How Feminism Ends
REVIEW ESSAY
Lineages of the Feminine:
An Outline of the History of Women
by Emmanuel Todd
Polity, 2023, 336 pages
I realized, recently, that I have been in pain for most of my life. The beginning was subtle. In middle school, I acquired knee pain and hip pain along with braces. Later, I began finding strange bruises on my legs, getting horrible cramps after eating anything of note, and then getting worse cramps after I got my period (obviously). In high school, I developed a vague, formless fatigue of the type my mom had, and found myself constantly buying new supplements for the various “deficiencies”—in iron, Vitamin D, or “female vitality”—that might be causing it. I got an IUD put in and out, which hurt both times. I got tested for Ehlers Danlos syndrome, a vague autoimmune disorder that women often think they have, which came back negative. My mom used to say that “women’s bodies are just more complicated,” which is a nice way of saying that there is nothing particularly wrong with me. Regardless, I have wasted thousands of hours of my life booking doctors appointments, remembering them, Ubering there, going to the pharmacy, picking up pills, avoiding walks, avoiding work, wondering whether I have reached some theoretical limit of self-maintenance, with my acupuncture and YouTube self-massage tutorials and nightly stretching routine (for the hip pain), and realizing that however much time I spend managing pain now, I am still young; it will probably get much worse.
And I’m boring you. Sorry. I know that female pain is boring. I know that writing about female pain is played out. There is already an essay called “The Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” which was published all the way back in 2014. That was, coincidentally, the same year that we all decided that being a woman has nothing to do with having a female body—the vessel that causes all of them so much pain.
Our Feminist Moment
The female body is the unsolvable problem of feminist theory. It cannot be explained away. It can only be managed.
Here are some facts about female bodies: They are 16.5 percent smaller on average, by weight, than male bodies. If you take an average female and put her in a subway car with a hundred males, the female will be weaker than ninety-eight of them. She will, likely, be scared. If a female wants to have a child, then she will have to grow that child in her own body—or hire a surrogate female to do it for her, which is risky and expensive. If she wants to avoid artificial insemination (which is also risky and expensive), she will have to find a male to join her before her early thirties. Males, on average, find females most physically attractive when they are around eighteen—and they are much more sexually motivated by visual stimulation than females, a trend which cuts across mammalian species.5
Once a female decides to have a child, she will be out of commission for months—if she comes back any faster, she will be hailed a “superhero.” Even then, heroic or not, all she gets for her effort is the opportunity to return to a relatively underwhelming baseline—the same position as any male.
These are simple, boring facts. Every year, seventy million new minds are born into female bodies, and will rediscover them all over again. But they alter your behavior. I know they have changed mine.
The 2010s were supposed to be the end of feminism—in that the project would reach its perfect, inevitable conclusion. Girls were supporting girls. Taylor Swift had a squad. Hillary Clinton was about to become the forty-fifth president of the United States. But toward the end of the decade, something snapped. The project hit a snag. By 2021, cool girls online were bragging about becoming “tradwives” and staying at home with their boyfriends. Part of feminism’s branding problem was that, when allowed to compete fairly, women were not measuring up in a few key professional fields—which led to broad-scale affirmative action on the basis of gender, to preserve the illusion, for men and women alike, that history was still lumbering along as planned. And in the meantime, something funny happened. We all, collectively, decided that women don’t exist. They are . . . undefinable. An ether. An essence. Even the acceptance of transgender “women” into the group cannot fully explain the obfuscating haze that has settled over the female sex—you can have a biological male called “Caitlyn” and still understand that only half the population can get endometriosis. Today, feminist theorists seem to relish explaining how women have nothing in common and no shared interests—that they are a formless, ever-evolving mass whose boundaries will never be defined.
Into this milieu, the eminent French anthropologist Emmanual Todd has released a new book titled Lineages of the Feminine, in which he attempts to reestablish “women” (the female kind) as a legitimate field of study.
He redefines a “woman” as “a member of the sex defined by the ability (except in cases of accidental sterility) to carry a child” and gets to work. Todd begins with the premise that female liberation has already occurred—completed, he contends, by around the year 2000. And he argues that, instead of being victims, females are now making history in the Western world, imposing their preferences on everyone else. He charts numerous female-led trends that have occurred across feminist countries over the past two decades—economic deindustrialization, a collapse in the capacity for “collective action” across social classes, and the proliferation of “soft” methods of social control (like “cancel culture”) over more explicit ones. Todd concludes that, for all the feel-good benefits of “girl power,” feminist societies have serious faults: they are increasingly dependent on male-dominated societies to manufacture basic goods, and are losing out on the “extra creativity and intensity” of males at work.
