The thing is that while liberals wanted to limit the Me Too conversation to the question of consent, many women wanted to have a broader conversation about so-called "bad dates" and the more general relationship between the sexes that went beyond just whether surface-level consent to sexual activity was offered. The problem was bigger than that.
2018 was when I first started to notice the term "high-value dating" trending on TikTok videos and whatnot and I suspect that's not a coincidence. While I don't have a comprehensive history of the origins of this concept on hand, what I do know is that it was certainly no coincidence that it began to catch on as a concept with many women in tandem with the evolution of the Me Too convo in the direction I've been describing. The concept has had many variations that range from promoting rigid dating traditionalism to something very much like sugar baby type gold-digging, but what they have in common is a goal of raising the price of sex. The following year (2019) saw the creation of a feminist-friendly version in the form of r/FemaleDatingStrategy and it quickly caught on, amassing a membership of some 240,000 during its three-year prime before the fateful decision was made to take the sub private (thus rendering it irrelevant) in early 2022, which made it the second-biggest female-only subreddit in existence behind only Two X Chromosomes (which is just an all-purpose women's sub), and its impact reverberated through the culture exponentially beyond that, with clear influence widely visible across TikTok and many other social media platforms.
I'm seriously not trying to oversell this. To put it a certain way, it can be said that each feminist wave has had an organization that's served as its distinctive center of gravity. In the first wave (at least at its zenith) here in the U.S., it was the National Women's Party. During the second wave, it was the National Organization for Women. During the third wave, it was the Feminist Majority. During the fourth wave it had been, up to this point, Women's March, Inc. But between a major and demoralizing split caused by accusations of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia by its rival factions on the one hand and the onset of Covid restrictions on the other, Women's March, Inc. had largely fallen apart and become far less influential by 2020, while online spaces naturally grew and thrived with most public places and businesses closed or operating on capacity limits. r/FemaleDatingStrategy functionally replaced Women's March, Inc. as the vanguard of the women's movement in the U.S. in 2020-21, becoming the new center of its intellectual ferment.
I would describe the Female Dating Strategy as a feminist revolt against sexual liberalism broadly: against hookup culture, dating apps, pornography, polyamory, sado-masochism, and low expectations, and in favor of hypergamy, strong boundaries, and self-respect. The FDS Handbook (still available here) has been described by some as "the red pill for women" and I think that may be a good characterization too in the sense that, in modern online parlance, to be anything other than "blue pilled" is to embrace some amount of evolutionary psychology/biology and, as Louise Perry has pointed out, that's what they did. These are growing fields of knowledge the women's movement dismisses and neglects to involve itself in at its own peril. Learnings thereof have been weaponized by the ranks of the moidnet (or "online manosphere" if you prefer a more respectful term, which I don't) to create the modern version of pick-up artistry. FDS was created in no small part as a response to this development, weaponizing evolutionary psychology to the benefit of women, thus creating a new and exciting kind of difference feminism! To be sure, they weren't out to save the world, but to give women helpful and based life tools with which to navigate the world as it exists in the practical. Nonetheless there were obvious areas of overlap between their way of thinking and the values of radical feminists as well, to which end radfems were well-represented there too (in fact, no shortage of new radfems were created by exposure to FDS culture), as were all sorts of women for that matter, including a few conservatives, progressives, and really everyone but your standard-issue sex-positive libfems. It was the rest of us against that value set and the world it represented and the resultant philosophy was a sort of unique fusion of all the corresponding ideas.
It wasn't just FDS though. This was also a period of great intellectual ferment and creativity in the women's movement more broadly. For example, you Cloven Hooves will recognize this as the period wherein r/GenderCritical took off as well, corresponding to a wave of feminist activity in Britain against proposed reforms to the country's Gender Recognition Act that were designed to deftly erase women as a recognized category of human beings for all legal purposes. You will, of course, be intimately familiar with the finer details, so I'll move on fairly quickly here, but I thought it worth taking just a moment to formally acknowledge this since, while the gender critical movement never really took off in a big way here in the United States the way it did in the UK, the Gender Critical sub (which I discovered through the aforementioned Feminist Current blog) and the YouTube vlogs of Magdalen Berns (which I also discovered through Feminist Current) impacted my way of thinking about the gender identity question.
I wasn't sure what to make of it for a long time, tbh. I was of course familiar with the loss of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival and whatnot, but like so many other feminists, my instinct was to try and empathize with and understand the position of trans-identified people, being as I wasn't the most "normal" person myself. At the same time though, the more I kept hearing about the privacy and safety issues in connection to women's spaces and began to see the clear advantages that male athletes have over female ones in so many areas, the more I began to question. What really broke through to me though was this interview Feminist Current's Meghan Murphy did with Dr. Sheila Jeffreys in late 2016 wherein she discussed the influence of neoliberal corporatization policies on a bunch of stuff happening in many modern colleges and universities, including the advent of "queer studies" and the devolution of women's studies to "gender studies", among other things. I found it fascinating and Jeffreys' manner of speaking about queer politics -- simply describing "trans-women" as men and so forth -- very clarifying in a way that the apologetic mincing of words on the subject I'd been been more frequently exposed to hadn't been. It made me realize I wasn't crazy for seeing what I was seeing and hearing what I was hearing: the gender identity movement actually is a load of anti-feminist, anti-woman, and anti-reality bullshit! And it was important for that kind of clarity to come from someone like her in particular -- a long-time political lesbian activist and scholar in women's studies -- rather than, y'know, Mike Huckabee or something because I was more inclined to question my senses than to trust Mike Huckabee, lol!
I needed to hear these things in plain English, not compromised Wokenese (e.g. "biological male" (as if there were some other kind), "trans-identified male" (which it took me a long time to figure out meant something other than "trans-man"), etc.), and I needed to hear it from someone I could trust; someone who both knew of these matters more than I did and whom I could be confident was on my side. It was quite natural for me to jump from that place to the Gender Critical subreddit and so forth and be encouraged by the activism I was seeing over in the UK.Well Magdalen Berns passed away in 2019 (rest in power, sister!) and the Gender Critical sub was banned the next year as part of a larger wave of wokeness that was sweeping academic and corporate culture at the time, but I think it worth recording that Berns had accrued some 30,000 followers on her YouTube channel before her death and r/GenderCritical had amassed over 64,000 members before it was banned. Anyway, that wave of woke censorship policies interestingly brings me to my next topic: incels.
In early 2018 there was a wave of terrorist attacks in the United States and Canada committed by men describing themselves as "involuntarily celibate", or incels for short, or who belonged to the online incel community. Among these was the 2018 Parkland shooting, which was the deadliest high school massacre in American history and touched off a wave of protests for gun control that culminated in the March For Our Lives, which was reportedly attended by a million people, making it the single largest protest action against gun violence in American history. I think you could say that, in a world historic sense, these developments happening in that window of time was in essence a kind of male reaction to the onset of the Me Too movement. Naturally, these actions met with a wave of condemnation from mainstream society and in fact "incel" essentially replaced "faggot" as society's new go-to insult describing male losers in general for some time. It also naturally created some public interest in the finer details of incel culture, mostly from a kind of morbid curiosity. I was among those morbidly curious, mostly because, embarrassingly enough, I was feeling kind of lonely myself at the time. The origins were a bit interesting. It turned out that the term "incel" was originally coined by a lesbian who had reached her late 20s without going on a single proper date back in the 1990s, news articles soon revealed, stoking my curiosity further. The internet soon unearthed a smaller, parallel variation for women, known as femcels, headquartered over on r/TruFemcels. I joined. Not to commit a shooting of course (the female variation isn't known for violence), but because, well, I was struggling to find a girlfriend and couldn't help finding a lot of what I saw there relatable sentiment. My various neuroses had a way of repelling others, unfortunately.
