No especially exciting news for my free newsletter this month: just an opinion piece, and something of a call to arms. This email is long and likely to be cut short by your email provider – so do click on the title to read the full thing in your browser.

As most of you will know, the reclaiming and reimagining of women’s stories has been at the heart of my work for well over two decades now: women’s stories that haven’t just been forgotten, but that have been actively erased. For a good couple of millennia. By men, and by the patriarchal structures and institutions which they created. And, it should be acknowledged, sometimes with the complicity of women, because none of this is ever about straightforward good-vs-evil dualities. (And very much more about all this, and about the stories I believe we need to reclaim, can be found in my 2016 book If Women Rose Rooted.) But this determined erasure of women’s rights to own and shape our own stories isn’t just ancient history: there’s a strange old turn of events in the world today which is making my blood run cold – and then making it boil.

Long-term readers of mine will know that I’ve never been one for ‘cancelling’, or for ‘call-out culture’, both of which I utterly abhor. I prefer to just to get on with my own work and leave individuals I don’t agree with to theirs. I might well be critical in private (especially of those who erase, bully or exploit, and I’ve been bruised by a few of those in my time) and a good old rant across the dinner table or over tea with friends can be excellent therapy – as long as it doesn’t seep out and poison your public work. I’m also not much possessed by the need to jump on bandwagons or to ‘speak out’ every time something happens in the world which makes me cross. But there’s a growing phenomenon that I’ve been reading and thinking about for a good couple of years now – one that gets right to the heart of women’s ability to decide for ourselves who we want to be; it’s insidious, and it puts us at risk. So I figured it was finally time to write about it and, although it discomfits me to do so, this meant I had little choice other than to name a few names in the process.

The phenomenon I’m focused on isn’t a new one, but it’s gaining momentum, and it’s gathered up some surprising apologists along the way. What I’m talking about is the increasingly vocal push from the super-traditionalist Right, and especially from the Christian Right, to demonise feminism and try to turn the clock back by restricting women’s life choices. I’m not talking about abortion here: it goes way, way beyond that. And for clarity, before I go on, I’m no far-left activist throwing stones at political opponents: I hold to a lot of so-called ‘traditional’ values, just as I hold to a lot of values espoused by so-called ‘progressives’. I refuse to be categorised. I hate these over-simplifying, tribalising labels, and at the moment I happen to especially hate the constant, shrill demonisation of the Right, too. Sometimes it’s justified, but sometimes it’s just lazy. It’s become automatic, it stops us from really interrogating what’s going on, and it has the clear aim of trying to absolve the rest of us from the part we’ve absolutely played in completely screwing up the world.

Anyway. The proponents of these anti-feminist views generally begin by approaching the issue with faux-sincere, head-shaking sorrow: ‘Look where feminism has got us! Look what we’ve unintentionally brought down on the world! We must save the poor women from themselves!’ Others go very much further, and so we find JD Vance, on the American Moment podcast in 2021, declaring that professional women ‘choose a path to misery’ when they decide to have a career instead of having children, and claiming that men in America have been ‘suppressed’ in their masculinity because of the terrible women who had the audacity to insist on making their own choices, not the ones that poor downtrodden men want them to make. This message is also a cornerstone of the kind of white evangelical Christianity that’s endemic in America, but still thankfully very much rarer over here. Women shouldn’t be in paid work: they should be staying in the home and rearing children. And if they don’t, then they’re depriving men of their God-given right to procreate and to have their floors scrubbed for them by obedient women in their rightful place: on their knees.

Unfortunately, this hypermasculine conservatism has finally crossed the Atlantic and is becoming all the rage in this part of the world too. Or at least, it’s becoming more overt. And sadly, its rise seems to be strongly correlated with a new fashion that’s recently emerged for men to convert to hypermasculine, intensely traditionalist forms of religion – a fashion which seems to have found its most common expression in some, though by no means all, iterations of Orthodox Christianity. I’ve been watching that trend for a good couple of years now, and watching it as closely as I have, and listening closely to some of its proponents, has made me very wary indeed.

But the straw that finally broke this camel’s back, and along with it her patience, was this particularly noxious piece on Iain McGilchrist’s Substack. Now, this is not a hatchet job on Iain McGilchrist: I don’t do hatchet jobs, and besides, he’s undoubtedly a very nice man who doesn’t really mean any harm – but he’s causing it anyway. Which is annoying, because as a former fairly hotshot neuroscientist in my youth, I’ve always hugely respected his insights into the functional roles of the two hemispheres of the human brain. (When I was eighteen years old and required to spend a month at the end of the first year of my psychology degree designing and implementing an original little research project, I walked into the neuropsychology lecturer’s office and calmly announced that for mine I’d like to interview a split-brain patient1 please, if he didn’t mind. He almost fell off his chair laughing. Me and the rest of the known universe, it seemed; there was a decade-long cue for access to the treasured few!) And in spite of my anger at the pernicious perspectives McGilchrist is giving space to in the article I’m talking about, I’ll continue to respect him immensely for his groundbreaking work.