One of Todd’s most tantalizing conclusions, however, is that so-called gender theory, and the subsequent haze that has settled over the female sex, has been propagated by a very specific group of people: females.
At least, the timing of the redefinition of “woman” is convenient. At the exact moment that we are implicitly evaluating the results of a century’s worth of upheaval on sexual roles, the key demographic in question has become almost impossible to describe. Still, I never found the “transgender question,” as Todd calls it, particularly interesting. It seemed like a red herring on the quest to understand women.
But I came back to it, because there is something, certainly, going on with women—at least, with the female kind that Todd describes. They are sick and tired (according to new studies which identify an “exhaustion gap”). They are more anxious than ever. They are not giving up on their careers, but they are not quite leaning into them either. And then a few weeks ago, it hit me—that I have wasted years of my life managing my body. Medicating and waiting, stretching and supplementing, setting appointments, driving, planning, identifying new hormones, and crying when those don’t work. Tens of thousands of hours of my precious time alive, wasted. And suddenly, I was dizzy, furious. I wanted to throw up, stab myself, run away—except you can’t escape your body. Who am I? What am I? I could have been something. I could have done something else. I don’t even know what. I’m so tired.
And then I got it—why an entire generation of females would want to blow themselves up.
An Unsolvable Problem
Just for the record, I am a woman. I am a woman in the new sense—in that I consider myself to be one. I am also a woman in the old sense—a mind in a female body. And that’s how I always think about it: mind and body. An unholy marriage. If life is a video game, I have been given a female body to operate.
Despite my natural affection for my female body, I know that having one is, objectively, a waste of my time. Having a female body is a part-time job. It splits your focus. It eats your mind. Even the most ambitious females tend to see the benefits of the extensive self-maintenance routines that preserve a female body—retinol and Pilates for the wealthy, makeup and carefully chosen clothes for everyone else. And even if a female somehow manages to spend no additional time on her body at a given time, she is still a bit behind for having been born with one: she likely wasted time on the decision to be “a different kind of girl”; she will waste time second-guessing herself when other, better-maintained females continue to see social benefits for their efforts. And in the meantime, all young females must also manage the decision of whether to have children, how many, and with whom—a process which we must begin roughly within the first third of our lives, and within five years of reaching our full mental maturity. If we want to give ourselves more time to decide on the issue of children, then we can now sign up for an additional suite of painful, time-consuming, and ambiguously effective procedures—IVF, egg freezing, and some Botox, probably, to eventually attract a male.
It is possible to do great work under those circumstances, to focus on a higher goal. But it is much, much harder. In the 1961 short story “Harrison Bergeron,” a dystopian government attempts to make everyone equal by equipping the more talented with handicaps; the intelligent wear headphones spouting loud noises at random intervals to interrupt their thoughts. That’s kind of how it feels to be female.
In the Western world, females are free to suppress their bodies within the limits of modern science. We can take hormones and continue to have sex with males. We can live with another female. We can do either (or both) for our entire lives and remain sterile—but that is a painful, and mentally taxing, decision for any animal. And even if we eschew all of the traditional distractions of the female body—pregnancy, males—it is still, as a vehicle for self-realization, a bit of a drag. Female healthcare costs are higher even in the absence of motherhood—we carry around a whole reproductive system in our bodies, and it is more prone to break, or malfunction, than the simpler male body. Females are also smaller, and weaker, than males, which crimps our behavior in subtle ways. We view the world as a collage of potential threats, not a space for exploration; we worry more about alienating our friends, and angering males; we take fewer risks, social and professional, that might end with us unprotected. The female world is smaller. It is, arguably, less ambitious.
If the goal of feminism is to improve the lot of females, then there are dozens of changes, social and scientific, that could help alleviate their condition. But if the goal of feminism is perfect sexual equality—that no mind should ever have to make sacrifices, in productivity or love, because of its body—then the end of feminism must, necessarily, mean the end of females. There is no other way.
In the past decade, it has become increasingly difficult to talk about being a female. For one, we lost our word.
In the early 1970s, feminist anthropologists began to make a distinction between “sex” and “gender”—contending that a new word was needed to describe the social element of sexual presentation. For the uninitiated, “gender” generally refers to the malleable, social component of a sexual role, while “sex” refers to the parts that come built-in. Dresses are gender. Vaginas are sex. Gender is a useful sociological concept—to denote that while females are born with vaginas, they are not born with dresses. In the 1970s and ’80s, feminists latched on to “gender” as a framework to discuss their discontent with the limited role prescribed to women, which did not only include dresses, but also passivity, caregiving, and, somewhat arbitrarily, the color pink. Within the decade, a number of feminist theorists began to define a “woman” as someone who merely performs the feminine gender role, and not any human member of the female sex—a nod to just how much of being a “woman,” in practice, does not follow naturally from being female.
