"Dissident Dialogues," Terrible Takes
When I first heard about Dissident Dialogues, a two-day festival of “dangerous ideas” organized by the canceled lead guitarist of Mumford & Sons, I wondered who would go. Spending the first weekend in May with a bunch of podcasters irate about woke-ness is not my idea of fun. Then I noticed a panel on the future of feminism and thought, “I’ll bite.”
I was curious to hear from a group of women presented as bold iconoclasts. While bizarre, their views and the convention itself were boring and dated. The only real danger came not from the ideas—a tired mishmash of gender essentialism and J.K Rowling-style trolling—but from the multi-million dollar effort to rebrand widely disseminated reactionary political takes as intriguing, countercultural, and “canceled.”
The panelists were all white, and two live in England: the writer Mary Harrington and the academic Kathleen Stock, who resigned from her position at the University of Sussex in 2021 after being protested and, she says, “ostracized” for her transphobic views. Both are Oxford grads who have made careers out of challenging what they see as contemporary feminist orthodoxy. Stock—who has said it is “not fair on females” to be expected to share changing rooms with trans women because of the “risk of a man saying he is a woman and going into a space and taking advantage”—insists that she is not transphobic. I disagree, but I’m more offended by the pretense that her views are original rather than a posher version of what Ted Cruz was saying in 2016, when he lost the GOP nomination to Donald Trump. Harrington once lived in a “supposedly egalitarian and sexually liberated all-lesbian community” that she eventually discovered “was in fact…riddled with competition.” She is now married to a man and frequently urges other women to do the same. Brave!
The other panelists were moderator Bridget Phetasy, a comedian who claims to have been driven out of L.A. by “rising crime, rampant homelessness and drug addiction, and an insane cost of living” (that last one I believe). “Red Scare” co-host Anna Khachiyan says many provocative things, but her shtick consists of being so heavily sarcastic that it’s impossible to tell when she’s sincere (I’m not sure she knows, either). Diana Fleischman is an evolutionary psychologist who emphasizes what she believes are the innate biological differences between men and women.
None of these women really seemed interested in discussing the future of feminism. Khachiyan urged women to stop blaming men, patriarchy, and society for their problems, said feminism has contributed to an undefined “crisis of masculinity,” and described it as a “signaling mechanism” meant to “sexually irritate” men into giving women what they want. Phetasy said she feels like “so much less of a feminist” now that she has a baby she’s breastfeeding and can’t stand to be away from. When Fleischman said something similar, a mystified Stock said, “I didn’t breastfeed, hated staying home, and desperately wanted to get out of the house.” Harrington repeated Madeleine Albright’s 2013 line about how women can have it all, just not all at once. It was odd to watch a group of women with varying degrees of contempt for the contemporary feminist movement describe these experiences as if they were unrelated to and in no way enabled by feminists who came before them.
When Harrington said we need to stop blaming “one sex or another” for society’s problems, I struggled to remember the last time I’d been at a feminist event where participants railed against men as opposed to, say, discussing strategies to defend abortion rights. There is plenty of non-man-hating feminism to be found, unless you are determined not to find it.
“I’m not going back,” Stock declared at one point, “You can’t take me back. I’m a gay woman; there’s nothing for me in ‘trad wife’ culture.” She suggested that feminists would be wise to “stop fiddling around the edges” with issues like making pregnancy less anxiety-provoking and instead focus on addressing the material suffering of women around the world. Women are still being “flogged to death,” she noted, and some are starving because “men are taking their food.” The only way to spread the kind of feminism that would meaningfully address those conditions, Khachiyan interjected, is “literally through regime change.” She rolled her eyes theatrically, adding that this would, of course, be “racist and Islamophobic.”
After giggling about their own pasts as “sluts,” Fleischman and Phetasy agreed that girls should be discouraged from sleeping around, because promiscuity doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness for women. (What lasting damage it did to them is unclear.) Then Phetasy surprised me by asking the only relevant question of the day. A British friend was giving her grief, she said, because American feminists had failed to save Roe. “You guys had one job! Didn’t you fail catastrophically?” she said, quoting her friend. Harrington replied that she thought women are, on average, more anti-abortion than men—in which case we’ve actually “won.”
To her credit, Phetasy kept pushing. “But how do we save women’s health care?” she asked, noting that Dobbs is creating health care “deserts.” For the first time all day, she sounded genuinely concerned. “How can we use our power, privilege, and freedom to save women from being harmed by the fall of Roe?” No one gave a direct or coherent answer. “We just need to occasionally have sex with each other in order to get along,” Stock said. She however will not be having sex with men, she added, implying that it was a job for her straight sisters. We should also get academics out of feminism, she continued, and “immediately defund” all feminist NGOs
Khachiyan ended with the soundest advice of the day: “Don’t listen to people like us,” she said. Incapable of leaving without a final provocation, she added, “Do raise the birth rate.” She sounded as novel and subversive as Glenn Beck.
—
Raina Lipsitz, author of The Rise of a New Left: How Young Radicals Are Shaping the Future of American Politics, contributes to a variety of publications, including Crain’s, The Nation, and The New Republic.