This was a bad chapter in my life, but it's worth discussing a little bit because there was some lasting impact on my worldview.So I've focused mostly here on the big developments of the feminist fourth wave in order to try and paint a clear picture of its basic direction and femcels were/are more of fringe scene and not always feminists by any means (some yes, some no), but I'm diverging here to a brief discussion of them in order to further capture the kind of ferment that was going on during this time. The thing that's relevant here is that r/TruFemcels was my introduction to the black pill, which is sort of internet parlance for doomer-ism, specifically in the sense of biological determinism. (Well, sometimes femcels call their particular variation "the pink pill" to be cute and unique, but black pill describes the broad, overall phenomenon of biological determinist doomer-ism online.) The community believed they were unlovable for genetic characteristics and features beyond their control -- mostly, but not only, outward appearance -- and that the only hope was to cosmetically alter one's body to match basic expectations of beauty and to learn to be a sigma type. I estimate that roughly 100% of the r/TruFemcels community had some kind of severe mental illness, with depressive disorders being by far the most common, often intermingled with PTSD and other conditions rooted in experiences of child abuse. Also very common was extreme social anxiety. In my case, my tendency to self-isolate had caused me to lose a firm command of the English language to the point where I sounded less coherent than Joe Biden when trying to speak to others without the excuse of advanced age. It was humiliating. Much of that was rooted in embarrassment about my past and lack of achievements in life that I didn't want to have to share with others, which left me with little that I felt comfortable sharing about myself. For me, just talking to someone one-on-one had gotten to be a bit like stage fright is to more normal people: a task so petrifying that I'd go out of my way to avoid it, which of course only worsened my condition over time. It felt hopeless and I felt right at home with other, similarly depressed women who shared lots of my nerdy, introverted interests like anime and video games and certain gothic sensibilities (yes, I'm using dark mode
), frequent suicide fantasies, and yes a certain jealous resentment of those with more intimate success in life. Being as women are reputed for being more sociable creatures than men simply made my situation all the more embarrassing and I didn't see the feminist movement proper taking up issues like these. That is, until I discovered r/FemaleDatingStrategy!Basically, FDS gave me lots of tools for success that I simply didn't glean anywhere else and, above all, a sense that I was worth effort. Over time I found myself becoming more sociable and able to project more confidence and soon I met the woman who would become my wife!
So I found my way out of femceldom and became less of a doomer...about the possibility of finding someone for me anyway. But along the way I absorbed some real truths about the nature of who is predator and who is prey in life and hard truths about romance indeed having a game aspect to it that have stuck with me. And it wasn't the end of my connection to black pilled thinking either. I discovered r/BlackPilledFeminism through the femcel community and remained on its private forums after the subreddit was banned. (Reddit closed all black pill subs over the course of 2020-21 due to an offensive lack of wokeness. Femcels, incidentally, have actually regrouped under a new humor-oriented sub appropriately called Yandere Psycho Femcel Girlfriend Grippy Sock Jail (which is just about the most deeply online name choice ever, ha ha!) but it's really not a theory one like the old one was. I'm not a member, but I visit it for witty, misandrist memes sometimes. 
) I remained a frequenter of the autonomous Black Pilled Feminism message board throughout my stay with FDS. To sum it up, black pilled feminism is a fringe scene mostly composed of former radical feminists that contends that equality of the sexes is an unattainable goal because both male and female biology are programmed to strive for the predator-prey relationship. Common opinions on the forums include a belief that the advancement of women toward a more equal station in life only creates more male resentment that ultimately will bubble over into proper conquest that women will be both unable and unwilling to successfully defeat. Some nightmare vision of the future resembling what you saw or read about in The Handmaid's Tale or some variation on it is common and black pilled feminists sometimes advocate for solutions like driving men extinct by some means or other, but with an overriding doubt that as much is even possible or ever will be. Although I must concede to being less strictly deterministic about it all than these women are, I came to lean toward a lot of their convictions over time and still consider myself at least adjacent the black pilled space fundamentally. I am not an optimist. And yes, I kind of hate men if you haven't noticed. I also resent nature for being what it is.(Evolutionary psychology also, incidentally, informs my current, updated view of the trans debate. While I find the gender identity movement no less absurd than I did as a conventional radfem, I find some of the gender abolitionist contentions about it silly and intellectually dishonest now, particularly on the discovery that like half the trans-identified community specifically counts themselves "non-binary". It's obvious to me now that serious feminist critiques of queer politics are grounded in a recognition of human biology and nature, not a subjectivist pretension that there's nothing innate about the sexes. A more conservative framing? Perhaps. I just don't care. I care about the truth.)
But not all post-radfem spaces being built in and around that time frame were doomer ones. Enter Womad, which I discovered via Feminist Current articles discussing stuff like Escape the Corset and the anti-molka (spycam) protests of 2018.
How to describe Womad? Basically, it's a Korean Reddit-style site for women and anything you've heard about it before in radfem media is the censored version intended to make it palatable to snowflakey Westerners, ha ha! It was created by women who seceded from a South Korean radfem site of a similar style called Megalia back close to a decade ago over the presence of male administrators and censorship of critiques of gay men. Censorship of women's voices led the majority of Megalia's members to leave for other places, with a new board called Womad absorbing the most defectors. Initially Womad described themselves as "radical lesbian feminists" and practitioners of 4B and Escape the Corset (Korean-style female separatism and beauty culture resistance scenes), but soon ditched these trappings, redefining themselves as female supremacists united around a belief that women are biologically superior to men (which is because we are) and a goal of establishing a matriarchal social order. It's my favorite site on the internet.
It goes without saying that these women practice 6B4T (the most extreme version of South Korean female separatism; one that I must admit goes too far in its restrictiveness even for me (I must be allowed anime, sorry)) and practice mirroring as a linguistic tactic popularized back on Megalia. You may have heard of the 2018 anti-molka (spycam) protest wave that swept Seoul and some other parts of South Korea? The largest feminist protests in the country's history? Like this one?
As you can see, the Korean version of the recent feminist wave was of bolder and generally superior content compared to ours. That's in no small part because no men were allowed to participate. I take a lot more inspiration from it, honestly, than from anything that's happened here in the last decade. But anyway, those protests were in response to a Womad woman being imprisoned and forced to apologize for exposing a male flasher using a tiny spycam. Since these tiny spy cameras are frequently hidden in their homes, inside the stalls of women's restrooms, etc., with the recorded content subsequently uploaded to pornographic web sites, typically with impunity despite the law, Korean women were incensed that the rare occasion on which the law was strictly enforced was also the rare occasion on which the culprit was a woman and the victim a man. You might call her actions an inciting incident, in other words.
Alrighty, I think I've captured both the essence and the general ferment of this period, so now onto...
CHAPTER 3: THE BATTLE OVER CHILDBIRTH (2022-PRESENT)
Back here in the U.S., the Dobbs decision allowing the individual states to regulate and outlaw abortion as they see fit changed the nature of the conversation overnight. From here, the issue of childbirth would take center stage.
To be sure, conflict over a woman's right to lead a degrading heterosexual lifestyle without being needlessly forced into motherhood against her will had been brewing for some time already. After all, a moid's relationship to the life-giving process is a more distant, remote, removed one than that of a woman, to which end the whole history of patriarchy has been the story of men trying to gain control of the life-giving process by force to compensate for their own inability to give birth. That's why they invent myths that invert the biological realities of childbirth: myths about the first woman somehow being birthed by a man, about male gods being the life-giving creation ones, and so on, as to reassure themselves that, counterintuitively, they are nature's default sex and we are the aberrational deformities no matter how physiologically obvious it is that the opposite is true. So naturally men are still trying to impose their control over the birthing process.
That said, these struggles ebb and flow. The advent of reasonably reliable birth control in the 1960s, together with growing academic concerns about an over-populated planet lacking sufficient natural resources to provide, made for an ebbing. Human beings' position atop the food chain had become so thoroughly dominant that it was no longer necessary, or even ecologically sustainable, for couples to keep having numerous children, and so women began to have fewer, accrued more leisure time as a result, and naturally began to yearn for more to do; for more options in life. The rest is history. The same can be said of much of the world's growing tolerance for same-sex relationships, which are obviously less likely to yield more children, from that same window of time. Most of a woman's, and especially a lesbian's, modern freedom has been built on the foundation of a declining birth rate and of that being viewed positively. And while abortion here in the U.S. has been fiercely opposed by many since it was legalized and met with waves of forced clinic closings brought about by all sorts of means both regulatory and violent, the real-world effect on women's bodily autonomy had been effectively mitigated to the point of near-irrelevance by increasing public access to contraceptives, which women naturally prefer over having to go through abortions anyway, as well as, more recently, the advent and deregulation of mail-order abortion pills. Until the Dobbs decision! Consequent abortion prohibitions across many U.S. states have been so severe and unconditional that they've forced birth rates to begin rising unnaturally therein, at the cost of many girl's and women's lives. And it's worth pointing out that we are not the only country currently moving in said direction either; just the richest one.
Naturally women, as well as liberals and some some libertarians, have reacted will alarm! In many states (including, mercifully, mine), subsequent ballot initiatives have succeeded in enshrining a woman's right to end an unwanted pregnancy into their constitutions to some degree or other and the movement to advance such initiatives and to try and reform the way Supreme Court appointments work has taken up much space in the feminist conversation that was previously absorbed by other topics. One won't be surprised to learn though that legal solutions aren't the only ones women have pursued.