Soon after, however, the debate took an unexpected turn. In 1990, a young philosopher named Judith Butler argued in an “impenetrable,” but “terribly influential” (to quote Todd) text called Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity that sex and gender have no innate link—that people are not born with any desire to perform a particular gender role, regardless of their sex.
Butler’s conclusion—that our roles of “man” and “woman” are socially constructed—sounded radical at the time, but in practice, she merely took the redefinition of “woman” to its logical conclusion. (Butler uses both “they/them” and “she/her” pronouns; I will use “she” going forward, in keeping with the style of this publication.)
If a “woman” is just a person who performs a gender role, then why must all females grow up to become “women”? And couldn’t some males be “women,” too?
The result was broad linguistic confusion—to use Butler’s term, “trouble.” Most people, when they use the words “man” and “woman,” are still trying to refer to their original definitions—a human male, and a human female. But gender theorists, fond of their new definitions, now shoot back that no one really knows what it means to “be” a woman—and that people who say they do are fascists, or worse.
In Lineages of the Feminine, Todd calls Butler a “Delphic oracle,” a still-living prophet who seems to have both “foreseen” and “made” history with her writing on gender. Todd invokes her name every few chapters; curses Gender Trouble like the anti-Christ. But he never tries to explain why Butler’s ideas became so popular: in his telling, feminists merely woke up one day, got bored of fighting for sexual equality, and turned around to attack their own category. But in 1990, Butler’s vision of a post-sex utopia would have been a welcome break for the whiny, “lived-experience”-based feminism that dominated the previous decade—a grab‑bag of rape victims and desperate housewives. Butler moved the window of debate from something rigid—bodies, their limitations—to a space of infinite play, of possibility and self-creation. Gender is fun. Gender sounds like freedom. Starting in 1990, a simplified version of Butler’s ideas spread from the obscurities of the university to a fan-zine called Judy!, to a second generation of PhD students, to teenage girls on Tumblr, and finally to the highest rungs of social influence, at Goldman Sachs and the U.S. government, where a rising generation of educated females thought that gender sounded like freedom, too.
In practice, however, the gendered word “woman” cannot be so easily replaced with the sexed one “female.” Perhaps because, to use the words of transgender writer and critic Andrea Long Chu, “females are fucked” (the full quote goes “being fucked makes you female, because fucked is what a female is”). I think she means passive, in a sexual sense, but female animals also have a much tougher biological lot than males. They have “teats,” go into heat, and often expire soon after birth. Which is perhaps why we prefer to reserve that word for dogs and cows. Taken out of context, the idea of a “human female” sounds like a twisted science experiment.
And so, in the absence of a better term, the femaleness of approximately half the population has shrunk a bit below the surface. They are vague, obscure. They might as well not exist.
A Sleight of Hand
In high school, I used to come home at night and scroll through Tumblr. It was a sharp contrast from the day, which was filled with lies. On Tumblr, everyone was so honest. You could watch tens of thousands of young girls speak, in clear, unsparing detail, about the things that girls notice all day: they wondered whether it really mattered if they studied math, and why they still felt a knife-stab of jealousy when they saw a girl at school with smaller thighs. Looking back, those girls were part of the first generation of females to be raised in a fully postfeminist milieu; they were, as they hit puberty, beginning to come to terms with the limits and contradictions of their female bodies. And they offered a whole menu of ways to deal with it. You could become an anorexic, starve yourself, and literally make your body disappear. You could binge and purge, make it puffy and unrecognizable, or at least punish it somehow. You could watch a movie called The Piano Teacher where Isabelle Huppert tries to cut herself between the legs with a razor blade. You could do it yourself: cut your thighs like an ecstatic nun in a thirteenth-century convent; cut your wrists so your mom could see. And in the background of all those lost, disappointed, self-destructive girls was a haze of vaguely Butlerian “gender trouble”—new pronouns, new words, and diagrams like the “gender-bread man” which promised additional layers of obfuscation and confusion. Some of the posters were trans, or otherwise gender-nonconforming, but I was always more interested in the girls: the girls who had, in their free time, taken it upon themselves to destroy, confuse, or at least complicate that word—“woman”—with which they had been tagged. There were girls with long hair and skater skirts who put “she/her” in their profiles; girls who added an “x” to the word “woman” to make it “womxn”—out of solidarity with someone, I suppose, although it was never quite clear with whom. If trans women were just women, then why do they need an x? And why didn’t the 36 percent of trans youth who identify as “men” demand an x too?
