Zoe Williams: Feminism without human warmth leaves me cold

.... the Slumflower’s message – love yourself, and that is your suit of armour – was much more important and universal than relationship advice, and spoke powerfully to girls who were ages away from their first shitty boyfriend, as well as enlighteningly to women who were ages from being able to remember him.

Eggerue did a TED talk and guest-edited the Today programme. She has a quarter of a million Instagram followers, and is plainly a force for inspiration. But fast-forward to now, the message has changed. Like a mash-up of Naomi Wolf and early-era Beyoncé, she has taken a female self-sufficiency narrative and spliced it with a coquettish 1950s individualism, to create something appalling, in my view a creed of exploitation. Initially I thought someone had hacked her Twitter feed: “If he says he loves you, and you are still paying your own bills, you settled for a roommate.” It got uglier: “Men shouldn’t open their useless mouths to invite me anywhere if they are not arranging my (luxe) travel and covering my Michelin star meal, plus some money (£1k) in a brown envelope to thank me for donating my time to them that I could have spent at home relaxing.”


A new voice of feminism, in short, had turned into something I found anti-feminist, anti-humanist, anti-intimacy, anti-everything I care about. The idea that you can address the objectification of women by abasing men – you want to measure us by the pound? Make sure you can afford to – is a race to the bottom. It goes against every element of the feminism I understand, in which women aspire not to be kept by men, but to have agency and self-determination and the ability to keep themselves. Women don’t present their sexuality as a commodity that only the rich man deserves, because they have sexual destinies of their own, which cannot be bought or sold, can only be realised or thwarted. Above all, my feminism doesn’t even exist without the presumption that all human beings are infinitely precious, infinitely vulnerable, that none of us could withstand the harshness of this worldview, in which we all use each other furiously until everybody’s spent... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/12/feminism-human-warmth-slumflower

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