Young women have undergone voluntary sterilization (one might say permanent birth contraception) at twice the pre-Dobbs rate. Perhaps more pointedly, anti-natalist content began to achieve significant popularity on social media after Dobbs as well. At the end of 2022, a pregnant woman named Yuni, who became a new mother that year, compiled a snarky list of pros and cons to having a child and posted regular updates on them to TikTok. The cons quickly came to outnumber the pros by a wide margin until, in its final iteration, The List, which you can see here, included 350 cons and 35 pros, which would be a ratio of 10 to 1 on the negative side. The List, as it came to simply be known, went viral, with her original video quickly amassing 11.5 million likes (that again is just the likes, not the total views!) by the start of the new year. The term "DINK", shorthand for "dual-income, no children" entered mainstream circulation. High-value dating was substantially replaced by what became known as the decenter men movement, which de-emphasized attachment to men and prioritized self-care. (It's sometimes been called "dump him feminism" after influencer Florence Given popularized the phrase.) One of my favorite manifestations of the decenter men trend was Elle Ray's Spoiled Girlie Support Group podcast while it was publicly available on YouTube. Elle Ray was a married heterosexual woman who made it her mission to encourage other women to surround themselves only with sources of positivity and uplift and the pursuit of exclusively female friendships and embraced a goddess-centered spirituality similar to that of Mary Daly and her videos often brought home a lot of powerful truths about how much more men need us than we need them. She too was proudly childfree.
Dovetailing with the ascendance of the aforementioned decenter men movement were a few waves of online interest in South Korea's 4B movement. The first of these took place on various social medias immediately after the Dobbs decision, with another hitting TikTok in a fairly big way in the spring of 2024, touched off by this cute little short video that drew over a million likes (that's just the likes), and finally once more immediately after Trump's election last year. For the unenlightened, 4B means "four no's" in English. The four no's are, roughly translated:
- No husband.
- No boyfriend.
- No baby.
- No sex with men.
Personally, I frequently follow it on the 4B Movement subreddit, which is my current favorite sub. Anyway, you can see how recent events will have radicalized some women. Trump's second election -- second time specifically defeating a woman, in this case after losing to a man last time (which I'm sure is just a coincidence 
) -- even managed to generate sympathetic editorials for 4B from the woke publications (not the bland regular business-type liberal ones, the properly progressive ones) ranging from the Guardian (article linked above) to Vox, Vanity Fair, Wired (which approvingly noted participation by gay men trans-women), the queer-themed Advocate, Jezebel, and even the normally aggressively sex-positive Cosmopolitan (after having rebuked it just a few months prior). Broadly favorable commentary could likewise be found on the woke ResetEra message board right after Trump's second win. But this brief breakthrough into a space adjacent the cultural mainstream brings me to the subject of the inevitable backlash.One had to sense that with all this decentering men, this "going boy sober", the social media celebration of "short kings", the Eras Tour becoming the biggest-earning music tour of all time, a certain Barbie movie with a less-than-thoroughly-disapproving attitude toward the concept of matriarchy and goddess worship becoming the biggest box office smash of 2023, and "Childless Cat Lady" shirts surfacing at the Democratic National Convention in support of Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party's second female nominee for president in three cycles, some kind of compromised, commercialized variation on radical feminism that passionately celebrated all things frilly and feminine (including feminine men), embraced capitalism and trans politics and whatnot while finding itself at peace with permanent singleness and childfree living was starting to become socially acceptable in a fairly broad way, at least with women. The line between mainstream liberal and radical feminism was starting to get a bit fuzzy. The drift had gone too far for men to accept. Forceful push-back was bound to happen. We all know what the electoral result was, but it's more pointed to discuss the aftermath because the aftermath has been built on the foundation of said electoral outcome. I'm namely speaking of the ascendance of liberal masculinism.
We here on Cloven Hooves are well aware of pick-up artist, pornographer, pimp, child rapist, pious Muslim, and self-described misogynist influencer Andrew Tate's moment in the sun back in 2022 when Google searches for his name outpaced those for Donald Trump. What you may have paid less attention to was the movement that one Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution began among liberal elites in the aftermath. Systematically weaponizing fears that more characters like Tate might enter the cultural mainstream in the future, Reeves subsequently made it his mission to offer what Idrees Kahloon has aptly called "a wide menu of policies designed to foster a ‘prosocial masculinity for a postfeminist world". Notice the expression "postfeminist world" here. Reeves has gone on to found the American Institute for Boys and Men and churn out videos that have racked up millions of views; videos with titles like "Male Inequality" on how modern society ostensibly privileges women over men. After all, women, being the dumber sex as we all know, are realizing higher levels of educational attainment than their male counterparts everywhere on Earth that they are allowed to, including the United States. Something must be done. But most importantly though, the birth rate has fallen too low. It is below the population replacement level and still dropping and this is unacceptable, as it may lead to worker shortages in the future. These sorts of things. And if we don't do what he says, the next generation of men will just have to keep going fascist. There's no alternative. Precisely because of his liberal orientation, he has been able to influence Democrats and Democratic politicians, especially since Trump's recent election victory.
I believe we have all noticed that since last year's election, the Democratic Party's camps have largely split on the question on the question of whether to continue embracing feminism at all, with the "moderate" camp championing the idea that today it is men who are oppressed by women and require society's focused attention and assistance. Without formally abandoning pro-choice politics or gay rights, they champion outreach to the moidnet as a priority over the restoration and securing of those rights, and gateway pro-natalist policies designed, for now, to incentivize childbirth (although I think we know where they're objectively leading, as there is factually no way to reverse the entire Earth's current birth rate decline without beginning to restrict women's freedom). This is the Bill Maher / James Carville / Chris and Andrew Cuomo branch of Democratic politics I'm talking about and it's noticeably expanded since the election. Liberal (i.e. ostensibly "egalitarian") masculinism, for example, has in recent months been publicly espoused by Senators Ruben Gallego of Arizona and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, as well as Governors Gavin Newsom of California and Wes Moore of Maryland, among the prominent examples I can think of off the top of my head. The "moderate" wing's embrace of masculinity politics leaves only the party's progressive wing still formally in the feminist camp.
I want to close this out by really stressing the significance of this shift we're seeing in attitudes toward the birth rate because that is, in a world-historic sense, the main force driving the current backlash against the women's movement, as in not just here, but globally. Birth rate panic. It's a mindset exactly opposite the "population bomb" mindset that allowed us to win most of the freedoms that we enjoy today. When the world decides that over-population is no longer a concern and that instead a future that could include worker shortages is of greater concern than ecological sustainability, that is a mindset that can and will ultimately undo those hard-won freedoms that we have today. It invalidates ideas like birth control, abortion, gayness, singleness, and childlessness as options detrimental to humanity, and without those options, how many women will be able to remain in the professional world or otherwise enjoy any sense of financial independence from men? How much control over their lives at home will they in turn enjoy without those things; without any financial independence or ability to avoid unwanted pregnancies, etc.? That is where this new trajectory can and will lead unless it is stopped, if we even can stop it.
I'm of the opinion that Richard Reeves is the most dangerous person in the English-speaking world right now and should be considered public enemy number one by the women's movement. JD Vance is next after that.
I regard this as a past-tense phenomenon anyway. Being a certifiable nerd who enjoys doing things like this, I just felt like providing a broad and general overview of, and hopefully some perspective on, the major goings on in and around the women's movement over the last couple decades or so, which mostly overlaps with the time that I've been involved. Consider this a loose outline of the history that's taken simply from my own viewpoint and experience, and feel free to share your own perspectives, experiences, disagreements, all of that!
Where to begin? Well I guess the best place is to define what we mean by a "feminist wave". What is a wave? Well for my purposes here, this will be about goings on in my country, the United States, though many of the events overlap with related happenings in many other countries in and around the same time frame. With that established though, it's common to see the term "third wave" used more to describe what's seen as an ongoing period of liberal consensus in the feminist movement that began sometime in the 1980s and is argued to persist today, so it's all one continuous thing, defined by perceived ideology, in this way of thinking. I think this perspective is narrow and fails to account for some highly important developments over the last decade specifically. I also think it more common for people to define a feminist wave in other ways that correspond to surges of activity of some kind more than ideology. Taking both of those things into account, what's really the best way to define a wave of women's advocacy?
Definition 1. Is a wave best defined as a period wherein it's more common than usual for women (or men) to identify as feminists? Well the common historical rates of that hover around 20 to 35% of the American female population, but those can be contrasted with sudden yet short-lived drastic surges in popularity that occurred in the late 1980s (corresponding to the launch of the then-aptly-named Feminist Majority) and once again beginning by roughly early 2016 and lasting through 2023. Throughout that period, surveys on the subject found feminist identification among women generally hovering well above 40% and most often in majority territory, peaking at 61% in the summer of 2020 at the zenith of the George Floyd protests. These surge periods could be considered feminist waves, although I think it's the most narrow possible definition. (See: Gallup's historical tracking poll, 2013 Huffington Post/YouGov poll, 2015 Vox poll, 2016 Washington Post poll <-- surge begins here, 2020 Pew Research survey, 2023 American Enterprise Institute survey, 2024 YouGov poll <-- back to normal.) The surge period, which was clearly underway by early 2016, corresponds to the launch of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and to a wide swath of prominent celebrities ranging from Beyonce Knowles and Taylor Swift to Emma Watson and beyond near-simultaneously proclaiming themselves feminists and defining the term for the public as "equality of the sexes" or "gender equality", belief in that. Suddenly, most of the female population discovered that "I've been a feminist all along and didn't know it!" because equality in the abstract is always popular whether feminist identification is or not. Feminist identification fades from popularity, by contrast, when it becomes more common for the public to perceive it as non-egalitarian.