Todd appears to blame Butler for the “transgender phenomenon” that has overtaken young people, and the broader culture wars, in the past decade. Which would be somewhat of a misreading of her work: Butler’s starting premise—that humans have no pre-social conception of themselves as “gendered”—directly contradicts the claims of the transgender community, that they “are” a different gender than the one historically associated with their sex. (Butler maintains that her ideas are compatible with the experiences of transgender people.)
But Todd is right to lay some of the blame for our current gender-confused moment at Butler’s feet. Butler pioneered a far more subtle, and ultimately influential, argument: that sex is not a particularly important category.
Butler disputes the idea that humans fall naturally into a binary—in sex or gender. She argues that, to the extent that we see two distinct categories of people in the world, it is because the roles of “man” and “woman” are violently enforced on bodies that would otherwise exist on a spectrum. A true feminism should therefore not seek to elevate “women,” but to destroy the category which oppresses them. Butler never denies that people have bodies, nor that the shape and features of those bodies are determined, to an extent, by hormones and chromosomes. She contends, however, that our beloved line between “male” and “female” is (almost) as fluid as gender—rendering our entire conception of sex, based as it is on the idea of two distinct categories, defunct. To do so, she appeals to the between 0.0018 percent and 10 percent of the population that is intersex, or have a mix of chromosomes and secondary sex characteristics that do not align with either of the major two sexual categories. On the latter point, Butler is correct that some people are neither “male” nor “female”: around 0.0022 percent of babies are born with either one or three sex chromosomes, another 0.00015 percent have a “mosaic” of cells with XX and YY phenotypes, and a vanishingly small percentage of the rest (around 0.001 percent, although estimates vary) will go on to develop different secondary sex characteristics than their chromosomes would indicate.
Butler, however, presents a false dichotomy: one in which sex must either be a perfect binary, or irrelevant. But even taking the highest reported number of intersex people—at 10 percent of the population—still leaves at least 3.6 billion people, alive today, who would be relatively stable as “females.” They have ovaries, can carry a child except in cases of outside interference, and invite a doctor’s concern if they fail to start bleeding by the age of sixteen.
There is something that defines what it means to be them. There are certainly an awful lot.
Philosophical confusion about what it means to “be” something is not new. Professional theorists are still not sure what it means to “be” a chair, or a pile, either. There are a few tricks to show the ambiguity inherent in any designation—you can appeal to edge cases (What about stools? Beanbag chairs? Objects unwittingly used as seating?), or slowly remove pieces from an object until it can no longer perform its core function. Is it still a chair with one leg sawed off? Is it still a woman with her womb removed? Humans do sometimes create distinctions arbitrarily, and the location where we draw those lines can affect our perceptions of the world at the margins. But words can only alter reality to an extent. The existence of purple, in all of its spectrum-ed glory, does not negate all “red” or “blue.”
In the rest of life, we still have chairs, and piles, and colors—because we need them. We live in a world of objects, and shades; we would never be able to create new knowledge, or share our experiences with others, without descriptors. It is fun to show how few people can precisely define the words they throw around all day (What is a “blonde”? What is “hope”?). But if we threw out every word that is as ambiguous, or difficult to define, as “female,” then we would have very few left.
No one, it seems, wants to talk about females. And those who do—angry British terfs (short for “trans exclusionary radical feminist”) and moms who remind their daughters about their “cycle”—are rude, coarse. Even Todd, with his contention that he is “tidying up” all of the sex-denying muck left by gender theorists, is not particularly comfortable with the blood-and-guts of his subject matter. He apologizes for saying that only females can get pregnant; cringes every time he mentions their physical size. The women of Todd’s Lineages float, disembodied and goal-less, through a sea of charts and graphs. They are not bodies, but outlines. Words. Clouds. I could read Lineages cover to cover and still have no idea what a “woman” looks like.
Towards Female Self-Destruction?
Once he gets over his discomfort with their bodies, Todd argues that women, or females, or whatever we want to call them, have at long last become agents in history. Todd views other researchers as hopelessly biased about the role of females in public life—conservatives view them as ineffective, and therefore inconsequential, and liberals are stuck with their view of “women” as perpetual victims of a vaguely-defined “patriarchy.” But females, Todd argues, are people too. And they are, increasingly, important people. In the past century, females have quietly risen to the top of numerous high-impact professions: in France, where Todd is writing, they represent 57 percent of newly minted doctors, 62 percent of public servants, and 53 percent of young journalists, who set the tone and content of the news. In particular, Todd finds that females now control what he terms “ideological classes”—namely, they represent over 60 percent of new PhDs in psychology, anthropology, literature, and sociology (Todd uses data from French universities, but the trend cuts across Western countries). Todd presents an Occam’s razor argument: if females now control the ideological classes, and those classes have recently engineered a dramatic upheaval in what it means to be a “woman,” then we should, perhaps, consider whether those two trends are related.