But that doesn’t mean I have to respect his political views or sociocultural commentaries, or assume that genius in a field of science confers wisdom in the field of life. When did it ever? To be honest, I’ve not been very much fazed by some of his recent Substack posts which have sent all the progressives into shocked, wailing tailspins. I’m by no means in complete agreement with everything he puts out there, but – apart from the fact that I’m not much given to performative outrage – there’s generally a kernel of truth somewhere at the heart of them.

Nevertheless, this article was a very large step too far. Women’s rights are existential for us, and this constant chipping away at them by ultraconservative intellectuals of both sexes, on the basis of spurious ‘data’ and inaccurate arguments, is unacceptable and dangerous. We’ve worked too hard for those rights and we’ve died too hard for them. So listen, friends, and listen well: we can’t just let these moments pass in the hope that it’ll all go away. It won’t. It’s getting worse, and it’s getting worse fast. And we women, and the many good men who constitute our family, friends and allies, need at once to stop enabling all those who are promoting these deeply problematic views along with the Christian ‘influencers’ who are peddling them. I don’t mean cancel; I mean stop enabling. Stop encouraging. Stop listening to them; stop quoting them. Read something else instead.

So in the article in question, McGilchrist interviews someone called Carrie Gress, whose website describes her as an ‘author, philosopher and mom’, and who has just published a book by a small American Catholic press entitled: Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused with Christianity. And yup, that ‘something wicked’ is us. Or at least, those of us who (radically …) believe in women’s right to self-determination. According to the book’s publishers, it ‘smashes the idol of feminism and exposes its deeply anti-Christian origins’. Blimey. Though if what Gress is proposing in her book is the Christian way – to keep women subject to the ideas of men about who we should be – then ‘anti-Christian’ is a label I’ll gladly accept. Perhaps she’d like us to be subject too – as women were until frighteningly recently here in the West – to being locked up in mental institutions or lobotomised if we don’t play the roles all the nice Christian men have set out for us.2 Marital rape? No such thing. Husband beats you up? You made your bed, so lie on it. And anyway, you probably made him do it. Husband abusing your child? Well, we all have our temptations; let’s just trot off down to confession and we’ll be pure again in no time.

Women in a Victorian madhouse (and almost certainly put there by their husbands or fathers) having a lovely time. Much nicer for them, and so much more useful for society, than sitting at home after a useful and fulfilling day’s work with the cat on their laps, sipping a calming, solitary glass of red.

Now, it will presumably be apparent to you all that Gress is neither a man nor a husband, which brings me back to my point about women’s complicity. And indeed, there are a whole bunch of women out there who similarly and startlingly believe that there’s only one way to be a ‘proper woman’, and that’s to get married and have children and stay at home and look after them and their father, who you must absolutely honour and obey. Gress is clearly one of these women. And so is the dreadful Allie Beth Stuckey, whose utterly deranged book Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion argues that women’s soft hearts are the real problem in the world today, and that it’s best, and definitely more Christian, not to love thy neighbour at all. (Believe it or not, Stuckey has over a million followers on social media.) Conservative British writer Mary Harrington even went so far as to coin the term ‘reactionary feminism’ to describe her emphasis on traditional gender roles, heteronormativity and the family as women's answer to life, the universe and everything!

But I digress. Now, this is where it all gets very weird, as well as even more enraging. In Gress’ highly imaginative exposition of the sins of those of us who won’t just lay down and die comply with her prescription for a contemporary theocratic dystopia, she roundly declares that feminists have always ‘espoused occult practices’, and this, it seems, is another reason why women who embrace feminism are Very Bad and must be wiped out. And although this might sound completely bonkers to anyone halfway normal, it’s another key trope of hyperconservative Christians – including New Orthodox Bros like that fully paid-up nutjob (if you’ll forgive the technical psychological term) and close friend of JD Vance, Rod Dreher, who I have taken to task previously here for insisting that tarot and astrology are ‘demonic’. Yes, demonic. And, according to Dreher, good God-fearing Christians are required to engage in ‘spiritual warfare’ against those of us who dabble with such things. I promise you I’m not just having a laugh here. If you own a pack of tarot cards or are curious about astrological archetypes, then you need to know that you are an agent of actual real-life demons, and that Rod Dreher would like to call up the armed forces of Christianity to commit actual real-life spiritual warfare against you. Really. Onward Christian soldiers, and everything.

As I said in that post:

And here the plot thickens even more, because in researching this piece I came across a recent YouTube conversation Iain McGilchrist had with another recent Orthodox convert, Martin Shaw, at the beginning of which they congratulate themselves on being friends with Rod-the-Demon-Slayer Dreher – who also happens to work for Hungarian dictator Viktor Orbán and is an immensely enthusiastic apologist for him – and both go on to pronounce to the world that Rod is a ‘good man’.

