Why the next wave of feminism is conservative

At a recent dinner, an MP told me a story that reveals a great deal about the current state of feminism. One of her constituents had come to her surgery in some distress. She had children at a local primary school, she said, and had been alarmed to discover that the school’s sex education curriculum contained explicit details that she considered wildly inappropriate. She was aware of the prevailing culture in which adolescents – particularly girls – are sexualised at an ever younger age, and she did not want that for her own children.

But parents are increasingly powerless in the face of progressive schools, and not having been to university, this woman felt anxious. She was intimidated by the prospect of speaking with her children’s headteacher. She didn’t understand the progressive jargon teachers used, and was unsettled by their moral certainty. So her plea to her MP was this: help me to protect my children, tell me what to say.

Who would she fare better with, do you think: a parliamentarian of the left, or of the right? The answer, to me, is not obvious. I am the director of The Other Half, a non-partisan feminist thinktank founded with the express intention of representing the interests of women like this constituent, women who feel at a loss as to how to protect their children. And when I say ‘non-partisan’, I really do mean it: my experience of SW1 is that party affiliation tells you almost nothing about a person’s attitude towards issues such as porn, child abuse and violence against women.

Feminism in the second half of the 20th century was strongly associated with the left, since it grew out of the American civil rights movements of the 1960s. But it has not always been so. There have been plenty of periods during which feminism of a much more conservative flavour has dominated. I believe we are entering another one of those periods now.

This rightward shift is a result of two phenomena, both connected to the advent of the internet. First, there has been the politicisation of otherwise non-political women during the Great British Terf War that began in the early 2010s – a war that is now over, by the way, with the ‘Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists’ (who mostly prefer to describe themselves as ‘gender critical’) very clearly victorious.

Witness the downfall this month of Mermaids, a charity whose stated goal is to represent the interests of transgender children and their families and which was, until recently, the jewel in the crown of British trans activism, attracting funding from the National Lottery, and high--profile support from the Sussexes and the BBC.

But in early October it was revealed that one of Mermaids’ trustees had spoken at an event hosted by a paedophile support group, while another member of staff had been caught sharing photos of himself online dressed in a schoolgirl skirt in a sexualised pose. This scandal comes hot on the heels of the discovery that Mermaids staff had offered breast binders to children without their parents’ knowledge or consent. In PMQs on 12 October the then prime minister Liz Truss appeared to lend her support to a police investigation into these activities, and an investigation by the Charity Commission is already under way.

The anonymous women of Mumsnet were not in the least bit surprised by the Mermaids revelations. In fact, they were instrumental in bringing them to light. Sneeringly described by one American media outlet as the ‘ground zero for British transphobia’, the users of Britain’s most popular parenting messaging board have had their suspicions about the charity for some time and have been doing their own detective work behind the scenes, as part of grassroots resistance to the radical ambitions of the trans activist movement. This has been a war fought over the earthiest kind of material reality – toilets, penises and the amputated breasts of unhappy teenage girls. But it’s also been a war fought almost entirely online. The trans movement sprang from the internet, and its opposing movement sprang from the same.

Mumsnetters, as the name suggests, are overwhelmingly mothers, the most natural and instinctive defenders of children. And here is the second tech-enabled factor in the rightward shift of feminism. ‘The trouble with socialism,’ as Oscar Wilde put it, ‘is that it takes up too many evenings.’ So does feminism – at least it did until quite recently. The second wave of the 1970s and 1980s was conceived of and led by a small cadre of young women who spent intensive amounts of time with one another, including sometimes living under the same roof, thinking and writing and working towards their utopian vision. Not coincidentally, they mostly didn’t have children, since being pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen was hardly compatible with a movement that demanded so much time and energy of its activists.

But how about pregnant and barefoot with a smartphone? The early battles of the Great British Terf War were fought by left-wing feminists, many of them affiliated with the trade union movement. But the popularity of platforms like Mumsnet meant that these people were joined by a much larger and formerly much quieter group of women: mothers from a wide range of backgrounds who feel the same fear for their children that the anxious constituent described, and who were newly able to participate in the public debate via the internet.

Given that they have been drawn in from outside of the usual activist circles, and given that having children is known to make people more conservative, we should not be surprised to discover that these new additions to the feminist movement are not necessarily of the left – a fact that has created a good deal of conflict within the gender critical ranks. Because of course it was the left who looked on cheerfully as male sex offenders were housed in women’s prisons, and the left who tried to set about dismantling women’s sports and women’s spaces. This fact is not lost on left-wing gender-critical feminists. But they interpret the past behaviour of their political allies as a moment of madness, remedied through a much-needed return to ‘proper’ leftist politics.

Other feminists view the matter quite differently. Towards the right of the gender-critical movement is the campaigner and mother of three Kellie Jay Keen, also known as Posie Parker, who is both an extraordinarily charismatic campaigner and a divisive figure: ‘a legend’ or ‘a Poundshop Marine Le Pen’, depending on your perspective.

Keen is able to speak to a Middle England that would never previously have identified as feminist in any way (a majority of British women do not define themselves as such), and she attracts what one critic describes as a ‘mass, populist’ energy – a description she would probably take as a compliment. More than anybody else, Keen is emblematic of British feminism’s current direction of travel away from the academic left.

And she is a queen of political display. Public events hosted by Keen and her allies invariably attract the attention of trans activists, and footage of confrontations between the groups are widely shared online, further energising her base. In one such video, we see Keen’s calm response to a male figure in a balaclava who looms over her, furious. Dressed in a viper-green jumpsuit, with platinum hair in her signature Marilyn Monroe set, she wags a scolding finger at the protestor (‘He’s not a woman, he’s a very naughty boy’?) – and then turns beaming to the camera.

Some feminists have taken to calling the black-clad activists ‘the Black Pampers’, which just about sums up the phenomenon. What we’re really seeing here, both online and offline, is teenage boys screaming in the faces of women their mums’ age. Mothers – and the hatred of them – are at the centre of the action.

To say that this new right-leaning feminist movement is maternal is not to say that it is cuddly. Keen is maternal in the way that a bear is maternal – that is, without mercy. Fearless aggression in the face of a threat to one’s young is an adaptive response that we share with all female mammals. It’s a powerful instinct, and now all mothers can join in, even if they’re housebound or with a baby cradled in one arm.

There is a prissy middle-aged character in The Simpsons whose catchphrase is: ‘Won’t somebody please think of the children?’ The character is meant to poke fun at the kind of womanly concerns that show’s writers think over the top and histrionic. But the question is now a very serious one. That female constituent who approached her MP, desperate to know how to protect her kids, was only asking what women across the country are beginning to ask. Any party that thinks itself fit for power will need to have an answer.