Definition 2. A more common definition of a feminist wave though would be a period of measurable uptick in street and (these days) online activism. This definition traces the beginning of the most recent North American wave roughly to the infamous SlutWalks of 2011 and its zenith by this metric could be surmised as 2017: a year that began with the first Women's March becoming the most-attended single-day protest action in American history up to that point and ended with Time magazine naming the Me Too movement their Person of the Year. "Feminism" was also the most-searched term in Webster's Dictionary that year. Other arguably related 2017 trivia includes that, for example, all three of the highest-earning Hollywood blockbusters of that year (in the U.S. anyway) had female lead characters for the first and so far only time since 1958. An elevated scale of women's protest continued in subsequent years, but with dropping attendance. The start of the second Trump term this year was marked by a renaming of the Women's March event to "People's March", i.e. no longer women-centric, and drew just 25,000 or so attendees, in comparison to the several million of the original version from '17.
Definition 3. A perhaps still more aesthetic and clarifying definition might be according to political cycles though. Frankly, I think you'll find that political culture has a way of being reset, and therefore shaped to some considerable degree, by elections. When one party wins the presidency, for example, suddenly the opposition party tends to see a surge of public interest and popularity, along with the ideas that are viewed as corresponding to those parties. For example, left wing political opinions, vaguely and broadly defined, are seeing an upswing in popularity right now here in the U.S. since Trump's election. But while history may rhyme with itself, it doesn't repeat, and so no two periods are totally alike; not even two periods of liberal upsurge. The current one doesn't seem to be benefiting the women's movement much, for example, as feminists are commonly blamed for Trump's victory last year and there is seen to be a need for a greater focus on economic populism to better reach the working class. Anyway, by this metric we could define the fourth feminist wave as beginning back at the start of 2007 with the election of Nancy Pelosi to the position of Speaker of the House (a genuinely monumental and unprecedented historical advancement for female representation in the government at the time) and concluding with the defeat of Kamala Harris by Donald Trump last year, with arguably peak period of 2016. In 2016, for example, the Democrats had a female party chair (Debbie Wasserman Schultz), a female presidential nominee for the first time ever (Hillary Clinton), and a female party leader in the House of Representatives (the aforementioned Nancy Pelosi). Since that time, all of that has been reversed and we are now back to all men all the time, at least at the top. Essentially, after Pelosi was first chosen as Speaker of the House, it became more common for women to run for president, yet today it feels inescapably unlikely that we will see another female nominee for the highest office in the land in the foreseeable future after back-to-back defeats, let alone the election of an actual female president. While this definition can be symbolically useful in a lot ways though, it's obviously ultimately a bit superficial.
Definition 4. My personally preferred definition of a feminist wave though is an uptick in intellectual ferment around women's advancement. By this broadest definition of all, the fourth feminist wave could be thought of as beginning as far back as 2004 with the launch of Jessica and Vanessa Valenti's Feministing blog (which you may remember for popularizing the term "sl*t-shaming", among other things); an event that served as the dawn of the feminist blogosphere that eventually (from 2012) included the radfem-adjacent Feminist Current blog I became absorbed with for a time myself, along with many others (the most prominent, of course, being the well-known Jezebel blog (founded in 2007, during the time of Hillary Clinton's first presidential run, for historical perspective) that's now on life support after a couple of sales, but still survives today). Online musing, engagement, and activism has been a defining feature of the feminist fourth wave that has distinguished the whole of it from earlier ones and significantly impacted the course of its development. By this final possible definition, the fourth feminist wave could be said to have peaked roughly around 2017-22, beginning with the #MeToo movement and running through the glory days of r/FemaleDatingStrategy (one of my favorite chapters of the recent wave) before slowly starting to recede more into the background amid emerging birth rate panic. Oh yeah, there were also influential books and papers corresponding to this wave, but I find that their significance pales in comparison to the online stuff overall.
CHAPTER 1: SEXY AND WOKE (BEGINNING-2015)
Whether we define this wave as beginning in 2004 with the founding of the Feministing blog or in 2011 with the first SlutWalk or somewhere in-between, one thing about it is clear: the underlying mindset behind it started really right from where the feminist third wave (essentially late '80s/90s feminism) left off. It's choice of imagery, naming and focus, was sexually charged in a manner that proponents call "owning your sexuality" and the rest of us call engaging in self-objectification so men will like you better, and its ideals leaned heavily individualistic. The movement's focus was on reaching a new generation of young women where they were. A blogosphere that frequently revolved around fashion talk and celebrity gossip and other stereotypical feminine vanities emerged to accomplish this feat, with an order of pro-choice commentary and complaints about the income gap and a narrowly-defined rape culture thrown in on the side, all presented with an air of wit and style befitting a hip young crowd. This was minimal feminism and maximal outreach, perhaps in a certain way appropriate to a moment in time when the women's movement was very unpopular. It was, after all, the age of Spike TV, Ignite Ministries, The Sopranos, Grand Theft Auto, being a P.I.M.P., the peak of Hooters' and Howard Stern's popularity, the age of Twilight and "suicide girls" (remember those?) etc. etc. etc. Christina Aguilera was getting "Stripped" and George W. Bush was a popular president for about half the decade. Epstein was doing his pedo island thing and nobody cared. Feminists were constantly lambasted in the video gaming publications that I consumed and on many popular television programs. That was the cultural backdrop. Just about anything was an improvement over that climate and it followed logically in a way that the up-and-coming feminists of the new scene felt compelled to be apologetic about feminism's angrier, more principled past (what with its unfashionably prudish concerns about the sexual objectification of women's bodies and whatnot) and to embrace aspects of the culture that surrounded them in order to be relevant. This was not for me.
The significance of this moment in time also overlapping with the dawn of the tube porn phenomenon really cannot be overstated. Before 2005 when YouTube came out, the internet was already increasing the volume and commonality of men's pornography consumption and to a far more limited degree women's as well, but contemporaneous surveys made it clear that it remained a small minority of both populations (some 25% of men and 5% of women as of 2002) regularly viewing porn (as in at least monthly) because the internet's main pornographic offerings were all pay sites, often owned by the traditional industry giants (Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler) and the free content that was available online was really all just ads for those pay sites. But once YouTube established a new streaming video concept, inevitably a new generation of pornographers seized upon the new format and ultimately this led to the de facto replacement of the traditional pornographers with today's free video streaming sites like PornHub and XVideos. Over the intervening decade or so that this transition was taking place, the commonality of at-least-monthly pornography consumption among American men and women alike more than doubled, reaching majority territory among men, and the median age of first exposure dropped to as low as 11 in the (deliberate) complete absence of age verification systems. These developments were contemporaneously dubbed a new sexual revolution by the press and celebrated with minimal criticism in most liberal publications. The larger media climate seemed to feel jealous and in need of getting in on the action to stay connected to the mindset of the new generation. Media in general became noticeably more sexualized, particularly when it came to women's bodies.
I highlight this backdrop to make some sense for you of what I liked to call the pornification of the feminist movement, which found expression in and around this time frame in many ways. The SlutWalk movement. "Free the Nipple". In France and eastern Europe, even an ostensibly radical feminist group was getting attention by using female public nudity as a protest tactic. (Spoiler: Femen was created by a man. I'll be you couldn't have guessed that.) Theoretically these were women's advocacy movements, but I think few people remember any such content. For example, the SlutWalks began in April of 2011 in Toronto after a local cop said that if they wish to avoid sexual violence then "women should avoid dressing like sluts", so in theory these were anti-rape protests. The main thing I remember from it all though was scenes of men ogling, laughing at, and photographing scantly-clad marchers, perhaps for future masturbatory purposes or other humiliation. Free the Nipple, meanwhile, was a campaign created in 2012 during pre-production of a film of the same name with the goal of legalizing public toplessness for women of the kind New York authorized around 1990. Of course, so far zero New York women, to my knowledge, have been stupid enough to take advantage of this right and I just can't imagine why. And Femen...sighs...well it was just sad to see even the supposedly radical feminist movement transparently being used as a parasitic, immensely hypocritical vehicle of male sexual exploitation of women.
