Welcome to Unmanned, a chronicling of anti-feminist backlash and what feminist refusal in the face of this backlash looks like. I plan to focus on how oppressive beliefs about gender shape our world — everything from our identities, relationships, institutions, and physical spaces to how we think about education, economics, politics, technology, and culture.
I’ve been immersed in writing and thinking about these issues for my entire life (see below for my work!) and resisted starting a newsletter for a long time. I’m launching this one for three specific reasons.
First, to write about the ways that anti-feminist backlash is being invigorated across the globe.
Second, to think out loud about what male supremacy looks like, how it feels to us, and what it means.
Third, and most importantly, to remind myself and readers that the reason we are where we are is because women and gender expansive people have never been stronger. I want to talk about frontlash, how people’s past and existing refusals to conform to traditional hetero-patriarchal norms is positively changing us, challenging cultures everywhere, and more deliberately shaping the future.
When haven’t people seeking freedom - just by living their lives - not faced backlash? Because feminism - its history, ideals, and necessity - is systemically and institutionally suppressed everywhere, every generation has to come to it in their own way. Today, however, technology — despite all of its very evident harms — has radically disrupted this pattern. We know more about how male supremacy functions, what it looks like in our day-to-day lives, how it fuels white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, other forms of hatred. We know more about the costs to girls and women of our socialized compliance. And we are, like generations before us, finding ways to resist and refuse. Only this time round, it’s far harder, even impossible, to ignore.
So, this newsletter will also be a celebration of the fact that women’s growing power is why we are seeing the blunt force of powerful and widespread anti-feminist sentiment.
Every and anything goes here: commentary, analysis, rants, poems, pictures, videos, and conversations. All of it, in some way, will be about how we tell stories and why it matters so much.
A quick detour about why I chose “Unmanned,” a word I think captures our current moment in specific and useful ways. In the most traditional sense, “unmanned,” means men lacking courage or strength, being undefended or unprotected, or even effeminate, in other words: losing traditional masculine qualities and feeling vulnerable and defensive. As feminists, we don’t want to recenter men, but we have to contend with the very obvious fact that we still live in a world where how men feel matters more than whether or not women are safe, healthy, or happy. Than whether or not women live. “Unmanned” also describes a space or vehicle or operation were no one is in control, very literally, no man is in control. For some, this represents a destabilizing uncertainty, but for others it means open-ended creativity and options previously foreclosed to us.
I propose here though another meaning of “unmanned”: being free from patriarchal control or influence; being autonomous in relation to male supremacist identities and relationships. Being unmanned in this sense is a form of liberation available to anyone and everyone. I can hear objections already, but moving right along.
Together, these definitions reflect a specific contributor to our current backlash: while our much of our society is invested in socializing girls to look to the future, to be pioneers of change and equality, it is even more invested, still, in socializing boys to look to the past, to men’s former unquestioned dominance and centrality. Unmanned, therefore, describes many men’s emotional fragility cognitive dissonance, fragility, status anxiety, and rage as women speak openly and honestly and without shame about what their inequality looks like in every day life. This frailty, and the defensiveness and anger it’s resulting in, is evident in our family lives, workplaces, cultural spaces, and national and global politics. It looks like the passive aggression of aggrieved entitlement, the subtle undermining of status anxiety, the vicious online attacks of compensatory masculinity, or the overtly supremacist goals of machofacist authoritarian politics. At every scale, we see the abject violence at the heart of oppression on vivid display.
Rage, resilience, and refusal brought me here and, maybe, brought you here too.
My goal with this newsletter is to be part of communities dedicated to new norms and language, healthier identities and relationships, and life sustaining, instead of depleting, social practices and politics.
If you’re like me, you're probably out of patience, concerned about your loved ones, neighbors, society, and the future. We’d all like worry less, laugh more, and know the peace and weightlessness that come with stability, social trust, and collective well-being. I’d like this to be a space that helps us move towards this goal.
I’m hoping that you’ll join me in thinking about these topics and how we make the world a healthier, lighter, and more just place.
About Me and What I Write
I’m a journalist, writer, and activist. I’ve published two books and contributed to more than a dozen others. Some are about gender and politics (Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth, and Believe Me: How Trusting Women Can Change The World), some about parenting and children (The Good Mother Myth, SLUT: A Play and Guidebook for Combating Sexism and Sexual Violence, Nevertheless We Persisted), and some are about technology and culture (Free Speech in the Digital Age, Gender, Sex, and Politics, Aftermath: Life in Post-Roe America, and Gender Hate Online: Understanding The New Anti-Feminism).
Rage Becomes Her is available in more than a dozen languages/editions and was the basis for a popular TED Talk on gender, politics, women, and rage. My most recent book, The Resilience Myth urges readers to understand how mainstream resilience narratives, based on individualism and internal growth ideas, exhaust us, undermining justice and equality. It’s about how resilience, instead, stems from mutual care and interdependence, from meaning and belonging.
Over the past several years, my shorter form writing and investigative journalism projects have appeared in The Verge, The Atlantic, Scientific American, Time, Huffington Post, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Guardian, Glamour, New Humanist, CNN and others. I am particularly grateful for a sprawling feminist media world, most of which sadly no longer exists, that welcomed me when I returned to writing after a long hiatus: Dame, Role/Reboot, Feministing, Feminist, The Feminist Wire, Everyday Feminism, Rewire, Ms. Magazine, and others. Lastly, I also spend a whole lot of time thinking out loud about about the ideas I obsess over. Sometimes for TED, sometimes at colleges and universities, other times at various organizations, on podcasts, and in media.
When I’m not working, I tend to be thinking about food, reading, cooking, trying to figure out how to like exercising even a little bit, delighting in truly terrible tv, and making sure I am spending time with the people I love most in the world. Lastly, even though some days it can feel virtually impossible, I seek out the people and places were I can laugh in the face of absurdity,
Why subscribe?
First, free weekly posts will be available to anyone and everyone. In these posts, I will share analyses of current events, politics, education, technology, culture and more. My hope is to delve into what “the personal is political” really looks like today and how conflict over this idea continues both to drive progressive change and backlash against it.
Paid subscribers also get
The ability to join discussions with me and other readers during a once-a-week chat about what’s keeping us all up at night or filling us with rage or laughter, or both.
Knowing that you are helping to build a sustainable work place for writers. During the past few years, with a few exceptions, feminist media platforms have been disappearing and it’s increasingly difficult to publish this type of content and be paid anything at all.
My thanks for joining this community and supporting this work.
If you are not in a position to pay, but keen on participating please email me at sorayachemaly@substack.com.
