Feminism is dead. Long live feminism.

If feminism isn’t dead, it certainly deserves to be – at least according to an [October 2015] piece in The Spectator, Britain’s Tory weekly. Feminism, we’re told, “should be celebrating its triumphs. Instead it has descended into pointless attention-seeking.” The triviality of the targets attacked by today’s feminists is the surest proof of it demise.

Phew. So, women have won. 

It’s nonsense, of course, but that thought – though it scarcely withstands scrutiny – was deemed worthy to be the magazine’s cover story. If nothing else, it shows that feminism is the zeitgeist, that gender is an argument we’re all in, and that it is an argument worth having – even when feminism’s sceptics proclaim that it has won and should, therefore, maintain a dignified silence. 

Despite feminism’s many triumphs, it hasn’t won. Nor can it in the new world order. The argument I have outlined on IAI TV is that the old sexual settlement is unsustainable and a new sexual settlement is being framed. Why has so much seemingly changed, and so little? Why in the new gender settlement is equality seemingly impossible and justice seemingly unattainable?

When I first started thinking about this for my book, End of Equality, it was the evidence on two fronts that provoked alarm: the equal pay stalemate, and the global evidence of impunity for crimes against women and children. Those thoughts were developing before the crash of 2008. If anything, the global debt crisis, and the response to it, clarified the contours of the new historical settlement: gender may not be an explicit category in the way the world is being made, but it is nonetheless omnipresent.