The development that most epitomized all of this to me occurred in 2013 after Robin Thicke released a song called Blurred Lines about how no doesn't really mean no, which became the pop hit of the year and featured a straight-up softcore porn online music video featuring an abundance of lady nipples, skin-toned panties, and degrading positioning. (Spoiler: All the men were fully dressed.) One Miley Cyrus helped him perform the rapist international anthem, appropriately attired, at that year's MTV Video Music Awards, whereupon she, and she alone, became the subject of the predictable public backlash. In response, Cyrus defended herself by suddenly proclaiming that she was "one of the biggest feminists" and joined Free the Nipple to prove it. This entire dynamic exemplifies the sheer stupidity and rarely-concealed misogyny of this whole era in American culture.
That's not to say there were no good or worthwhile feminist scenes or forms of activism around during this window of time by any means! The Everyday Sexism Project, founded by British writer Laura Bates for the purpose of encouraging (mainly) girls and women to speak out about and raise awareness of often more casual and typical forms of gendered treatment they receive in their everyday lives, was one that I participated in myself. In a similar vein, in October of 2014, the YouTube video 10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman went viral by powerfully documenting 108 incidents of catcalls, stalking, and other street harassment a normally-dressed woman endured simply for walking the streets of New York. Projects like these served to prove a problem existed in society. Being a lifelong, avid video gamer though, the effort I was personally most invested in in and around this time was the defense of Anita Sarkeesian's Tropes vs. Women in Video Games web video series analyzing in-depth and critiquing the representation of women in video games throughout the history of the medium.
Anita's defenders were mainly headquartered over on the r/GirlGamers subreddit. She faced a great volume of harassment and death and rape threats for her efforts and was forced to flee her home more than once over a couple of especially plausible ones during 2014's infamous Gamergate campaign "for ethics in video game journalism", which happened partially in response to the publication of her Women as Background Decoration videos within that series. Anita's tone and work differed from what was typical at the time in that she had notably been an early critic of the SlutWalk movement and of liberal "choice feminism", and to some extent hook-up culture itself, was known to speak of radical feminism in positive terms, and her Tropes vs. Women series included extensive critiques of "mainstream" pornographers and of prostitution that generated backlash from liberals (example) in addition to conservatives and conversely positive coverage over on the contemporaneously radfem-adjacent Feminist Current blog I mentioned before. In fact, that was how I first discovered the Feminist Current blog. Well, Sarkeesian's views were a sort of mixture of radfem and woke politics at the time and eventually she abandoned the former in favor of a complete embrace of the latter in a way that I noticed right after Trump's election in 2016.
This brings me to the subject of wokeness. I throw the term around, people throw the term around, but what does it mean? When I think of wokeness, I think specifically of intersectionality theory and the general politics thereof. It's a worldview that says, among other things, that it is wrong for women to prioritize our own interests and instead must find and make common cause with men of color, gay men, disabled men, poor men, sex buyers, "the trans community", literally anyone belonging to any religious minority group, and so on and so on in order to realize the defeat of patriarchal social systems because these things are all deeply interwoven and connected to each other, you see. It's pertinent to say as much because this was the time period when wokeness really came to infect the mainstream of the women's movement in a big and defining way. Intersectionality theory had been around for some time already, of course, but as Rebecca Traister has aptly documented, it was really the 2008 primary contest between Hillary Clinton (a white woman) and Barack Obama (a black man) that served as a turning point in the way the movement thought about issues of race and identity more broadly. It was felt that the primary contest had exposed sexist elements in the Obama camp and racist ones in the Clinton camp and that there was, accordingly, a need to focus on reconciling demographic (racial in particular) differences. In a way, one could construe the Kamala Harris nomination years later as a logical conclusion of this project. I'd say there's been both good and bad to intersectionality politics, but personally tend to view them as distinct from what I'm about at the end of the day.
CHAPTER 2: HIGH-VALUE DATING (2015-22)
The year 2015 marked the beginning of a new chapter in the history of women's advocacy. That new chapter began with, and was in many ways caused by, the presidential campaign of Donald Trump and his subsequent election. I'll draw your attention to this chart from a few years back:
(Source)
You'll notice that before 2017 -- the year Trump first assumed office -- American women were generally contented with the overall treatment of their sex by society. After Trump's election, never again. I point this out to highlight the profound and historic impact this one pig alone has had on women's overall immiseration and consciousness of their interests as a class. Though 2016's was an election won on a legal technicality and not on, y'know, getting the most votes, it was nonetheless an election that proved men would rather vote for a rapist than a woman; sooner a man with no prior experience in government whatsoever than a consummate professional who was female; that society would hypocritically penalize a woman for inauthenticity after robbing her of her very name. This was not about victory, it was about humiliation. Gendered humiliation specifically. As much was, in my estimation, the main reason the Republicans nominated Trump to represent them in that particular contest in the first place.
Everyone knew Hillary Clinton was going to be the Democratic Party's candidate that cycle right from the outset. The only questions were what margin she'd win the nomination by and who her Republican opponent would be. Trump was a deliberate choice of opponent calculated to respond specifically to that candidate; the first female major party nominee in the nation's history. He was not just a man and not just a sexist, but a cartoon. Upon launching his bid for the presidency, he had to sell the Miss Universe beauty pageant. He'd created the first ever casino in Atlantic City to feature an in-house strip club. He'd been featured on the cover of Playboy magazine and had to buy the silence of his first wife on a rape accusation to the tune of $14 million plus properties. His current wife was/is a former fashion model 24 years his junior, i.e. easily young enough to be his daughter. When a debate moderator questioned how he talked about women, he responded with a veiled threat, the downstream effect of which ultimately cost that moderator her job at Fox News (though, being a certifiable pick-me, she eventually forgave despite the fact that he never apologized to her for anything and now the two enjoy a one-sided friendship, pff). It seemed like half his (granted high-turnover) campaign staff at any given point in time had a police record that involved battery of at least one woman. Indeed, much of the marvelous Trump family fortune itself originated from a brothel Donald's grandfather had run for miners. In other words, one did not have to look far to find evidence that Trump saw members of the female sex as scarcely more than slabs of meat because the evidence was everywhere and overwhelming. Nominating not just a moid, but that moid to go up against the Democratic Party's first female nominee ever was a deliberate choice. That choice was about humiliation. Then, as the election itself approached, came the Access Hollywood video and the corresponding testimonies, the Howard Stern recording where he boasted of walking in on teen girls undressing in their locker rooms, the revelation of him berating a pageant contestant for her weight...and then the pig's victory despite it all. Or was it "despite it all" or more like because of it all? There was no way to read the outcome but as a validation of sexual predation itself and women responded accordingly.
Women began banding together immediately after Trump's ethically dubious election victory and well I think we here in this community know that the result was the first Women's March and that it drew a hitherto unprecedented (in this country unprecedented anyway) total of several million to the streets, mostly protesting against their country's decision to legitimize male sexual aggression and violence against women. I was there too. Well you know this, Cloven Hooves, just as you're familiar with the #MeToo movement that surged into mainstream visibility with its revelations about prominent film director Harvey Weinstein later in the same year. What I'm trying to highlight here is the connection between these things; the fact that Trump's election changed the climate in such a way as to instill genuine fear in women across the country and even beyond. There is no question in my mind that Me Too wouldn't have become the sweeping cultural phenomenon that it did had Hillary Clinton won the previous year's election instead. One might think of the likes of Harvey Weinstein, Larry Nasser, Bill Cosby, pedo Senate candidate Roy Moore (remember him?), with their hundreds of victims, as essentially fall guys for that most obvious predator of all who was untouchable (so to speak). And no, it mostly certainly was not just some movement of elites as it's been sometimes vilified by detractors. Across the country, and indeed much of the world, victims of sexual harassment were dramatically emboldened to give voice to their suffering and to seek out some kind of justice for themselves and did exactly that. Sexual harassment complaints and lawsuits jumped significantly in and around this time frame. There was something cathartic and liberating about the whole experience and we were in pain and terror and needed that encouragement and catharsis. This is where the story of this feminist wave ends though in the telling of liberals because that's where they wanted it to end. In truth though, it was just the beginning. The real beginning.
Hints that something bigger than critiques of what we formally call sexual harassment and rape was in demand were noticeable when Kristen Roupenian's short story Cat Person, published in the New Yorker in December of 2017 (i.e. a few months into the #MeToo surge), went viral online. It's worth noting that this popular fictional story wasn't about the typical stuff of Me Too accounts. It was instead a story about the nature of modern-day dating that resonated very broadly with women. Simply put, it's about a 20-year-old student who is conned into sex by a 34-year-old man through deceptive texts (that frequently involve cute running jokes about the man's ostensible two cats that our victim eventually notices don't seem to exist in his home; hence the title of the piece). A witty and charming man in text messages proves to be a charmless liar in real life. Following her disgusting sexual experience, she resolves to break up with him. Yet still not wanting to offend the parasite, she struggles for the right words and ultimately gets a friend to impersonate her for the breakup text, following which he begins to pursue her...yeah. That so many women found this fictional tale relatable turned out to be an early sign of things to come.
