(Below is a lightly-edited transcript of a speech I gave at LevelUp in Atlanta earlier this month. I haven’t confronted this topic comprehensively in a while.
–Ayaan)
“Feminism” is a notoriously vague term. Many of you will have heard the claim that anyone who believes in equal rights between men and women is a feminist (a definition spouted by celebrities like Emma Watson over the years). In reality, feminism is an incredibly splintered concept, and the late-stage feminism which dominates Western institutions today is more confusing and paradoxical than ever before. Think of the platitudes which Hollywood actors repeat in their Oscar speeches. A contrived hierarchy of oppressed groups governs feminist rhetoric and has generated several paradoxes, some of which I will discuss today. Indeed, so-called “progressive” feminism defends hierarchy far more than any standard conservative would. Most importantly, this feminism ignores Islamic misogyny in the developing world – and, increasingly, on Western shores. Today I will baptize it “luxury feminism.”
Like many things, luxury feminism is easiest to define by comparison. With that in mind, I will compare progressive feminism with more productive movements, like the growing “sex realist” movement. I will then make a case for abandoning the word altogether and restoring a sense of perspective on women’s issues. It is even more urgent now than it was when I first came to the Netherlands in 1992 that we acknowledge and criticize the spread of Islamic misogyny in the West. Meanwhile, the sexes have never been more alienated from one another, to the extreme detriment of Western society and its future.
First, I want you to consider the predicaments of normal women in the West. Lizzy is a 25-year-old woman who wants to have children. She has a degree and worries that having children in the next few years will threaten her career. When she seeks out feminist literature and advice, she finds no comfort: All she is told is that children will only burden her, ruining her body and career prospects. Feminism emphasizes the need for financial independence, in the event that her husband will abandon her. She is filled with dread, not joy, at the prospect of child-rearing, but can’t shake the feeling in the back of her mind that something is missing from her life.
Liv is a college student who has hooked up with a guy after a drinks party. She wakes up the next day with a sense of shame and self-loathing; her memory is that they were both drinking a lot. She doesn’t even remember how they got back to the dorm room. When she confronts the man, he seems just as embarrassed as she is; all he can say is sorry, before going quiet. The logic of MeToo jumps to the conclusion that she did not consent and that the hookup was rape. Liv, whose uncertainty clashes with the absolute certainty of her feminist friends, falls into despair and starts experiencing anxiety and depression. Standard feminist rhetoric cynically demonizes the male party and, without the language of chivalry or “dignity,” catastrophizes the situation. At the same time, it does not suggest that Liv avoid drinking too much around men who want to sleep with her. Standard feminist rhetoric makes her makes her more miserable, not less.
Sophia’s neighborhood is changing. Nearby, an enclave of immigrants – mostly men – from North Africa has formed. In the afternoon in the park with her children, a gang of them approach and start intimidating her. One of them attempts to sexually assault her. The police cannot help her, since she has limited identifying information; her memory is hazy from shock. She has no way of expressing outrage at the root cause of the problem, which is the failure of assimilating recent migrants from the Islamic world, without being accused of bigotry; modern luxury feminism forbids her from pointing out that crucial cultural factor. Instead, she has to dance around the problem by criticizing the sexual aggression of “all men.”
Nellie is a cyclist who wants to compete in a regional competition which has recently declared itself to be “trans-inclusive.” Need I say any more?
Paradox no. 1: Race trumps sex
In the spirit of “intersectional” rankings, I want to begin by examining the first paradox of luxury feminism: that race trumps sex. “Taḥarrush jamāʿī” is an Arabic term describing “collective sexual assault” or mass molestation. It is a traditional form of plunder in Islam, often (but not necessarily) in the context of war. “Kafir” (nonbelieving) women are particularly targeted; taḥarrush jamāʿī was inflicted on a group of women protestors in Tahrir Square, Cairo, in 2005, and has been increasingly documented in the Islamic world since. It has now come to Europe.
The 2015-16 New Year’s Eve assaults, in which a large group of North African men assaulted approximately 1,200 women in a single night, starkly revealed how unassimilated migrants treat Western women whom they view as ripe for the picking. In my book Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights (2021), I show the causal connection between increased sexual coercion and rape in countries like Germany (which experienced a 41% increase in 2017 alone) and this influx of young male migrants from North Africa and the Middle East. I also reflect on the silence of contemporary feminism to take to the streets in anger about this. In the UK, “Honor Based Abuse,” which is closely tied to Muslim forced marriage, has been on the rise, with offences rising in England by 60% in the last two years and by 193% since 2016. This was reported in a recent Guardian article which also failed to mention that HBA predominantly occurs in immigrant communities.