The first time I read Todd’s most provocative conclusion, that females are responsible for our collective obsession with gender, I skimmed right past it. “Women do gender studies.” Of course they do. They are narcissists, like all of us.
But when I returned to Lineages, I realized that Todd is actually making a much finer-grained distinction. Both males and female students study sex. In 2011, male and female doctoral students were almost equally likely to defend a PhD thesis in sociology with the word “sex” in it. But the same year, females were almost three times as likely to defend a thesis with the word “gender.” Moreover, the academic field that is responsible for creating and disseminating gender theory, formerly known as “women’s studies” and now “gender studies,” is made up of 89 percent women—the vast majority of whom, I imagine, are female. A merely self-obsessed group could have chosen to study anything—pregnancy, menopause—that would have affected almost all of them. But instead, as feminism continued to progress, and hit what now appears to be a late stage, they chose, instead, to fixate on gender.
As an anthropologist, Todd finds that some form of transvestism is “universal” across human societies: he finds gender-bending gods in ancient myth, crossdressers in Shakespearean England, and male-to-female kathoey in contemporary Thailand. He devotes particular attention to the case of the berdaches, or two-spirits, in North American Indian cultures: tribe members who performed the gender role of the opposite sex (some berdaches were also intersex). Contemporary transgender activists often cite berdaches as a precedent for their desire to live outside the sex-and-gender binary. But berdaches, as well as other historical instances of transvestism, differ from Western “gender ideology” in a few key attributes—first, Native Americans never believed that berdaches “became” the opposite sex; instead, they existed as a “third sex” that combined masculine and feminine elements. And second, the vast majority (79 percent) of known berdaches were male.
On the latter point, Western transgenderism has only recently diverged from its historical precedent. In 2009, 70 percent of requests for puberty blockers were made on behalf of young boys—a comparable ratio to that observed among the berdaches. Over the next decade, the total number of requests would increase by over 2,000 percent. But by 2018, the sex ratio had flipped, and 74 percent of requests were now made on behalf of young girls—females.
Todd identifies three points where the contemporary “transgender moment” has no historical precedent: the high percentage of females who want to change sex, the ideological centrality of transgender people (which he finds only represent 0.3–0.7 percent of the population), and the growing push, among a certain breed of gender theorist, to deny the relevance of sex in the rest of human life.
During the same period (2009–18) that the sex ratio of transgender youth flipped, the “transgender question” rose to become a defining social issue of the twenty-first century. The right of individuals to change their gender on official documents is now a “top policy priority” for OECD countries, alongside the promotion of democracy and free trade. Todd also identifies a truly bizarre breed of scholarship that has proliferated in the past decade—one which tries to attribute increasingly spurious secondary sex characteristics to socialized “gender.” Todd cites one article, published in a prestigious French scientific journal, which argues that “menopause is a social construct”—as if the author is looking for a biological basis for Butler’s thesis that all differences between males and females must be socially constructed.
Todd is a self-described liberal, and supports the right of adults to change their gender and, to the extent it is now medically possible, their sex. But in the places where our current moment is excessive, or historically aberrant, Todd finds an unambiguous common thread: the presence of females.
Females control the universities where such sex-denying work is produced. Females are disproportionately concentrated in the academic fields—anthropology, biology, sociology—that have most radically changed their ideas on sex and gender (in contrast, history, a more male-dominated field, has stayed largely above the fray). A female sociologist wrote the book about how menopause is a social construct; a different female anthropologist wrote another study Todd cites which argues that females should, actually, have evolved to be taller and stronger than males. (Todd responds that “natural selection is there only to be lamented over.”) Females increasingly control the levers of cultural power; if a topic feels “ideologically central,” then it is because females made it so. At the very least, they constitute the majority of reporters who cover health, social issues, and family policy. The “gender ideology” Todd abhors runs through numerous female-dominated professions: it is promoted by journalists, legitimized by doctors, and codified into law by a growing number of female government officials. Todd also finds that it is almost always “mothers” (i.e., female parents) who have the final say over medical treatment for their children. And so while debates about “gender-affirming” care tend to be sex-neutral—“parents” making decisions about the bodies of their “children”—much of the contemporary “transgender movement” amounts to a trend of older females helping younger ones escape their sex.
