Debating Away Our Humanity
CBS News wants to know if "feminism failed women." Here's what they're really asking.
I drafted about ten different ledes for this column before realizing that nothing could beat the chilling absurdity of facts laid plain: CBS News, now led by one of the least talented women in media, plans to air a Bank of America-sponsored debate asking, “Has feminism failed women?”
The episode will run next year as part of the station’s new series, Things That Matter—which editor-in-chief Bari Weiss says will feature “honest conversation and civil, passionate debate.”
Civil and passionate debate…about whether equality is bad for women?
Given the regular slate of horrors I write about, you might think a single episode of television from an already-embattled media company wouldn’t rank high on my list of worries. But it’s not just CBS News asking this question.
Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, a growing number of publications, podcasts, and pundits are questioning feminism under the auspices of civil discourse. In recent months, I’ve been invited by half a dozen outlets to participate in similar ‘debates’ myself. The NPR-distributed series Open to Debate asked whether I’d weigh in on the question, “has feminism hurt women?” (NPR!) And earlier this year, I declined a “balanced and insightful discussion” on the wildly popular podcast Diary of a CEO—an episode they ended up calling, “Has modern feminism betrayed the very women it promised to empower?”
Why forgo all these opportunities to get in front of huge audiences and defend feminism? Because to participate would be accepting the premise that our rights and humanity are up for debate. Once you concede that it’s reasonable to ask whether women’s rights are a good thing, you’ve already lost.
And let’s be real, that is the question they’re asking. While there are plenty of vital conversations to have about feminism—even about its missteps—these shows and others like it aren’t interrogating if and how feminism delivered equality for women. They’re questioning whether equality itself was a mistake.
After all, when outlets ask whether ‘feminism’ has failed, the term is just a proxy for the issues they’re really targeting—like women’s right to work, vote, and control our own bodies. It’s a whole lot easier to debate ‘feminism’ than admit you’re challenging basic freedoms.
This sudden broad media interest isn’t some well-timed coincidence, either. We’re watching a deliberate conservative cultural push designed to undermine women’s rights. Some outlets are in on it, others are falling for it. Either way, the endgame is the same: treating our humanity like a thought exercise makes it that much easier to legislate away.
When CNN gave sit-down interviews to Christian nationalists who want to repeal women’s right to vote, they weren’t just lending credibility to dangerous misogynists—they were telling viewers that stripping women of voting rights is an idea worthy of discussion. And when The New York Times aired a podcast asking, “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?”—deliberately or not—they were arming extremist legislators looking to dismantle anti-discrimination and harassment laws.
Why do you think conservative pundits and media are so obsessed with ‘debate me’ bullshit to begin with? It’s because whatever we argue is meaningless: simply by entering the ring, we’ve conceded that long-standing freedoms are now, literally, up for debate.
For years, we’ve seen the right-wing media machine use this cultural attack on everything from DEI and birth control to trans people’s very existence—making Americans believe that unpopular extremist views aren’t just worthy of consideration, but might even be the norm.
And while all marginalized groups are under siege, it’s worth noting the specific kind of gaslighting that’s singularly directed at women. It’s not enough to roll back our rights, conservatives want women to believe that erosion is actually a good thing. That feminism failed us, or made us miserable.
It makes sense—a certain amount of buy-in is necessary if you’re trying to oppress half the population.
That’s why they’re pouring millions of dollars into trad-wife influencers and birth control disinformation, pushing these pseudo-intellectual debates, and—most importantly—why they’re increasingly targeting young women. This next generation is growing up in a country where women die of sepsis, lose organs, get arrested for miscarriages, and are used as brain-dead incubators. Of course they’re running a full court cultural press about how freedom isn’t that great anyway!
Right-wing legislators, activists, organizations, and donors hope that by reframing old-fashioned sexist oppression as some kind of high-brow concern for women’s happiness, they might be able to convince us to get on board. (Or, at the very least, get us to shut up about it.)
But you know what actually makes women happy? Bank accounts. Voting rights. The ability to leave a bad marriage, and not have a miscarriage kill us.
We know this because American women already lived the alternative. We fought hard for those rights, and rejected Republicans’ anti-feminist vision decades ago. Here’s the good news: I think our collective frustration at seeing long-settled issues re-litigated might actually be one of our most powerful weapons.
Because as much as the CBS News debate and others like it chill me to the bone, conservatives and their media enablers are going to have a hard time rebranding old-school oppression as some kind of lifestyle upgrade—not unless they’ve found a way to silence the women who were actually there.
For every glossy anti-feminist TikTok about the ‘princess treatment’, there’s another video from a former stay-at-home mom left broke and terrified when her husband walked. For every well-coiffed Fox News host insisting women were happier before feminism, there’s an older woman who remembers exactly how much that ‘happiness’ cost her.
That’s why one of the most important things we can do right now is foster more intergenerational connection. For those of us who’ve been around the block, there’s real power in sharing hard-won wisdom—but it can’t be a one-way conversation. We need Democrats to stop taking young women’s votes for granted, reproductive rights groups to really listen to young Americans, and progressive donors to hone in on the generation conservatives are working overtime to win.
Those are the conversations worth having, not the ones that require us to defend our humanity. Not the ones that treat our freedom like a political talking point. Because those aren’t debates—they’re humiliation rituals.
Good for you, Ms. Valenti. Intellectual and bodily autonomy for women IS NOT UP FOR DEBATE. I bet Bari Weiss, that untalented know-nothing grifter, would scream bloody murder because if not for feminism, she would lose her bank account, her job, her female partner, quite possibly her voting rights, be a slave to her parents, probably shamed in synagogue for being a loose and degenerate woman, have a male guardian, etc., etc., etc. Has "Feminism Failed Women"? How about how GOP politics have failed women?
This is Susan Faludi's Backlash all over again. The conservative PR strategy is always to say, "Feminism? You don't really want that, dear. It will just make you miserable and you'll never get a man."
This time around they are telling us "You're not unhappy because your reproductive rights are being stripped from you, and people are threatening your right to vote, and accusing you of being a 'DEI hire.' You're actually unhappy because you have to work and can't stay home and make cake and do crafts all day in a gingham dress."
This is so infuriating. Just exactly when did these great defenders of "true womanhood" Bari Weiss, Helen Andrews, Erika Kirk, and Amy Coney Barrett announce their retirement from public life to stay home and make decorative cushions? I missed that announcement.