The Psychological Toll of Reawakened Misogyny
As right wing movements surge with power in India, Brazil, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Turkyie, France, Germany, Russia and the United States, many women feel that the tide is turning against them.
Last month on X white supremacist Nicholas Fuentes wrote “Your body, my choice. Forever.” Professional misogynist Andrew Tate informs us that “The men are back in charge.”
It’s beside the point to wonder when men stopped being in charge. These influencers and the legions following them, along with multitudes of less radical people, proclaim that a new age of manhood has dawned. Get used to it.
Women feel that hard won gains, gains they had taken for granted, are under threat. This perception causes widespread distress, taking form as anxiety, depression, simmering anger, and profound incredulity.
Fear of Losing Autonomy
When women look at global communities where female autonomy is starkly absent they see a potential future that feels chillingly plausible. These fears are not irrational; they are borne out by history.
Do you know the The 5th Dimension song Age of Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In? It came out in 1969. That was the first year that women could file for divorce.
In 1973 Marvin Gaye released Let's Get It On. Same year that abortion became legal – not by a proper act of legislation, but because of a cascade of reasonings from the Constitution.
Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama came out in 1974. Fifty years ago. That was the first year that women were allowed to open their own bank account.
We all know this music. Historically speaking, fifty years is not that long. Young women are painfully aware of just how fresh their rights are.
Seeing Roe vs. Wade fall, and having the state declare that it has authority over their body, and that it has the right to inspect their body to find out just how much authority it has, makes women terrified at how fragile their gains are.
The incredulity some of my younger patients experience in the face of this and the many other hypothetical situations they dream up causes them deep distress. I have clients stockpiling birth control because they fear access to it will start to come along with government oversight.
No Quarter At Home or Work
There’s another side to this that’s rarely talked about.
The feminist movement strongly advocated for women to gain access to “the man’s world.” At the same time, it failed to assert that women deserve equal rights for what they were already doing for humanity.
Feminists belittled homemakers. Because of that, far right pundits can still say that being a homemaker means submission to a man. Women who are homemakers are believed to be “controlled” by their husband, “supported” by him, etc. In today’s culture wars, when the right tells women to be homemakers they mean it as an insult to their intelligence, agency and potential. They mean to “put them in their place.”
The feminist movement should have empowered women in the home, demanding honour and economic recognition for their work and their phenomenal social contribution. Instead, it perpetuated the beliefs of the patriarchy, and so left homemakers wide open to this cultural abuse.
If there’s no retreat to the home, then perhaps there is agency moving into the “man’s world?” The current zeitgeist undermines that idea as well.
The pundits say that working women didn’t earn their positions through hard work, talent, or grit. No, they were awarded them through Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies.
Women’s hard won gains were not earned; they were granted by the authorities. Once again, women end up disempowered and defensive.
The Breaking of the Social Fabric
To see rights come under attack is bad enough. Much worse are the harrowing stories my clients tell me about the unraveling of societal norms.
Women have always had to be vigilant, but part of the cultural change feminism created was to demand and receive greater respect from all men. The way we are treated by strangers on the street matters perhaps more than anything else, and that treatment has deteriorated materially in recent years, and looks likely to get worse.
The fear of losing autonomy and agency leads many women to feel deeply anxious. It’s as if they are watching progress unravel in slow-motion right before their eyes. Helpless to do anything about it, depression can set in.
The Personal Cost of Unprocessed Anger
This distress often pressurizes into rage that has no specific object. “Situational anger” can be the most difficult and debilitating type of rage.
Worst of all, it's isolating. Women carry it silently, since there’s no place to put it and since releasing any of it might make their day-to-day situation worse. They worry about being perceived as “difficult” or “emotional” if they speak out too strongly, so they suppress their feelings.
Without any efficacious outlet available, the very anger that should fuel change becomes a source of self-harm. This is a quiet crisis among women—burning anger that offers no solutions, only pain.
What Can Be Done?
Women often feel the collective suffering of all women worldwide. Women are biologically wired to be more empathetic, a requirement for motherhood and for effective leadership. Women suffer more because they suffer not only for themselves but for others.
Sometimes women feel that they cannot heal themselves unless they can heal all others. This fallacy arises from empathy, because the empath is the one who knows that if anyone is going to survive, the whole tribe has to survive. Women fall into this trap easily, where they hold themselves back out of some misshapen belief that doing so will make things better for others.
To be a force of change in society, the first thing a woman must do is take care of herself. The very best way to do that right now might be to reach out to other people – not just other women, but sympathetic and enlightened men as well – and get together with them. If you can do it physically, that’s excellent, but video calls work too. Find a way, or create a way, to socialize in an unstructured situation where the only goal is friendship itself.
In a world that seems to be getting colder, friendly and open companionship of any kind, with anyone, about anything, is an act of rebellion that will have a real impact on our lives and on our world.
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