Todd does not find moral fault with females for disproportionately enabling sex changes for minors (a female judge also banned “hormonal blockages” in England). He does, however, argue that the growing number of young females who want to change gender, and the much larger group who are so passionate about supporting them, are expressing a profound discontent; screaming in so many words. If the berdache role once offered young males a way to avoid the risks and responsibilities of becoming a “man,” then Todd wonders whether the condition of being a “woman” might now be the one worth escaping.
Many conservative commentators have already noticed, anecdotally, that the loudest voices on transgender issues are those of highly educated, cisgender females. And they will argue, often in bad faith, that if women really want to improve their condition, they should spend more time talking about themselves. With all this talk of “gender,” how will women find time to agitate for abortion rights in Louisiana? How will they talk about rape?
But if you exclude the ongoing debate about what it means to “be” a woman, there is not so much more to be said, or improved, about the condition of females—at least not in the Western countries where most novel feminist theory is incubated. Their remaining problems are those of atoms, not ideas.
Halfway through Lineages, I conspired to reread The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal text on womanhood, because so many of Todd’s descriptions of the female condition sounded oddly familiar. Flipping through the old text, I marveled at how little the challenges facing women (again, the female kind) have changed since 1949. I found paragraphs in The Second Sex that could have been lifted from 2021 articles in The Cut, or from my friends’ edgy feminist novels.
The Second Sex is somewhat of a lost feminist text. Academic feminists tend to dismiss it as hopelessly out of date—too bourgeois, too sex-essentialist. Before I read The Second Sex in college, I assumed that it was written sometime in the 1800s, or another faraway period when females gave birth in grass huts. But when Beauvoir was writing, female liberation was actually quite far along. The year The Second Sex was published, women represented 42 percent of French baccalaureate (or high-school-level degree) holders. Females were entering a post-industrial, white collar economy for the first time. Beauvoir paints a sharp portrait of a society where males and females engage socially, and compete on relatively equal footing in school and work, but where females always seem to fall behind.
At the time Beauvoir was writing, many casual observers had begun to attribute all residual female underperformance to their “eternal feminine” nature—some inborn quality that made them better suited for lace‑making than the acquisition of money or power. And so Beauvoir set out to defend the integrity of female minds.
The Second Sex is technically a work of philosophy, but it is best read as a long counterexample. Beauvoir writes often in the third person, as if about a single character (“she is scrutinized” or “she pleads with her mother”). Beauvoir walks her reader through all of the stages of a female life—girlhood, adolescence, marriage, the various detours she could take as an alternative, and finally old age. The female character’s inevitable mediocrity is a case of death by a thousand cuts: her interests are denigrated; she has fewer life experiences from which to draw inspiration; she overcompensates, gets frustrated, and ultimately gives up. By the end of the book, Beauvoir leaves her with all of the horrible personality traits we attribute to “women”—vapid, frigid, narcissistic, believing in magic, obsessed with her children and resenting them in equal parts.
Beauvoir is often credited for inventing the concept of “gender” with the phrase “one is not born, but becomes, a woman.” But her “woman” is certainly female. She is raped, bleeds, and is brutally “deflowered” on her wedding night. She is a rational mind, in a female body; a mind not born, but made, weak.
In contrast to female smallness, Beauvoir presents an idealized male “greatness.” The Second Sex is filled with references to male geniuses: Marx and Freud, Picasso and Van Gogh, writers like Kafka and Dostoyevsky who “took the weight of the world on their shoulders” and tried to “work out the human condition in their own lives.” She scours history looking for equally “great” women, and is left, always, disappointed. She complains that there is “nothing more boring than books about famous women,” as they are all “very pale figures” next to those of the great men.
Toward the end of The Second Sex, Beauvoir begins to devote increasing amounts of page space to the question of whether a woman could ever be “great.” She proposes numerous reasons why not.