You couldn’t make this shit up. Just have a read here in Vanity Fair about this good man’s downright-creepy-verging-on-the-genuinely-insane views on everything from circumcision to gay and transgender life – and exorcism, of course, of which he’s a great fan. There go those demons again … He has also (of course) railed against the ‘feminisation’ of Christianity, which apparently is hastening its decline. But confusingly, Dreher is very much a member of the Christian in-crowd, and repeatedly appears on stage with a surprisingly wide range of them (many of whom should know better), and an endorsement from him apparently graces Shaw’s forthcoming book on Christian wonder tales.

But I’m digressing again and wait – there’s more! Gress goes on to helpfully announce that ‘women’s autonomy can never lead to happiness’. And really, how could we women ever possibly understand what makes us happy? Probably the men know best there, too. (I’m sure Rod would give us a few tips if we asked him nicely, since he’s such a fan of women and all.) But Christianity, she states, is ‘an antidote to feminism’ – as if a belief in women’s fundamental rights were some sort of sickness needing treatment or, as she then declares in her interview with McGilchrist, a ‘corrupting influence’. So: convert to Christianity, relinquish your autonomy to the men as you do, and you’ll be happy as a pig in shit.

The problem is, it isn’t true. To quote just one of many possible sources, in his book Happy Ever After: A Radical New Approach to Living Well,3 psychologist Paul Dolan notes that although men seem generally to be happier when they’re married, most research that’s been carried out on the subject shows that women are not. A key reference point of Dolan’s is a study of American Time Use which compared levels of unhappiness in unmarried, married, divorced, separated and widowed people.4 The study, like several others of its kind, found that unmarried, childless women were the happiest group of all.

Now, before I go any further, I also need to caveat what I’m saying here by making it very clear that I have no problem with Christians in general, and some of them are even my best friends :-) There are forms of Christianity that are gentle and kind, whose adherents are following the actual teachings of a man who didn’t as much as even skirt around the edges of the perspectives these loonies are vomiting up, and who most certainly would have profoundly disapproved of them and thrown them out of the temple along with all the other hucksters and snake-oil salesmen – just as there are Christians who’d just as soon burn us all at the stake.

Distressingly, McGilchrist also seems quite pleased with Gress’ suggestion during their conversation that some of the most vocal, influential and historically significant feminists have qualities of character that, he says, ‘are known to psychiatrists as “borderline personality disorder” traits’. FFS.

And goodness me, the poor men! In his conversation with Gress, McGilchrist also declares: ‘… men have become worse – both in and for themselves, and in and for women – through the advances of feminism.’

Nasty women. Nasty, nasty women. It’s all the nasty women’s fault.

Now: there are a good few aspects of some specific forms of feminism that I don’t much like. I’m certainly not going to bore you by listing them here, nor by listing all the many important and necessary aspects of feminism that I absolutely do like. And if anyone reading this actually NEEDS a thorough rundown of why women’s rights have so badly needed to be fought for over the past hundred years or more, you’ve clearly had your head stuck a very long way up your own backside for a very long time and you need to run off at once down the doctor’s to have it pulled out. Instead, I’m just going to say this: if you think that fighting for women’s rights is a ‘dangerous ideology’, to quote Gress again – then, to also quote my late, lamented Great-Aunt Meg: you are highly, highly likely to ‘need your head looking’, and I’m exactly the psychologist who’s here to help you do it.

I should also say that Gress’ supporters appear to be trying to suggest, as a consequence of some of the not-very-surprising backlash to all this bullshit in the comments on McGilchrist’s post, that it’s only radical feminism she objects to; ‘ordinary’ feminism is of course really just fine. And I’ll admit I have not read her book in full: I’d rather cut my left breast off with a spoon. But read her interview with McGilchrist and the publisher’s highlights about the book, and then try to come back and tell me we’ve all got the wrong end of the stick and there’s nothing here to see. Gress’ idea of acceptable feminism seems to be that women tie themselves to the home, and if they have any energy left after their daily slave labour on behalf of the glory-to-God men who provide their life with meaning and purpose, maybe they’ll get a bit of time off to scribble down a nice little book that shows their poor miserable feminist sisters how to be just as happy-slappy bonkers as them. And in this context, you might like to know that Something Wicked isn’t even Gress’ first book on this subject: she also has one snappily entitled The Anti-Mary Exposed. (Anti-Mary = Anti-Christ, see?):

The anti-Christ? We women who have the audacity to want to run our own lives, thank you very much, are ‘something wicked’, beset by borderline personality disorders, in league with demons and, in the end, probably full-on followers of the actual anti-Christ as well???

