I’m Not a Feminist, But . . .

What is post-feminism, and how is it related to not identifying as a feminist?

In her book Modern Misogyny, psychologist Kristin Anderson (2015) explains that we are living in an era of post-feminism, which began in the 1990s and evolved following the 9/11 attacks. A defining feature of post-feminism is the idea that the women’s movement has reached its goals and, therefore, feminism is no longer needed. Feminists disagree with this belief. In fact, two of the goals of this book are to show (a) how gender inequities shape all aspects of the psychological development of girls and women and (b) how addressing inequities has the potential to improve everyone’s lives.

In this post-feminist era, stereotypes about feminists are widely disseminated as a way to stigmatize women who speak out against sexism. As a result, a goal of the post-feminist era is to convince girls and women that identifying with feminism is problematic—and this leads to tremendous confusion about what it means to be a feminist (Anderson, Kanner, & Elsayegh, 2009). Susan Faludi (1992) coined the term backlash to explain how negative stereotypes generally develop when women begin to make social gains. From Fauldi’s perspective, negative stereotypes prevent women from organizing as an activist group because they are less likely to self-identify as feminists when they’re aware of such stereotypes.

There are no shortages of negative stereotypes about feminists. They’ve been called bra-burners and man-haters; they’ve been described as hairy, selfish, unattractive, angry, tense, and egotistical (Alexander & Ryan, 1997; Hall & Rodriguez, 2003; Liss, Hoffner, & Crawford, 2000; Rudman & Fairchild, 2007). Surprisingly, even when women believe in some aspects of feminism, they assume that the typical feminist is more radical than they are (Liss et al., 2000). This happens because negative beliefs influence a woman’s decision to identify as a feminist (Alexander & Ryan, 1997). In one research study, for example, women who read a paragraph expressing negative stereotypes about feminists were twice as likely not to identify as feminist as compared to women who read a paragraph expressing positive stereotypes (Roy, Weibust, & Miller, 2007).