Think Like a Feminist

Something has changed.

Only a few years ago, we found ourselves collectively able to live with those who would explain away the “locker-room talk” of the man who would go on to become the president of the United States. The progressive catharsis of the Women’s Marches was threatening to go pretty much nowhere, fizzling out while pussyhats and safety pins went from de rigueur to passé in a matter of months. Working women patiently plodded along, eagerly anticipating the closing of the gendered pay gap by 2119.

But then, seemingly out of nowhere, the accretion of male sins became impossible to ignore. We hit a tipping point, and suddenly so many of us were sharing our stories of harassment and abuse. The MeToo movement has laid bare the elephant in the room, skeletons burst from closets, dirty laundry flaps in the breeze. Hollywood actresses have banded together to announce that “Time’s Up,” and they’ve done it in conjunction with the workers’ rights activists and organizers who’ve been at this stuff for decades. Not a day seems to go by without another high-profile allegation being offered up to the court of public opinion, where we jurors are asked to pass judgment on cases with sometimes sketchy access to the facts and an even sketchier understanding of the moral or legal theories that might help us make sense of things. After centuries of progress coming at a snail’s pace, things are now shifting too quickly for anyone to figure out what the hell is going on.

I wrote Think Like a Feminist: The Philosophy Behind the Revolution (Norton, 2020) to give readers a long-view take on women’s reckoning with sexual harassment and sexual assault. The book—not an academic monograph, but a trade book written for a broad public audience—puts the concerns of the MeToo movement into a broader historical and sociopolitical context, framing them in terms of the battles that feminists have been waging for hundreds of years. It’s being published on September 1^st, and has been described as “a crisp, well-informed primer on feminist theory” by Publisher’s Weekly and “a winning mix of scholarship and irreverence” by Kirkus Reviews.

As an academic philosopher, my scholarly writing is usually read by about nine other people, most of whom share my intellectual and political commitments and want merely to quibble over the details. Even when the scholarly debate gets fierce it usually remains civil; even when disagreement is genuine it usually remains impersonal. But over the years I’ve come to learn that when you go public with your opinions, the debate doesn’t always remain so civil. A few years ago, for example, I published an op-ed where I argued that our culture simply doesn’t know how to deal with women in positions of authority because until fairly recently it didn’t have to. I thought the essay expressed a fairly uncontroversial position, one that merely laid out a century of very careful work in social and political philosophy for a general audience. Female professors, I claimed, have a particularly difficult time establishing a rapport with students that doesn’t revolve around the tired tropes of saintly mother or sexual plaything, neither of which are terribly pedagogically useful.

When Sigmund Freud argued that women could be seen as Madonnas or whores, he didn’t get hate mail. His was considered an objective treatment of the subject. Mine, apparently, was not, and the hate mail just kept coming: I was immature. A neurotic. “I feel sorry for her children,” readers said. “I feel sorry for her students. For her husband.” Much of the negative feedback I received in the wake of this op-ed amounted to the accusation that I was a narcissistic whiner tilting at windmills. The restrictive roles that women are forced to play in our culture aren’t that bad, I was told, and they certainly don’t amount to oppression. “Grow up and deal with it,” one reader wrote. “If a student acts inappropriately, slap him or her down and get on with being a professor.”

Similar admonitions have been lobbed at today’s proponents of MeToo. “Apparently there is a whole country full of young women who don’t know how to call a cab,” Caitlin Flanagan snarked. Dave Chappelle took aim at the woman who charged his friend Louis CK with masturbating in the middle of a telephone call, calling her “weak” and chiding: “Bitch, you don’t know how to hang up a phone?” Katie Roiphe griped, “It feels as if the feminist moment is, at times, providing cover for vindictiveness and personal vendettas and office politics and garden-variety disappointment, that what we think of as purely positive social change is also, for some, blood sport. The grammar is better in these feminist tweets, but they are nonetheless recognizably Trumpian.” Comparable sentiments have been expressed by opinionati across the political spectrum: that the MeToo movement has predictably descended into hysteria, that red-blooded men are now presumed guilty until proven innocent, that we’ve raised a generation of pearl-clutching politically correct snowflake prudes who’ve fetishized the victimization of women and are going to ruin sex by taking all the hot, messy ambiguity out of it.

I think these concern-trolling calls for due process, and the blanket insinuations that everyone who’s hopped on the MeToo bandwagon has abandoned it, are not only unfair and unhelpful but often made in bad faith. But the ubiquity and resilience of such claims made me realize that a book on feminism for the general public was needed.