But, hey, we probably shouldn’t be surprised that these ideas are still doing the rounds – though when a woman is among their prominent perpetrators, I have to admit that I am, actually. I understand Gress’ feeling that mothers aren’t valued enough or given enough credit for all that they do (though I don’t agree that’s always true; as a non-mother, it’s often seemed to me that Western culture elevates motherhood above all other forms of mature femininity) but this stuff goes much further. The Christian Right’s anti-feminism stems from very longstanding convictions that patriarchal, Bible-based gender roles – in which men lead and women submit – are part of the profoundly disturbing divine order they imagine to be at work in the cosmos. As a consequence of which, the feminist fight for equal rights for women counts as rebellion against ‘God’s design’ – so equating feminists with Satan at worst (or with followers of the anti-Christ at best). They fiercely object to women’s leadership roles of any kind – but especially in the Church – and there are ‘Christian nationalists’ in America who believe that even giving women the vote was a mistake. This isn’t the Christianity I grew up with, but it’s certainly flavour of the month today and not just, it seems, in Donald Trump’s Washington DC.

This demonisation of autonomous women by the Christian Right really isn’t a new thing, then, but it’s becoming much more prominent again and its influence is insidious. And so another recently converted New Orthodox Bro, Paul Kingsnorth (a writer I’ve formerly respected), in a lengthy Substack article bucolically entitled ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’, has attempted to make the case that:

You what??? On what planet has this blockhead been living, where he imagines some Golden Age of cosy pre-feminist womanhood to have existed in which women had, and I quote, ‘self-sufficiency, agency and power’? Has he actually read any actual history? Any literature of the day? Has he no clue at all about all the things that women have suffered over the centuries, and largely at the hands of precisely those men he’d like them all to stay at home cooking and cleaning for now? ‘Self-sufficiency, agency and power’??? I’m beginning to find all this nonsense not only actively demented, but decidedly sinister. There’s something really, really wrong here, and it’s a very wrong thing that’s spreading more and more widely and growing more and more vocal by the day. If I were a Christian, maybe I’d even be invoking the word anti-Christ.

Woman with lots of ‘self-sufficiency, agency and power’ undergoing forced lobotomy by man. Praise the Lord! Let’s go right back to those times, right now! Surely it’s the only truly Christian way!

Maybe all these folk had really great childhoods, wrapped up tightly in the benign, silk-clad bosom of the perfect nuclear family. Maybe there wasn’t a wife-beater, child abuser or alcoholic in sight. Maybe it was all just sugar and spice and all things nice. But those of us for whom it wasn’t are under absolutely no obligation to choose that particular brand of hell again, now that we’re grown up. Now, I don’t give a flying fuck how these pernicious idiots choose to pursue their personal lives, and the virtue and morality of what they’re putting out into the world here is entirely between them and their God. But I fervently hope that their longed-for Day of Judgement moseys right on along and right on schedule, because I think it might have a surprise or two in store for them.

So what can we can do in response? Stop enabling, stop excusing. Change the channel or turn the TV off. Keep telling our own stories and stop listening to the ones who try to tell them for us. Stop quoting them. Keep valuing the qualities that make women who we are. Getting married and having kids and staying in the home if we want to; going out to work or having a valuable career as a doctor, writer, teacher or artist if we want to. Our choice about what we’re in service to, but always in service to something. Just not ever in service to this malignant spirit that’s at work all across the world today, directly promoting the anti-woman doctrine I’ve outlined in this article, or indirectly promoting the people who peddle it. ‘He’s a Good Man’? ‘She’s a Good Woman’? Oh, get a grip.

The tragedy of it is that I’m sure they all think they’re Very Good, Fine Upstanding People. I’m sure they love their children and their dogs and Think Very Deeply About Things just like the rest of us. But what they’re doing isn’t good or fine. If I believed in evil, I’d say that’s what they were actually in service to.5 I’d say, if only they would listen (and of course they wouldn’t, because apparently I’m an unhappy, wicked bitch who’s possessed of borderline personality disorder traits, is in service to demons, and almost certainly is a follower of the anti-Christ too) that they need to think very carefully about the energy they’re putting out into the world, and the forces they’re unleashing on it. They really, really need to make sure that they’re not accidentally following the wrong ‘god’ home.6

I thought long and hard about whether or not to write this post – but what worries me here is the creeping normalisation of these extreme perspectives on women, as they’re increasingly being promoted by people who have (or once had) credibility, and who aren’t obviously right-wing evangelical loonies. Who say things like ‘Oh well, you might not agree with him/ her, but he/ she makes some points worth thinking about.’ I dispute that too, but I think that’s already quite enough for this month. Until next time – and taking a very deep, calming breath – I’m wishing you, as ever, all the beauties and blessings of whichever season you find yourselves in.

(No other big news to offer you this month, but watch out for a bumper edition in early March.)