The sexual violence of unassimilated Muslim men against Western women is not limited to adult women. As I have previously written for Restoration:
South Asian grooming gangs in the UK have historically targeted young British girls from vulnerable backgrounds, girls who are considered sexual objects for the use and abuse of men who will never marry them. Between 2008 and 2010, a voracious grooming gang in Rochdale comprised of British-Pakistani men was made known to British police. The cops failed to clamp down on its activity, largely out of fear of being condemned as racist (which, no doubt, would have happened). As a result, hundreds of white working-class girls, many of whom were from vulnerable backgrounds and lacked parental support, were made victims of sex trafficking. Rochdale was by no means the only grooming gang; grooming gangs have recently been exposed in Rotherham, Huddersfield, Bradford, Oxford, and other areas with notable South Asian Muslim populations and enclaves. In 2017, it was found that 84% of those convicted for grooming gang offenses in the UK were South Asian, despite representing only 7% of the population. Rather than grappling with unpleasant case studies or statistics which risk seeming critical of Islam, Western feminism paradoxically condemns “Islamophobia” and sexism in the same breath. The Department of Gender Studies at the LSE recently compared the French radical feminist group Femen with the “far-right.” Why? For criticizing patriarchy within Islam and the sexually aggressive behavior of migrants from Muslim countries.
Femen has its own problems, but protesting Muslim misogyny is not one of them!
I suspect the feminist belief that race trumps sex explains the following strange event. In March of this year, when several women from NYC tearfully recorded their reaction after they were punched in the face by the same man, they withheld one important identifying detail: That he was black. Violence against women by men of color is an uncomfortable topic. In the States, it seems that only black women feel able to discuss the misogyny and abuse they face in their own community. In such discussions, luxury feminism is nowhere to be seen.
In the hierarchy of victimhood, white people can never be victimized by people of color. To say otherwise is a feature of imperialism, or white hegemony, or white cisheteropatriarchy (it seems that feminists have recently grown tired of the vagueness of their terms so have resorted to inventing German-style neologisms). Luxury feminism is, first and foremost, a political opposition to conservatism: Whatever the latter says, the former must revile. When immigration proves harmful to women (both women in the West and within immigrant communities), feminists turn a blind eye out of political allegiance. Taken to its extreme, this feminism considers the wanton acts of extreme sexual violence by Hamas on October 7th as either “resistance by any means necessary” or simply “made up” by Israel – or, somehow, both.
Meanwhile, MeToo’s paradox is similar to that of gender ideology: It denies embodied sex differences, assuming that men and women pursue and react in the same way to sex. When a woman feels violated, that is not because women are inherently more emotionally affected by sex; that must be because there was no “consent.” This is a dangerous error. Spotlighting dubious cases of celebrities hooking up in hotel rooms while ignoring Honor Based Abuse, the mistreatment of Muslim wives, and the horrific abuse by Hamas is the paradox of MeToo.
Paradox no. 2: Transgenderism as a luxury belief
Luxury feminism celebrates the destruction of all-male spaces for Western men but has no response to the subjugation and segregation of women under Islam. Now, thanks to the rise of gender ideology and activism, all-female spaces are threatened. You might think that feminism should object to this: All-female spaces include changing rooms and toilets with baby-changing facilities. But superficially siding with gender ideology is a key feature of luxury feminism, which needs to be seen on the “right side of history.”
The basis of transgender activism is the luxury feminist belief that trans people are the new gay people. Since they are the new marginalized group, they must be defended at all costs. This has led to more paradoxes than I can contain in this speech, the main one being that womanhood loses all meaning under the law of self-identification. Any man with feminine inclinations, or an autogynephilic fetish, can claim womanhood for himself. On the flip side of the coin, young women experiencing the strife of puberty and female embodiment are encouraged to reject their womanhood altogether.
The “trans” umbrella is as broad, confused, and disparate as the “feminist” one. Increasingly, young gay men and boys with feminine characteristics are presented with the notion that they are actually women. Activists celebrate their “gender journeys” in spite of the abject horrors and permanently damaging, even life-shortening, effects of “bottom surgery” which increasing numbers of gay men solicit. Under which regimes are gay men refashioned into “straight women?” Islamic countries like Iran inflict transgender “reassignment” surgeries onto gay men in an effort to erase homosexuality. Encouraging the view that gay men are, or should be, women is a kind of progress: The dystopian kind.
Even more strange is the luxury feminist embrace of straight men who transition. At least, it is confusing until you realize that luxury feminists simply deny that these men have any motivations besides the genuine belief that they are inwardly female (another paradox!). But sound research shows that autogynephilia is a real condition which is increasingly represented in trans-identifying men. How can it be that feminists do not suspect any deceit when convicted male rapists decide to transition and then solicit sanctuary in a female prison? This is happening more than you think: Reduxx has published dozens of cases over the past few months alone. Certain feminists’ sheer blindness to the unglamorous problems of actually vulnerable women, like women in prisons, reveals just how luxury their beliefs are.
Paradox no.3: “Sex work is work”
“TERF” isn’t the only new word used to demonize sensible people. “SWERF” is a term used by feminists to describe “sex worker exclusionary radical feminism.” One slogan of luxury feminism is the trite platitude “sex work is work.”
