The defeat of Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election was disheartening for many reasons, one of which being the gendered elephant in the room—for the second time in 10 years, the chance of a female president was crushed at the last second. While Harris did not foreground her gender in her campaign, many commentators did. In the days after her defeat, the vanished possibility of that historic moment haunted many discussions of the election results. Some, like Justin Trudeau, described the loss as an “attack on women’s progress.”
It is easy to interpret her defeat as an act of deep-seated sexism, an indication that America just isn’t ready for a woman in the Oval Office. Polling data suggests otherwise—the Pew Research Center found that the majority of Americans didn’t think there was a difference between a man’s and a woman’s capacity to govern. The average person does not hold a cartoonish hatred for women, though some certainly do. This does not mean, however, that sexism is a problem of the past. It is just wearing a better disguise.
The picture of sexism that most people in Western contexts likely have in their mind is one informed by the past. The “classic” sexist of our imaginations is someone with the values of a 1950s breadwinning man, who believes women are inherently inferior—good for cooking, cleaning, raising children, and not much else. Someone who believes women should be seen and not heard and should “serve” their husbands and children first and foremost. Someone who thinks women have no place in militaries or corner offices or positions of power. Though this belief is pre-modern, shaped by an aversion to progress, classic sexism still persists in Western liberal democracies. Classic sexism, however, is not the only kind of sexism.
The modern sexist, on the other hand, does not think they hate women. There are likely women whom they respect or admire; they may even be women themselves. Compared to the worst excesses of classic sexists, they may consider themselves morally superior. They dislike figures like Harris not “because they are women” but for supposedly unrelated reasons that nevertheless demonstrate this new sexism at work. Perhaps “she’s just a bit too outspoken about abortion,” a policy modern sexists oppose on the basis of religion or general squeamishness. Maybe her efforts to make childcare more affordable sound to the modern sexist like a waste of money better spent elsewhere.
This same vein of criticism snaked through the fallout of the #MeToo movement, once the shock of revealed scandals gave way to demands for tangible policy change. Advocates against sexual assault or domestic violence, sexists said, are “very brave” but liable to “take things a bit too far”—grown men ought to know the difference between “yes” and “no,” they said, but there’s no reason to force consent education onto children. There’s a “right and a wrong” place to talk about periods. To the modern sexist, there is something special—empowering, even—about femininity, and it ought to be protected, including against those who might want to access it for perverse reasons. They are perfectly happy for women to exist and to succeed, so long as they don’t stray too far from the “perfectly reasonable, not at all sex-based” bounds the modern sexist prescribes.
Modern sexism is “modern” precisely because it frames itself as progressive, as having accepted the tenets of feminist rhetoric, albeit just the most superficial iterations of them: that women can do what men can do, that both genders are equal. It proudly sets itself apart from classic sexism, even joining in the chorus of its criticism. And yet it operates on sensibilities it has convinced its adherents are instinctual, sensibilities that are underpinned by its older, uglier predecessor. Women can be leaders, so long as they prioritize men’s goals, forgoing topics such as abortion that primarily impact women. Sexual assault is wrong, but it is a crime that starts and ends with the actions of unknowably bad men (unless they are not really bad men, in which case it’s an accident). Assault, they believe, should thus be treated like a problem exclusive to those specific men rather than a wider societal issue. Their opinions on trans women betray a similarly shallow understanding of gendered issues: trans women may wear dresses but may not use women’s bathrooms or claim any feminist airtime as their own. Women can be empowered, per the modern sexist’s rationale, so long as they exercise their autonomy “the right way.” Women who violate these standards are seen as overbearing, too radical, or, perhaps, unfeminist.
The divide between “sexism” and “feminism” has slimmed disturbingly over time. Despite making strides in some regards, the worst elements of the “third wave” of feminism—choice feminism, lipstick feminism—encouraged women to shed patriarchal obligations and make decisions of their own accord, to embrace “feminine” things like makeup and sensuality. This way of thinking shifts the burden of proliferating sexism onto individual women. Once, women were told to shave their legs because it was what men wanted them to do. Now, faced with decades of advertisements professing the beauty of hairlessness, media chock-full of smooth-shaven women, and uproar when a public figure dares not to shave her armpits, third-wave feminism congratulates women for exercising their right to shave their legs “for themselves.” The “choices” that women are offered under this model of feminism are often non-existent, a critique that has existed for decades. And yet, the school of thought still prevails in the soup we call contemporary feminist ideology, and indeed in the way we talk about feminism and womanhood popularly. This is not a coincidence.
Modern sexism feeds on the idea that there is a right way and a wrong way to be a woman and implicitly assumes that women can choose between those two ways. It promotes the idea that women who do not abide by modern sexist sensibilities are simply making the wrong choices—whether they are too vocal about their periods, too outspoken about abortions, or too trans.