The next stop on our journey into the last decade's dating revolution is the Aziz Ansari case. Ansari, of course, was/is an award-winning actor who claimed to be a supporter of the Me Too movement and wore one of those cute little Time's Up pins while he was accepting a win in the Best Actor category at the Golden Globes at the start of 2018. One of his dates was repulsed by that, which she saw as hypocrisy based on her experience with him, which she went public with in response. Her account can be read here. The summary version is that, on their one date, he had rushed through dinner at the bar he'd invited her to before bringing her back to his apartment, then immediately kissed, fondled, and performed oral sex on her, which she reciprocated. But when things kept escalating with Ansari saying he'd go get a condom within minutes of their first kiss, Grace (a pseudonym) said she felt uncomfortable at how quickly things were moving and voiced her hesitation. He seemed to acknowledge, but kept pursuing and aggressively pestering her for intercourse for an hour, accompanied by a few more make-out sessions that Grace was clearly reluctant to keep participating in. She was finally allowed to leave in tears after enough resistance, but not without multiple assaults. It's clear from her account that the 34-year-old actor had simply aimed to get the 22-year-old woman drunk so that her resistance to having sex on their first date would be down. This was, in other words, a classic case of what we generously call a "bad date", i.e. one wherein a woman narrowly avoids rape. The Atlantic, the New York Times, the New York Post, CNN, and more all came out with statements denouncing Grace for her story, although it's worth pointing out that this was no mere rumor; Ansari acknowledged that it happened, claiming it was simply a matter of miscommunication. This was the point where the press largely jumped ship on the Me Too movement for its perceived direction -- the kind of questions it was leading to -- and it's noteworthy for that. The thing is that while liberals wanted to limit the Me Too conversation to the question of consent, many women wanted to have a broader conversation about so-called "bad dates" and the more general relationship between the sexes that went beyond just whether surface-level consent to sexual activity was offered. The problem was bigger than that.
2018 was when I first started to notice the term "high-value dating" trending on TikTok videos and whatnot and I suspect that's not a coincidence. While I don't have a comprehensive history of the origins of this concept on hand, what I do know is that it was certainly no coincidence that it began to catch on as a concept with many women in tandem with the evolution of the Me Too convo in the direction I've been describing. The concept has had many variations that range from promoting rigid dating traditionalism to something very much like sugar baby type gold-digging, but what they have in common is a goal of raising the price of sex. The following year (2019) saw the creation of a feminist-friendly version in the form of r/FemaleDatingStrategy and it quickly caught on, amassing a membership of some 240,000 during its three-year prime before the fateful decision was made to take the sub private (thus rendering it irrelevant) in early 2022, which made it the second-biggest female-only subreddit in existence behind only Two X Chromosomes (which is just an all-purpose women's sub), and its impact reverberated through the culture exponentially beyond that, with clear influence widely visible across TikTok and many other social media platforms.
I'm seriously not trying to oversell this. To put it a certain way, it can be said that each feminist wave has had an organization that's served as its distinctive center of gravity. In the first wave (at least at its zenith) here in the U.S., it was the National Women's Party. During the second wave, it was the National Organization for Women. During the third wave, it was the Feminist Majority. During the fourth wave it had been, up to this point, Women's March, Inc. But between a major and demoralizing split caused by accusations of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia by its rival factions on the one hand and the onset of Covid restrictions on the other, Women's March, Inc. had largely fallen apart and become far less influential by 2020, while online spaces naturally grew and thrived with most public places and businesses closed or operating on capacity limits. r/FemaleDatingStrategy functionally replaced Women's March, Inc. as the vanguard of the women's movement in the U.S. in 2020-21, becoming the new center of its intellectual ferment.
I would describe the Female Dating Strategy as a feminist revolt against sexual liberalism broadly: against hookup culture, dating apps, pornography, polyamory, sado-masochism, and low expectations, and in favor of hypergamy, strong boundaries, and self-respect. The FDS Handbook (still available here) has been described by some as "the red pill for women" and I think that may be a good characterization too in the sense that, in modern online parlance, to be anything other than "blue pilled" is to embrace some amount of evolutionary psychology/biology and, as Louise Perry has pointed out, that's what they did. These are growing fields of knowledge the women's movement dismisses and neglects to involve itself in at its own peril. Learnings thereof have been weaponized by the ranks of the moidnet (or "online manosphere" if you prefer a more respectful term, which I don't) to create the modern version of pick-up artistry. FDS was created in no small part as a response to this development, weaponizing evolutionary psychology to the benefit of women, thus creating a new and exciting kind of difference feminism! To be sure, they weren't out to save the world, but to give women helpful and based life tools with which to navigate the world as it exists in the practical. Nonetheless there were obvious areas of overlap between their way of thinking and the values of radical feminists as well, to which end radfems were well-represented there too (in fact, no shortage of new radfems were created by exposure to FDS culture), as were all sorts of women for that matter, including a few conservatives, progressives, and really everyone but your standard-issue sex-positive libfems. It was the rest of us against that value set and the world it represented and the resultant philosophy was a sort of unique fusion of all the corresponding ideas.
It wasn't just FDS though. This was also a period of great intellectual ferment and creativity in the women's movement more broadly. For example, you Cloven Hooves will recognize this as the period wherein r/GenderCritical took off as well, corresponding to a wave of feminist activity in Britain against proposed reforms to the country's Gender Recognition Act that were designed to deftly erase women as a recognized category of human beings for all legal purposes. You will, of course, be intimately familiar with the finer details, so I'll move on fairly quickly here, but I thought it worth taking just a moment to formally acknowledge this since, while the gender critical movement never really took off in a big way here in the United States the way it did in the UK, the Gender Critical sub (which I discovered through the aforementioned Feminist Current blog) and the YouTube vlogs of Magdalen Berns (which I also discovered through Feminist Current) impacted my way of thinking about the gender identity question.
I wasn't sure what to make of it for a long time, tbh. I was of course familiar with the loss of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival and whatnot, but like so many other feminists, my instinct was to try and empathize with and understand the position of trans-identified people, being as I wasn't the most "normal" person myself. At the same time though, the more I kept hearing about the privacy and safety issues in connection to women's spaces and began to see the clear advantages that male athletes have over female ones in so many areas, the more I began to question. What really broke through to me though was this interview Feminist Current's Meghan Murphy did with Dr. Sheila Jeffreys in late 2016 wherein she discussed the influence of neoliberal corporatization policies on a bunch of stuff happening in many modern colleges and universities, including the advent of "queer studies" and the devolution of women's studies to "gender studies", among other things. I found it fascinating and Jeffreys' manner of speaking about queer politics -- simply describing "trans-women" as men and so forth -- very clarifying in a way that the apologetic mincing of words on the subject I'd been been more frequently exposed to hadn't been. It made me realize I wasn't crazy for seeing what I was seeing and hearing what I was hearing: the gender identity movement actually is a load of anti-feminist, anti-woman, and anti-reality bullshit! And it was important for that kind of clarity to come from someone like her in particular -- a long-time political lesbian activist and scholar in women's studies -- rather than, y'know, Mike Huckabee or something because I was more inclined to question my senses than to trust Mike Huckabee, lol! I needed to hear these things in plain English, not compromised Wokenese (e.g. "biological male" (as if there were some other kind), "trans-identified male" (which it took me a long time to figure out meant something other than "trans-man"), etc.), and I needed to hear it from someone I could trust; someone who both knew of these matters more than I did and whom I could be confident was on my side. It was quite natural for me to jump from that place to the Gender Critical subreddit and so forth and be encouraged by the activism I was seeing over in the UK.
Well Magdalen Berns passed away in 2019 (rest in power, sister!) and the Gender Critical sub was banned the next year as part of a larger wave of wokeness that was sweeping academic and corporate culture at the time, but I think it worth recording that Berns had accrued some 30,000 followers on her YouTube channel before her death and r/GenderCritical had amassed over 64,000 members before it was banned. Anyway, that wave of woke censorship policies interestingly brings me to my next topic: incels.