Despite MeToo’s obsession with consent and its punishment of men for minor sexual misconduct, one modern feminist myth is that sex work – both online in the form of OnlyFans and in the porn and prostitution industries – is empowering. There is even a “sex worker inclusive LGBT+ Pride flag” featuring a red umbrella, the international symbol of sex workers. In 2001, Venetian activists took to the streets with red umbrellas to protest inhumane working conditions, while at the same time defending the legitimacy of such work. Can you imagine a more bizarre paradox?
I needn’t go into detail about the horrors of the global sex trade. But I want to discuss a phenomenon of sanitized prostitution which has been given a veneer of glamour: OnlyFans. On OnlyFans, a minuscule proportion of women make enough money to sustain themselves. The vast majority of women make a pittance, while closing off doors into the professional world forever. Worse than that: When they retire or reform, they can never scrub the internet of their nude images. Neither is OnlyFans free of the exploitation and pimping which shapes the world of prostitution, despite its apparent respect for women’s creative autonomy. The paywalls on OnlyFans allow traffickers to fly under the radar of police. Recent research has found that an alarmingly high number of OnlyFans profiles reveal indicators of trafficking as well as child sexual abuse material. Online pimping and trafficking is so prevalent that pimps can seemingly gain notoriety and fame in online spaces: Andrew Tate, who has previously advertized his own abusive pimping tactics, is a hero to many misguided and alienated boys and young men. His Islamic faith is one aspect of his patriarchal persona. I worry about the growing gulf between boys and girls; when feminism defends an industry as hostile to true love and intimacy as prostitution, it contributes to phenomena like Andrew Tate. Men regard women on OnlyFans with disgust while soliciting their services; women mistake their money for admiration. It is a tale as old as time.
Radical feminism and finding a balance
The luxury feminism which I have described has been called “radical” feminism by Christina Hoff-Sommers, who criticized the lack of nuance of third-wave feminism in the 90s (Who Stole Feminism? 1995). For example, she challenged the denial that the “gender pay gap” had anything to do with women’s own choices and the nature of motherhood.
The reason I don’t use the term “radical” feminism in my own critique is that this term also applies to another group of feminists who do not care for luxury beliefs. The UK’s Julie Bindel isn’t afraid of challenging Islamic violence, the sex industry, and the risks and abuses of the growing surrogacy industry. As such, she is labelled a “TERF” and a “SWERF”. Bindel cares most about women in poverty, since they tend to be at the highest risk of abuse; the grooming gangs scandal made this extremely clear.
However, the tradition of “radical” feminism, championed by the philosopher Andrea Dworkin, abandons the possibility of harmony with our other half: The male population. In the words of Dworkin: “Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice.” She even described all heterosexual intercourse as “the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women.” Misandry is not the answer, though many strides have been made thanks to the work of feminists like Bindel against the prostitution industry and now gender ideology.
Conclusion: Marital cooperation and the body politic
One obvious way of fighting luxury feminism is to support the growing body of “realist” feminists in the UK. These women have widened the Overton Window to challenge gender clinics and put a stop to the NHS’ irresponsible distribution of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for trans children.
There is a growing “postliberal” movement which brings together this kind of feminism with more conservative, pro-family and often pro-Christian views. Louise Perry is one such postliberal thinker, whose book The Case against the Sexual Revolution (2022) has the audacity to encourage women to listen to the wisdom of their own mothers and to avoid drinking heavily around promiscuous men.
In my view, it would help if we abandoned the troublesome term “feminism” altogether in favor of more specific terms like “sex realism” and “scepticism” when it comes to things like excessive immigration. We must preserve single sex spaces – yes, including all-male spaces like social clubs. We must emphasize the importance of marriage and increase financial and social support for mothers, making it not just normal but normative to lend a hand to the mothers in your life. We can give transformative help to the women I described at the beginning of my talk; it just requires the bravery to sound a bit old-fashioned!
Luxury feminism talks about “amplifying” voices all the time. Let’s amplify the voices and stories of women escaping abuse from the developing world or apostasizing from Islam, while keeping them safe with strong and principled policing. Let’s amplify the voices of sex realist women and men, whether conservative or liberal, and encourage them to unite despite their political differences. Let’s amplify the voices of old-fashioned mothers.
One of the reasons I fled to the West was to have the freedom to marry for love. Here, we take it for granted that marriage is not just a self-serving contract or a tribal agreement between families, but a loving a union of equals who possess complementary virtues. A happy marriage is the fundamental unit of a healthy society. For a marriage to be happy and fulfilling, it must be cooperative. For the health of the body politic, marital cooperation has to be reflected on a large scale. Only then will families grow and flourish, birth rates stabilize, and the collective mental health crisis ease.
I want to end with the wisdom of G. K. Chesterton, who put it better than I can: “We men and women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other a terrible and tragic loyalty.”