Modern sexism, like a parasite, is attached to the back of the modern feminist movement. In the past several decades, the label of “feminist” has been strategically semantically bleached to admit a range of contradictory ideologies. Choice feminism is inherently at odds with the belief that the patriarchy strips women of their agency. If feminist academia and feminist echo chambers are consumed with the questions of whether or not women have agency and what they ought to do with it, they, inevitably, self-cannibalize. It is hard to get buy-in to a movement if the movement itself does not agree on what it means to buy in. If popular organic discourse cannot come to a consensus on what it means to be feminist, there is space for that definition to be decided by the shadowy hand of patriarchal self-interest. Businesses push ads that prop up “girlbosses” who find validation in how hard they work, forgoing accommodations like maternity or reproductive leave. Conservative parties prop up candidates like Nikki Haley, who has a track record of opposing access to abortion while proudly wearing 5-inch heels. Modern sexism cloaks itself.
The dichotomy of classic and modern sexism is a metaphor borrowed from art for the purposes of this essay. It is not a dichotomy that is referred to in popular discourse, nor is it one that is clearly apparent. Linguistic relativity suggests that the words we have access to restrict not just the concepts we can articulate, but those that we can conceive of at all. Without a semantic distinction between forms of sexism, we speak and think of sexism as one amorphous blob. This makes discussions about sexism challenging. They are often plagued with imprecision. As noted earlier, modern sexism balks at the label of “sexism.” It insists that such a condemnation can only apply to its brutish, pre-modern relative and that labelling the modern sexist’s actions—disparaging Harris, playing into respectability politics, being transphobic—as sexist is a bad-faith misnomer. It supposes that women cannot be unfeminist or sexist, because it strips feminism and sexism of their nuances beyond what is not in the broad interest of women—the same semantic loophole that allows TERFs to keep the “F” in their acronym. When our definition of “sexism” is unnuanced, our discussions about it must be, too.
Not only does semantic bleaching make allegations of sexism less precise, it also weakens the power of those allegations overall. In 2022, Australia had a reckoning around consent education after activist Chanel Contos exposed the prevalence of rape culture in boys’ high schools. Consent education, and the lack thereof, was clearly positioned as a feminist issue. While some mainstream objection argued that sexual assault in schools was not as large of a concern as feminists were making it out to be, much pushback, from pundits and members of the public, attempted to defang the claims of sexism by instead framing their concerns around what was appropriate for children.
This same tactic is used by the modern sexist across policy and pop culture debates alike. Childcare policies that empower women to remain in the workforce if they have kids are framed as being harmful to children. Sabrina Carpenter posed for an album cover on all fours with a man pulling her hair, and the claim that the image was sexist was chilled out by choice feminists who argued that the image was a satirical act of reclamation (never mind that describing it as satire concedes the sexist connotations of the image). In these instances, if there is a reason other than hatred of women for why the alleged sexism may exist—for the benefit of others or perhaps for the empowerment of women—then the label of sexism does not stick.
“Sexism” loses weight as a concept when those who claim it hurts them don’t seem to agree on what it is. This makes it harder for women to communicate harms done to them. It places a burden on women to be doubly conscious, borrowing W. E. B. Dubois’ term, of the direct conflict between their desire to be free from oppression and the way their actions shape their perception, upon which their freedom from oppression is contingent. This is exhausting.
The harms of this semantic ambiguity echo within feminist discourse too. If sexism is the opposite of feminism, then to call choice feminism “sexist” is oxymoronic. This at once strips accusations of sexism of their power as a critique of feminism and makes it easier to deploy the term as a tool to brand something unfeminist and therefore oppositional. It becomes easy to levy accusations of sexism at critics of, for example, the sex work industry, even if their criticism comes from a place that is totally consistent with feminist ideology. Trans-exclusionary radical feminists are shielded from being called “sexist” by their purported care for women. Of course, it is not impossible to make nuanced and precise arguments about sexism and its iterations within the feminist movement. It just becomes a lot harder when “sexism” is a dirty word.
Though hotly contested, the evolution of the feminist movement has been doggedly tracked in academic discourse. It correlates, though imperfectly, with the popular perception of women in the Western world. Historic landmarks, such as the first women in positions like the presidency, are anticipated, recorded, and used as touchstones of social progress. We tend to assume that feminism and sexism are two sides of a tug-of-war, the success of each coming at the direct expense of the other. That logic would suggest that, as feminism progresses, sexism retreats. That is not true. A virus, when faced with antibodies, evolves to avoid its demise. In attempting to outlast each other, sexism and feminism inadvertently shape each other.
NICOLA BRAYAN is a Sydney-based writer who loves language and everything we do with it. More of her work can be found on Instagram @nicolabrayanwrites, or on her Substack, Nota Bene: https://nicolabrayan.substack.com/