I wrote Think Like a Feminist, in part, because I recognize that feminism has a PR problem. If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say, “I’m not a feminist, but . . .” and then go on to say all sorts of explicitly feminist things, I could close the wage gap single-handedly. Half the people I meet think feminists are scary man-hating harpies who just need to get laid. The other half think feminism amounts to vacuously affirming every choice a woman makes on no other grounds than that someone with two X chromosomes is pulling the trigger. Neither of these misconceptions accurately represents the movement, but it’s illustrative to consider why the caricatures of the Girl Power Feminist and the Angry Feminist get so much cultural uptake.  Both, I argue, defang feminism of its radical potential.     

Flying in the face of the stereotype of feminists as man-haters, a major theme in this book is women’s own culpability in this mess. I explain why there are often very good reasons for women to go with the flow, and why it’s often very difficult to do otherwise. This is, in part, because it’s next to impossible to avoid internalizing society’s expectations about what women are supposed to want and how we’re supposed to act. But when we unquestioningly participate in a system that harms people, then we share in the responsibility for perpetuating that system. I argue that women should take responsibility for the roles we play that entrench a system that harms not only us but all other women. But I also argue that we should cut ourselves and other women a whole lot of slack, because we need to appreciate just how monumental the system we’re up against is. Each of us is just trying to make it to tomorrow. Think Like a Feminist explains why men in general are not the enemy here, but rather an interconnected system of sexist norms, habits, expectations, and institutions. Some of these things function below the level of conscious awareness, and most implicate women as well.

In writing a book like this I think it’s important to be honest about the mistakes feminists have made in the past—about how our calls for solidarity among women far too often gave in to the temptations of racism, classism, ableism, homophobia, or transphobia. For example, incidents like Susan B. Anthony declaring, “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman,” or Betty Friedan scaring up a “lavender menace” to disassociate the feminist movement from LGBTQ causes, are black marks on the movement’s history that still haven’t been properly made up for. We need to be open about this checkered past to avoid falling into similar patterns in the future.

Readers of the book will need to permit me a degree of polemicism: purporting to present the definitive take on anything is a fool’s bargain, much less a topic as varied and controversial as feminism. I do my very best to present as many of feminism’s strands as possible, and I try to avoid getting bogged down in its internecine battles, but I don’t pretend to be neutral about which iterations of feminism I prefer or that all are equally valid. My training as an analytic philosopher shows through here, but I try not to give continental and post-structural approaches short shrift. I aim to give sex-positive and anti-porn feminism equal airtime. But I take a firm stance on current debates about trans inclusion. Walking readers through the evolution of feminist thought—from characterizing gender as a social construction to realizing that there are important senses in which sex, too, is socially constructed—I argue that TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) are feminists who don’t deserve the name. No one should get to call herself a feminist if she doesn’t care about all women, and trans women are women.

My hope is that Think Like a Feminist resonates as well with those who’ve been with me in the feminist trenches for decades as with those who are new to the party. I want it to speak to diehards and to skeptics, to 16-year-olds and to 60-year-olds. I’d like people to read it in the classroom, in their reading groups, and on the beach. I adamantly didn’t want to settle for preaching to the choir with this book, but nor did I want to spend all my time simply trying to convince people they should be feminists. Feminism’s ideas can speak for themselves, as long as you can get them across. Understanding that you usually catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, I try my best in this book to turn the stereotype of the humorless feminist bitch on its head, introducing readers to some of the central lessons of feminist theory in a manner that is accessible, unintimidating, and as amusing, irreverent, and undidactic as possible. 

Having spent a very long time playing Whac-A-Mole with people’s misconceptions of feminism—in the classroom, on social media, at the Thanksgiving dinner table—I’ve ended up with a whole bag full o’ tricks to get the skeptics’ guard down and get them to listen to what feminism is really about. Think Like a Feminist is the collection of this hard-won repertoire.

Excerpted from Think Like a Feminist: The Philosophy Behind the Revolution. Copyright (c) 2020 by Carol Hay. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott or Associate Editor Julinna Oxley.

Carol Hay

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Carol Hay is an associate professor of philosophy at University of Massachusetts Lowell and author of the award-winning Kantianism, Liberalism, & Feminism: Resisting Oppression. She’s written for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Aeon magazine. She divides her time between Boston and San Francisco.