To be considered “great,” one must necessarily create something that has never been seen before. And females have less time to create. Their bodies have more demands, and so they get less time for everything else: to read, to walk, to think, to participate in any unstructured activity that requires the full force of their time and attention. Females can certainly fit significant professional activities—like becoming a doctor or lawyer—in between their bodily interruptions, but the professions which lead to “greatness” tend to be the least structured—if you want to start a business, or develop a grand theory of reality, then you must take all of the time you can muster and consent to be judged on your results. There is no “time off” on greatness, no compensated leave. Additionally, females who try to commit themselves to greatness are often distracted by their options; they arrive at the starting line exhausted from the process of choosing, and second-guess their decision before they even begin. Moreover, Beauvoir identifies females’ small size as a potential barrier to their “greatness”—physical weakness holds them back from experiences that might enrich their minds. A female, Beauvoir contends, could never have taken Van Gogh’s treacherous trek to Borinage to become an artist; as a result, she never would have “felt men’s misery as her own crime,” sought “redemption,” and painted Van Gogh’s sunflowers. Many females do not even feel comfortable walking alone at night in their home city, let alone exploring the world on their own. In a utopia, a female could, technically, go out on her own, but her safety will always be contingent on the kindness of individual males—it only takes one.
And so, for a female who wants to be great, “her wings are clipped.” She has less time, less focus, and less space to move.
In her second-to-last chapter, titled “Towards Liberation,” Beauvoir sketches a vision of a postfeminist society quite similar to the one we enjoy today. She promises that women can eventually have almost everything that males have—highly-paid jobs, a vague concept of “brotherhood,” and sexually satisfying, nonmonogamous relationships without children (as Beauvoir herself enjoyed). But she never promises that a female can be “great.” She raises the issue, toys with it for a few thousand words, turns it over, brings up new counterarguments and dismisses others (including one, from the noted anti-feminist French critic Marthe Borély, that women merely lack “creative genius”), but she never answers her own question. The silence hangs awkwardly in the air.
And so The Second Sex sets up a small tragedy—a problem for the end of feminism, once all of the other ones have been solved. The female body—split, distracted—is a poor vessel for greatness. A female will never have the most time, the most focus, or the most desperation to make her own name. Moreover, the same barriers that prevent females from reaching “greatness” hold all of them back to an extent—a slight drag.
Which would be fine if females were just born different: smaller in mind as well as body. But if you believe Beauvoir, then female minds are not designed, in any particular way, for smallness. And so they must all be a little bit crushed.
In the early 2010s, feminism revived with milquetoast platitudes about “choice”—whatever you do, whatever you choose, as a “woman,” is empowering, because you did the best you could with what you were given. But somehow, females making “choices” in an open market was also supposed to lead to equality of outcome in a wide variety of professions. We wanted females to lead balanced lives, including reproduction, but for an equal number of them to also become astronauts, elite mathematicians, and Supreme Court–caliber lawyers at the same time.
In 2020, when Todd picks up his study of “women,” he finds their condition, ostensibly, much improved from when Beauvoir was writing. Females are running countries. They wage war and invent vaccines. They are overrepresented in numerous highly prestigious professions—medicine, government, and high culture. No educated female would dare refer to her daughter as “mommy’s little helper”; young girls are prepared for long, intellectual careers and encouraged to play sports. But Todd finds that females are still vastly underrepresented at the very, very top of capitalistic success—the economic equivalent of what Beavoir calls “greatness.” Even in Sweden, the most gender-equal country in the world, males still represent 69 percent of managers and 92 percent of CEOs. In the United States, females constitute a whopping 58 percent of college graduates (and have made up the majority since 1981) but only account for 10 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs. Females are most under-represented at the extremes of public recognition: females win fewer Nobel Prizes, raise a mere 2.1 percent of venture capital dollars, and account for only 5.6 percent of self-made billionaires.
The result, Todd argues, is a split consciousness on the status of “women.” Males see women everywhere: women police them in HR departments, mock them in the news, and, to add insult to injury, continue to insist that they are members of a protected class.
Females, however, are still haunted by a lack of female “greatness”—the same problem posed, seventy-five years ago, by Beauvoir. They work under male bosses. Their countries are run by mostly male leaders. Males continue to define the cutting edge in technology and industry, while females play catch-up in remedial programs (“Women in tech!” “Women in business!”). And even the most liberated female must still take her pills, and count her cycle, and watch her fertility “window” while pretending that she doesn’t care. The female condition, one of constant self-monitoring and self-suppression, is now oddly similar to that of the gender-dysphoric, which is perhaps why we females are so obsessed with them (I never felt quite so understood as a female until I read the work of Andrea Long Chu, whom Todd cites as a leading chronicler of the transgender experience). It also seems designed to create a degree of self-loathing: females are constantly set up to compete at tasks at which they are slightly disadvantaged, and are promised a life which, any rational mind will quickly discover, they will never achieve. Social media aside, it is unsurprising that a growing number of women now report that they hate themselves.