In early 2018 there was a wave of terrorist attacks in the United States and Canada committed by men describing themselves as "involuntarily celibate", or incels for short, or who belonged to the online incel community. Among these was the 2018 Parkland shooting, which was the deadliest high school massacre in American history and touched off a wave of protests for gun control that culminated in the March For Our Lives, which was reportedly attended by a million people, making it the single largest protest action against gun violence in American history. I think you could say that, in a world historic sense, these developments happening in that window of time was in essence a kind of male reaction to the onset of the Me Too movement. Naturally, these actions met with a wave of condemnation from mainstream society and in fact "incel" essentially replaced "faggot" as society's new go-to insult describing male losers in general for some time. It also naturally created some public interest in the finer details of incel culture, mostly from a kind of morbid curiosity. I was among those morbidly curious, mostly because, embarrassingly enough, I was feeling kind of lonely myself at the time. The origins were a bit interesting. It turned out that the term "incel" was originally coined by a lesbian who had reached her late 20s without going on a single proper date back in the 1990s, news articles soon revealed, stoking my curiosity further. The internet soon unearthed a smaller, parallel variation for women, known as femcels, headquartered over on r/TruFemcels. I joined. Not to commit a shooting of course (the female variation isn't known for violence), but because, well, I was struggling to find a girlfriend and couldn't help finding a lot of what I saw there relatable sentiment. My various neuroses had a way of repelling others, unfortunately. This was a bad chapter in my life, but it's worth discussing a little bit because there was some lasting impact on my worldview.
So I've focused mostly here on the big developments of the feminist fourth wave in order to try and paint a clear picture of its basic direction and femcels were/are more of fringe scene and not always feminists by any means (some yes, some no), but I'm diverging here to a brief discussion of them in order to further capture the kind of ferment that was going on during this time. The thing that's relevant here is that r/TruFemcels was my introduction to the black pill, which is sort of internet parlance for doomer-ism, specifically in the sense of biological determinism. (Well, sometimes femcels call their particular variation "the pink pill" to be cute and unique, but black pill describes the broad, overall phenomenon of biological determinist doomer-ism online.) The community believed they were unlovable for genetic characteristics and features beyond their control -- mostly, but not only, outward appearance -- and that the only hope was to cosmetically alter one's body to match basic expectations of beauty and to learn to be a sigma type. I estimate that roughly 100% of the r/TruFemcels community had some kind of severe mental illness, with depressive disorders being by far the most common, often intermingled with PTSD and other conditions rooted in experiences of child abuse. Also very common was extreme social anxiety. In my case, my tendency to self-isolate had caused me to lose a firm command of the English language to the point where I sounded less coherent than Joe Biden when trying to speak to others without the excuse of advanced age. It was humiliating. Much of that was rooted in embarrassment about my past and lack of achievements in life that I didn't want to have to share with others, which left me with little that I felt comfortable sharing about myself. For me, just talking to someone one-on-one had gotten to be a bit like stage fright is to more normal people: a task so petrifying that I'd go out of my way to avoid it, which of course only worsened my condition over time. It felt hopeless and I felt right at home with other, similarly depressed women who shared lots of my nerdy, introverted interests like anime and video games and certain gothic sensibilities (yes, I'm using dark mode ), frequent suicide fantasies, and yes a certain jealous resentment of those with more intimate success in life. Being as women are reputed for being more sociable creatures than men simply made my situation all the more embarrassing and I didn't see the feminist movement proper taking up issues like these. That is, until I discovered r/FemaleDatingStrategy!
Basically, FDS gave me lots of tools for success that I simply didn't glean anywhere else and, above all, a sense that I was worth effort. Over time I found myself becoming more sociable and able to project more confidence and soon I met the woman who would become my wife! So I found my way out of femceldom and became less of a doomer...about the possibility of finding someone for me anyway. But along the way I absorbed some real truths about the nature of who is predator and who is prey in life and hard truths about romance indeed having a game aspect to it that have stuck with me. And it wasn't the end of my connection to black pilled thinking either. I discovered r/BlackPilledFeminism through the femcel community and remained on its private forums after the subreddit was banned. (Reddit closed all black pill subs over the course of 2020-21 due to an offensive lack of wokeness. Femcels, incidentally, have actually regrouped under a new humor-oriented sub appropriately called Yandere Psycho Femcel Girlfriend Grippy Sock Jail (which is just about the most deeply online name choice ever, ha ha!) but it's really not a theory one like the old one was. I'm not a member, but I visit it for witty, misandrist memes sometimes. ) I remained a frequenter of the autonomous Black Pilled Feminism message board throughout my stay with FDS. To sum it up, black pilled feminism is a fringe scene mostly composed of former radical feminists that contends that equality of the sexes is an unattainable goal because both male and female biology are programmed to strive for the predator-prey relationship. Common opinions on the forums include a belief that the advancement of women toward a more equal station in life only creates more male resentment that ultimately will bubble over into proper conquest that women will be both unable and unwilling to successfully defeat. Some nightmare vision of the future resembling what you saw or read about in The Handmaid's Tale or some variation on it is common and black pilled feminists sometimes advocate for solutions like driving men extinct by some means or other, but with an overriding doubt that as much is even possible or ever will be. Although I must concede to being less strictly deterministic about it all than these women are, I came to lean toward a lot of their convictions over time and still consider myself at least adjacent the black pilled space fundamentally. I am not an optimist. And yes, I kind of hate men if you haven't noticed. I also resent nature for being what it is.
(Evolutionary psychology also, incidentally, informs my current, updated view of the trans debate. While I find the gender identity movement no less absurd than I did as a conventional radfem, I find some of the gender abolitionist contentions about it silly and intellectually dishonest now, particularly on the discovery that like half the trans-identified community specifically counts themselves "non-binary". It's obvious to me now that serious feminist critiques of queer politics are grounded in a recognition of human biology and nature, not a subjectivist pretension that there's nothing innate about the sexes. A more conservative framing? Perhaps. I just don't care. I care about the truth.)
But not all post-radfem spaces being built in and around that time frame were doomer ones. Enter Womad, which I discovered via Feminist Current articles discussing stuff like Escape the Corset and the anti-molka (spycam) protests of 2018.
How to describe Womad? Basically, it's a Korean Reddit-style site for women and anything you've heard about it before in radfem media is the censored version intended to make it palatable to snowflakey Westerners, ha ha! It was created by women who seceded from a South Korean radfem site of a similar style called Megalia back close to a decade ago over the presence of male administrators and censorship of critiques of gay men. Censorship of women's voices led the majority of Megalia's members to leave for other places, with a new board called Womad absorbing the most defectors. Initially Womad described themselves as "radical lesbian feminists" and practitioners of 4B and Escape the Corset (Korean-style female separatism and beauty culture resistance scenes), but soon ditched these trappings, redefining themselves as female supremacists united around a belief that women are biologically superior to men (which is because we are) and a goal of establishing a matriarchal social order. It's my favorite site on the internet.
It goes without saying that these women practice 6B4T (the most extreme version of South Korean female separatism; one that I must admit goes too far in its restrictiveness even for me (I must be allowed anime, sorry)) and practice mirroring as a linguistic tactic popularized back on Megalia. You may have heard of the 2018 anti-molka (spycam) protest wave that swept Seoul and some other parts of South Korea? The largest feminist protests in the country's history? Like this one?
As you can see, the Korean version of the recent feminist wave was of bolder and generally superior content compared to ours. That's in no small part because no men were allowed to participate. I take a lot more inspiration from it, honestly, than from anything that's happened here in the last decade. But anyway, those protests were in response to a Womad woman being imprisoned and forced to apologize for exposing a male flasher using a tiny spycam. Since these tiny spy cameras are frequently hidden in their homes, inside the stalls of women's restrooms, etc., with the recorded content subsequently uploaded to pornographic web sites, typically with impunity despite the law, Korean women were incensed that the rare occasion on which the law was strictly enforced was also the rare occasion on which the culprit was a woman and the victim a man. You might call her actions an inciting incident, in other words.
Alrighty, I think I've captured both the essence and the general ferment of this period, so now onto...
CHAPTER 3: THE BATTLE OVER CHILDBIRTH (2022-PRESENT)
Back here in the U.S., the Dobbs decision allowing the individual states to regulate and outlaw abortion as they see fit changed the nature of the conversation overnight. From here, the issue of childbirth would take center stage.
To be sure, conflict over a woman's right to lead a degrading heterosexual lifestyle without being needlessly forced into motherhood against her will had been brewing for some time already. After all, a moid's relationship to the life-giving process is a more distant, remote, removed one than that of a woman, to which end the whole history of patriarchy has been the story of men trying to gain control of the life-giving process by force to compensate for their own inability to give birth. That's why they invent myths that invert the biological realities of childbirth: myths about the first woman somehow being birthed by a man, about male gods being the life-giving creation ones, and so on, as to reassure themselves that, counterintuitively, they are nature's default sex and we are the aberrational deformities no matter how physiologically obvious it is that the opposite is true. So naturally men are still trying to impose their control over the birthing process.
