Open Letter

Why have the sexist tropes returned?

Dear Ms. Badham,

I read with interest your recent opinion piece for The Guardian—the one titled “Girls, ignore the sexist rhetoric. Revel in everything that upsets the haters.”

Like you, I am a gen X woman. I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, lucky both in when I was born, but also in where and to whom, for I had no doors closed to me on account of my sex.

Like you, I despair when I see the resurgence of sexist tropes, all sparkly like knights in shining armor, here to save womanhood and return us to our rightful place on the domestic altar, spatulas and brooms close at hand. I thought that we had long since gotten past such regressive fantasies.

Like you, I would have women be proud of our educations, love our careers, and have families that are shaped by love and by choice. I am, I do, and I have.

And yet, despite those similarities in our experiences and worldviews, I think you’ve gotten just about everything wrong.

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It is not the hard-earned successes of women that have caused a regressive backlash against us. No.

Having benefitted from our predecessors, who fought for the right to work outside the home, buy property, make legal decisions for ourselves, and receive equal pay for equal work, to name just a few past wins, many women seem to have forgotten how much we have won, and how equal the playing field has become. All too often now, the demands being made are for a decidedly unequal playing field, in which women get all the benefits, and pay none of the costs.

Demanding everything, while pretending that we have nothing, is neither a stable nor an honorable game. We should not be surprised that people are beginning to notice.

Too many women have gleefully taken power from men and wielded it as indiscriminately as men did when they had it. We are suffering an epidemic of toxic femininity.

Remember #MeToo? It had the potential to reveal to men—the vast majority of men who are good—that the vast majority of women have had run-ins with bad men. It won’t be obvious to good men, who presumably mostly have friends who are also good men, that the small minority of men who aren’t good manage to have a disproportionate impact on women. Most women have been on the receiving end of toxic male behavior, even though most men would never behave that way.

The good men deserve to know this, and they want to know this. But instead, #MeToo turned into a nasty, vengeful movement, in which obvious truths—like Matt Damon’s observation that an unwanted pat on the butt is not the same as rape—were met with outrage. Instead of being heralded as a good man who is aware of the different social realities that men and women live in, he was told to sit down and shut up. It was not, he was told, his turn to speak.

Past injustice is no excuse for injustice in the present, though. That response to Matt Damon, and others like him? That was women being bad to men. And the societal response was to celebrate the bad behavior of the women who scolded him. Of course people are angry.

I believe that much of what you are defending in your piece is part and parcel of what got us into the mess that we now find ourselves in.

Third wave feminism embraces “sex positivity”— in which everyone pretends that young women didn’t always have access to all the sex they wanted, while desire for lasting commitment or emotional depth is seen as a flaw. In short, women get the privilege of acting like men at their stupidest. How awesome for us all.

Some confused versions of feminism want men and women to be not just equal, but the same. We’re not. And while I would not suggest that being a parent should be required in order to hold high office, it is a modern oddity that so many people who are deciding our fates do not have children of their own. Being a parent changes you—this is especially true for women. There is no love as fierce or as fearsome as that for one’s child. While women, on average, are more “agreeable” than men, more likely to affirm other’s choices and comply with the will of the majority, Mama bears are a force of nature. Mama bears find hidden reserves of power when their cubs are threatened.

Except when they don’t. Those same traits that make women, on average, more likely to be compassionate, to care for the weak and the powerless, to go into healing professions rather than destructive ones—those same traits that help Mama bears find hidden reserves of power when their cubs are threatened can be weaponized towards demonic ends.

Mothers are being convinced that the playful fantasies of their children warrant hormones and surgery. Mothers are being convinced that telling children no and resisting their tantrums is bad parenting. After women led the calls to defund the police across American cities in 2020, the resultant crime waves and accelerating urban decay should have come as no surprise to anyone. Many people could see the problems with the policies that were being proposed, mostly by women. And yet city councils and legislators enacted the policies throughout the land. Why? In part, because in today’s environment, telling women that their ideas are bad is a kind of hate crime.

The power grab and biological confusion of modern feminism doesn’t resemble the feminism that we genX-ers grew up with. It really doesn’t.

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And then there’s this: the amazing knots that you tie yourself into—you, along with so many other women—as you try to make real concerns about actual biology out to be exclusively the ravings of angry young basement-dwelling men.