Todd argues that the recent wave of Western feminist agitation that we have witnessed in the past decade (#MeToo in America, #BalanceTonPorc in France) is not the result of a massive backslide in female liberation but the opposite—external barriers to female equality are falling by the year. Women are waking up to their new condition and finding it a bit upsetting. And they are looking desperately for something, anything, else to blame—femicide in a foreign country, their still-male bosses, and even the word “woman” itself.
Because if this is the end of feminism, then it doesn’t quite feel fair. If women are finally “free,” then why is it still so hard to be female? And why, after all of our hard work, are the best parts of history still made by males?
The End of Feminism
Females have a conflicted relationship with feminism—the movement started in our name. On paper, we should want it to “end” someday, because the end of feminism would, ostensibly, mean equality for females. But in the meantime, most females have grown comfortable with the idea that we exist somewhere in a liminal space—that while we will rarely face explicit discrimination because of our sex, all of our personal challenges with female-ness will eventually be solved by more “feminism.” A good number of females have even built entire identities around their particular solutions: her feminism and my feminism. The mid-2010s definition of feminism, imprecise and optimistic, was “equal rights and opportunity for women.” Back then, the post-Butlerian definitions of “man” and “woman” had yet to make it to the heights of pop culture, and so “women” still meant “females.” In 2014, Emma Watson gave a widely publicized speech to the United Nations in which she declared that “we should all be feminists.” She said it like it was self-evident, and got a resounding “Yes!” Who would say no? Males, females, and everyone in between were primed for a moral victory. Half of the population was equal and had been treated unequally. It was an easy win.
But what would it look like, in practice, for females to be “equal”?
In the Western world, females are now in a strange position where we can do pretty much anything we want. We compete for any job, get married or not, have children or not, cut our hair, get a nose piercing, and, in the places where most feminist tracts are written, get an abortion. We are free to move in the world, to use our bodies and minds as we please, and to be judged accordingly. But “options,” in an inferior body, are not the same as “equality.”
In truth, no one really knows what to do with females. The laws of fairness demand equal outcomes for equal minds—particularly in the intellectual spheres, where individuals in Western countries are taught to find most of their moral and economic value. But the laws of physics say it’s not quite possible.
Today, females look for hope in technology: in artificial wombs and same sex reproduction. And I think that would be such a funny way for feminism to end—if someday, we get artificial wombs, and parents get to choose the body of their child, and they all choose “male,” and females can be, at long last, wiped from the face of the earth.
An Awkward Silence
Todd leaves an obvious question unanswered: why did so many people go along with the changes made to “women” by feminist theorists? Males could have stopped the shift anytime; older females could have rolled their eyes and said “no, women are females.” But if no one wants to say what a “woman” is anymore, it’s because we know.
A mind in a female body is a mind shrunken, tweaked. And it’s not fixable. It’s not fair. And that small unfairness, multiplied over billions of female minds, defies our sense of how a social movement, and how history, should end. And so we walk them to the drug store, believe their lie, give them some gold stars they didn’t earn, and a few appointments they probably don’t deserve, because what we really want to say is sorry. That it’s harder. That it’s manageable.
We have always had lies to explain the condition of females: we said that they were contorted, fallen, or morally weak. And for the first 200,000 years of human history, the idea that females were inferior minds, or otherwise half-alive, would have been a comforting lie—because their lives would be miserable regardless. They gave birth without painkillers, gave out somewhat regularly in the process. And females were not slaves, or members of some faraway group: they were half of the population, mothers and wives, someone’s daughter, doomed, through no fault of their own, to a very different fate. And so we needed a fable—an original sin, a Pandora’s box—to explain why they deserved that fate. Their fate has, unequivocally, improved: I would not wish the pre-epidural, prefeminist condition on anyone. But even with all the wonders of modern medicine, the female body still demands much more of its owner’s time than the male body; as a result, females will always be somewhat limited in their ability to create, to contribute to the broader human project, with their minds. Fine. We can tolerate a difference in theory—we tolerate it in practice every day. But for the first time in human history, we must also square the unfairness of the female condition with an understanding that females are equal in their minds—a heartening realization, but one that comes with uncomfortable moral implications. Now, we owe females something: an equal experience of life, or, when we cannot provide it, an explanation. But no man, even the most cynical, wants to look his daughter in the eye and tell her that her life will be smaller, that she might be better suited as a vessel for someone else. No one wants a halfway moral victory; no one wants to end a social movement in awkward silence.
And so we found a new way to avoid the problem. We made it impossible to describe. And I wonder if Todd—like all those angry terfs, like the Trump-girls who grab their breasts and say “I’m a real woman”—simply missed the memo. Of course we all know what a “woman” is, or was. But it might be less painful, in a world where females will never be equal, to imagine that they don’t exist.