That said, these struggles ebb and flow. The advent of reasonably reliable birth control in the 1960s, together with growing academic concerns about an over-populated planet lacking sufficient natural resources to provide, made for an ebbing. Human beings' position atop the food chain had become so thoroughly dominant that it was no longer necessary, or even ecologically sustainable, for couples to keep having numerous children, and so women began to have fewer, accrued more leisure time as a result, and naturally began to yearn for more to do; for more options in life. The rest is history. The same can be said of much of the world's growing tolerance for same-sex relationships, which are obviously less likely to yield more children, from that same window of time. Most of a woman's, and especially a lesbian's, modern freedom has been built on the foundation of a declining birth rate and of that being viewed positively. And while abortion here in the U.S. has been fiercely opposed by many since it was legalized and met with waves of forced clinic closings brought about by all sorts of means both regulatory and violent, the real-world effect on women's bodily autonomy had been effectively mitigated to the point of near-irrelevance by increasing public access to contraceptives, which women naturally prefer over having to go through abortions anyway, as well as, more recently, the advent and deregulation of mail-order abortion pills. Until the Dobbs decision! Consequent abortion prohibitions across many U.S. states have been so severe and unconditional that they've forced birth rates to begin rising unnaturally therein, at the cost of many girl's and women's lives. And it's worth pointing out that we are not the only country currently moving in said direction either; just the richest one.
Naturally women, as well as liberals and some some libertarians, have reacted will alarm! In many states (including, mercifully, mine), subsequent ballot initiatives have succeeded in enshrining a woman's right to end an unwanted pregnancy into their constitutions to some degree or other and the movement to advance such initiatives and to try and reform the way Supreme Court appointments work has taken up much space in the feminist conversation that was previously absorbed by other topics. One won't be surprised to learn though that legal solutions aren't the only ones women have pursued.
Young women have undergone voluntary sterilization (one might say permanent birth contraception) at twice the pre-Dobbs rate. Perhaps more pointedly, anti-natalist content began to achieve significant popularity on social media after Dobbs as well. At the end of 2022, a pregnant woman named Yuni, who became a new mother that year, compiled a snarky list of pros and cons to having a child and posted regular updates on them to TikTok. The cons quickly came to outnumber the pros by a wide margin until, in its final iteration, The List, which you can see here, included 350 cons and 35 pros, which would be a ratio of 10 to 1 on the negative side. The List, as it came to simply be known, went viral, with her original video quickly amassing 11.5 million likes (that again is just the likes, not the total views!) by the start of the new year. The term "DINK", shorthand for "dual-income, no children" entered mainstream circulation. High-value dating was substantially replaced by what became known as the decenter men movement, which de-emphasized attachment to men and prioritized self-care. (It's sometimes been called "dump him feminism" after influencer Florence Given popularized the phrase.) One of my favorite manifestations of the decenter men trend was Elle Ray's Spoiled Girlie Support Group podcast while it was publicly available on YouTube. Elle Ray was a married heterosexual woman who made it her mission to encourage other women to surround themselves only with sources of positivity and uplift and the pursuit of exclusively female friendships and embraced a goddess-centered spirituality similar to that of Mary Daly and her videos often brought home a lot of powerful truths about how much more men need us than we need them. She too was proudly childfree.
Dovetailing with the ascendance of the aforementioned decenter men movement were a few waves of online interest in South Korea's 4B movement. The first of these took place on various social medias immediately after the Dobbs decision, with another hitting TikTok in a fairly big way in the spring of 2024, touched off by this cute little short video that drew over a million likes (that's just the likes), and finally once more immediately after Trump's election last year. For the unenlightened, 4B means "four no's" in English. The four no's are, roughly translated:
- No husband.
- No boyfriend.
- No baby.
- No sex with men.
Personally, I frequently follow it on the 4B Movement subreddit, which is my current favorite sub. Anyway, you can see how recent events will have radicalized some women. Trump's second election -- second time specifically defeating a woman, in this case after losing to a man last time (which I'm sure is just a coincidence ) -- even managed to generate sympathetic editorials for 4B from the woke publications (not the bland regular business-type liberal ones, the properly progressive ones) ranging from the Guardian (article linked above) to Vox, Vanity Fair, Wired (which approvingly noted participation by gay men trans-women), the queer-themed Advocate, Jezebel, and even the normally aggressively sex-positive Cosmopolitan (after having rebuked it just a few months prior). Broadly favorable commentary could likewise be found on the woke ResetEra message board right after Trump's second win. But this brief breakthrough into a space adjacent the cultural mainstream brings me to the subject of the inevitable backlash.One had to sense that with all this decentering men, this "going boy sober", the social media celebration of "short kings", the Eras Tour becoming the biggest-earning music tour of all time, a certain Barbie movie with a less-than-thoroughly-disapproving attitude toward the concept of matriarchy and goddess worship becoming the biggest box office smash of 2023, and "Childless Cat Lady" shirts surfacing at the Democratic National Convention in support of Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party's second female nominee for president in three cycles, some kind of compromised, commercialized variation on radical feminism that passionately celebrated all things frilly and feminine (including feminine men), embraced capitalism and trans politics and whatnot while finding itself at peace with permanent singleness and childfree living was starting to become socially acceptable in a fairly broad way, at least with women. The line between mainstream liberal and radical feminism was starting to get a bit fuzzy. The drift had gone too far for men to accept. Forceful push-back was bound to happen. We all know what the electoral result was, but it's more pointed to discuss the aftermath because the aftermath has been built on the foundation of said electoral outcome. I'm namely speaking of the ascendance of liberal masculinism.
We here on Cloven Hooves are well aware of pick-up artist, pornographer, pimp, child rapist, pious Muslim, and self-described misogynist influencer Andrew Tate's moment in the sun back in 2022 when Google searches for his name outpaced those for Donald Trump. What you may have paid less attention to was the movement that one Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution began among liberal elites in the aftermath. Systematically weaponizing fears that more characters like Tate might enter the cultural mainstream in the future, Reeves subsequently made it his mission to offer what Idrees Kahloon has aptly called "a wide menu of policies designed to foster a ‘prosocial masculinity for a postfeminist world". Notice the expression "postfeminist world" here. Reeves has gone on to found the American Institute for Boys and Men and churn out videos that have racked up millions of views; videos with titles like "Male Inequality" on how modern society ostensibly privileges women over men. After all, women, being the dumber sex as we all know, are realizing higher levels of educational attainment than their male counterparts everywhere on Earth that they are allowed to, including the United States. Something must be done. But most importantly though, the birth rate has fallen too low. It is below the population replacement level and still dropping and this is unacceptable, as it may lead to worker shortages in the future. These sorts of things. And if we don't do what he says, the next generation of men will just have to keep going fascist. There's no alternative. Precisely because of his liberal orientation, he has been able to influence Democrats and Democratic politicians, especially since Trump's recent election victory.
I believe we have all noticed that since last year's election, the Democratic Party's camps have largely split on the question on the question of whether to continue embracing feminism at all, with the "moderate" camp championing the idea that today it is men who are oppressed by women and require society's focused attention and assistance. Without formally abandoning pro-choice politics or gay rights, they champion outreach to the moidnet as a priority over the restoration and securing of those rights, and gateway pro-natalist policies designed, for now, to incentivize childbirth (although I think we know where they're objectively leading, as there is factually no way to reverse the entire Earth's current birth rate decline without beginning to restrict women's freedom). This is the Bill Maher / James Carville / Chris and Andrew Cuomo branch of Democratic politics I'm talking about and it's noticeably expanded since the election. Liberal (i.e. ostensibly "egalitarian") masculinism, for example, has in recent months been publicly espoused by Senators Ruben Gallego of Arizona and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, as well as Governors Gavin Newsom of California and Wes Moore of Maryland, among the prominent examples I can think of off the top of my head. The "moderate" wing's embrace of masculinity politics leaves only the party's progressive wing still formally in the feminist camp.
I want to close this out by really stressing the significance of this shift we're seeing in attitudes toward the birth rate because that is, in a world-historic sense, the main force driving the current backlash against the women's movement, as in not just here, but globally. Birth rate panic. It's a mindset exactly opposite the "population bomb" mindset that allowed us to win most of the freedoms that we enjoy today. When the world decides that over-population is no longer a concern and that instead a future that could include worker shortages is of greater concern than ecological sustainability, that is a mindset that can and will ultimately undo those hard-won freedoms that we have today. It invalidates ideas like birth control, abortion, gayness, singleness, and childlessness as options detrimental to humanity, and without those options, how many women will be able to remain in the professional world or otherwise enjoy any sense of financial independence from men? How much control over their lives at home will they in turn enjoy without those things; without any financial independence or ability to avoid unwanted pregnancies, etc.? That is where this new trajectory can and will lead unless it is stopped, if we even can stop it.
I'm of the opinion that Richard Reeves is the most dangerous person in the English-speaking world right now and should be considered public enemy number one by the women's movement. JD Vance is next after that.
at in hindsight for what it was -- glorification of the subjugation and commodification of women's bodies. We also see "body positivity" at around this point, which later warped into consumerist nightmare of "hey turns out we can sell makeup and skin tight clothing to ugly broads and fat chicks too! we just gotta say every BODY is beautiful! cha-ching!" 