Are there men who are spewing bile on the internet, enraged and hurt that no woman is interested in being with them? There are, to be sure. But there are also a large number of people, myself included, who are concerned about what happened in the Olympics because we care about women’s rights, about sport, and about reality. I happen to be a biologist, but it doesn’t take one to know what a woman is. I can attest that Imane Khelif, the Algerian athlete who took home gold in women’s boxing, is not a woman.

I am not part of what you call the “’let us tell you how women should look, act, reproduce, breathe and exist on this earth’ brigade”. In fact, here I laid out precisely what I understand to be possible for women. The answer is: nearly everything. Girls can aspire to be astronauts and mothers, chefs and CEOs, athletes and mathematicians, and the women they will become might well become any one (or more) of those things. Why? Because the one and only universal thing that girls do, when they grow up, is they become women.

You also suggest that those who complain about Imane Khelif’s conduct in the Olympics are doing so because Khelif refuses to “portray herself as an aspirational Sports Illustrated swimsuit model.” In this sad world that you are positing, the only reason for people to have concerns about the legitimacy of athletes who present themselves as women, is that they don’t satisfy male fantasies of womanhood.

That’s not it at all, of course. What I and many others are objecting to is that Imane Khelif is a man competing in the women’s category. Imane Khelif is XY,  and almost certainly has one of several well-understood Disorders of Sexual Development. This means that when Khelif was born, he appeared to be female, and lived as if a girl until puberty hit. But male puberty transformed his external appearance into that of a man, which is, in fact, what he now is. Just as girls become women, boys become men.

Imane Khelif on the shoulders of his coach after beating women for boxing gold.

It can’t be an easy thing, to believe yourself to be a girl, and to have everyone around you believe that you are a girl, only to have adolescence reveal that everyone was wrong. But as much compassion as we might have for the younger Khelif, who no doubt went through a baffling and painful puberty, we owe the adult Khelif, a man who takes pleasure in beating up women, no compassion at all. Would that Khelif were not encouraged in his delusions by a world of people who have forgotten how to say no. There, again, is the misplaced compassion of women, being weaponized against our own selves.

Meanwhile, over in Olympic beach volleyball, we saw two different ways that women are objectified in the world: Would we have women covered like walking corpses so that no man might catch a scintillating glimpse of flesh, as the Egyptian women were dressed, or do we prefer the wedgie bikinis of the Spanish team, who seem to be preparing for future careers on OnlyFans?

Surely we can agree that both of these are failure modes. Neither is a win for women. And neither can be blamed on the “yelping far right” that you invoke as responsible for the trials and tribulations of modern women. Nope.

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You write:

Vote for a woman not because she’s a woman but because she’s the best at the job.

Amen!

But wait. Surely you can’t be speaking of Kamala Harris here. Perhaps it’s just my American bias to think that. But just in case you are: Back in the day, before Harris was chosen to be Biden’s VP, he vowed to choose a woman for Vice President. The immutable demographics of his future pick meant more to him than her skills. She wasn’t chosen because she was best, but because she was a woman.

Even so, we should still vote for who is best, even if our candidates were not chosen because they’re the best. I do not believe that anyone with a basic understanding of the English language, or with an interest in any policy that a president of the United States might affect—could believe that Harris could be best at that job. She has no stated positions, has accomplished nothing¹, and can barely speak in coherent sentences.

What her ascendancy tells me about those who gave her the path to power, is that it doesn’t matter to them that she is incompetent, it just matters that she looks the part. You might have us vote for the person best for the job; they just want us to vote for a woman. Any woman. In fact, it is a reasonable read on the situation to suggest that the choice of this particular woman means that the powers that be—in this case, the Democratic National Committee—may actually believe that this is the best a woman can be.

They are wrong, of course. You know that. I know that. But the world is beginning to forget. Push enough incompetent people to the top because of their immutable characteristics, leaving analytically and creatively talented people in the dust, and you will find that some people start to pine for the old days. The days when those silly women would stay home and tend to the only work they are suited for.

Step aside, ladies, and let the men do the work of the world.

1. A sycophantic article about Kamala Harris’s work as Vice President will surely be an easy place to find some of her notable achievements. Per USA Today, Harris’s most newsworthy accomplishments include establishing an office, visiting a clinic, and traveling to Wisconsin to celebrate an announcement.