The Postfeminist Manifesto: Resilience, Discernment and Autonomy

There's a better way to live.

These ideas emerged from self-reflection — I’ve done everything I critique here. There’s a better way to live that’s neither traditional nor feminist, and I want to share it with you: the path of moral autonomy.

Part 1: Interior Freedom

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Freedom Through Responsibility

Freedom is meaningless without self-governance.

Every version of feminism has sold women the promise of freedom from constraints, wherein responsibility becomes a shackle. It’s why we resist taking accountability for how we hurt other women, in particular, and always have the excuse of patriarchy. I write this because I was once such a woman, and miserable. My depression lasted for fifteen years precisely because I was never encouraged to be accountable for my outcomes. Yes, my family traumatized me, but I chose to be a victim. Resilience and responsibility go hand in hand.

As with therapy’s promise of validation, we expect our friends to validate everything we do. We therefore remain childlike in our decision-making abilities, even though we demand equal participation in public life.

I once had an insatiable need to be right, all the time. That desire corrodes relationships because the other person has to walk on eggshells around you. Everyone is wrong sometimes, but most women have convinced themselves that we cannot be, and anyone saying so is either sexist or mean. That is no way to cultivate a resilient psyche.

Feminism’s moral inversion has valorized victimhood, wherein seizure of agency is punished most by other women. We get social currency among women for performing victimhood (especially women of color) so we think we are actually victims. I chose to stop seeing white people as the source of all my problems. I was, in fact, participating in the bourgeois class project of opportunity hoarding in the name of justice.

I learned from various philosophical traditions that true freedom stems from discipline, and freedom from constraint is a type of shackle. This false model of freedom had me chasing the ephemeral.

From discipline stems self-containment, and from self-containment comes moksha, or true liberation, in this life. Discipline is a kind of yogic heat. Those who do whatever they want at any given moment are simply leaking energy rather than designing a good life.

Postfeminism is the pursuit of discipline and the acceptance of responsibility as a means to true freedom.

Truth Through Discernment

Clarity of thought is rebellion these days.

We’ve become intellectually lazy by outsourcing our thinking to algorithms. Feminism and social media, in particular, have mixed to convince us that truths are determined through social performance — that is the logical endpoint of claiming that the oppressed can access truth in a way others cannot. This confers moral authority on those who may not have the character to bear it. This is outsourcing one’s judgment to identity labels, and the identity labels themselves are inseparable from the algorithms that created them. Feminism of today is inseparable from the process of creating oneself online, and that self is hollow. The phone has turned us into automatons spouting thought-terminating cliches.

We’ve also stopped reading now that we can get the morally correct opinion from TikTok and Instagram. The most significant change I made in my journey was to break up with the phone and read deeply again. We no longer have focus, so we lack the discipline to cultivate mastery or undertake anything truly challenging. We’ve been convinced that a frictionless life is a desirable one.

If we’re going to have a socially consequential opinion, we should be reading deeply about that subject. After I spent two years only reading, all my previously held opinions changed because I was forced to think about what is true versus what my peers insisted was true. There is no substitute for reading if you want to cultivate depth; not audiobooks, not podcasts.

Humans’ nature is to believe that which will garner social belonging, and women are no exception. Arriving at truth requires the individual to wrestle with ideas and apply reason to their experiences. This is the dialectical process in action, whereby we resolve contradictions between seemingly intractable positions. Women have been taught that logic is sexist and reasoning is a male way of knowing that somehow subordinates emotion. But emotion is simply not how we get at truth, though feminism taught me that’s the case. We refuse to examine our positions because we’re terrified of what other women will think of us.

Truth through discernment requires the willingness to reject the socially accepted position and stand alone. Sometimes, reasoning leads to places others refuse to follow because they can’t get past the implication for their self-concept.

I had to let go of the need to fit in with women to fully exercise my reasoning ability. I thought I would be unhappy, but I’ve never been more satisfied with life.

Everyone is wrong sometimes, including women. Postfeminism is choosing truth over belonging.

Part 2: Womanhood

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Autonomy Through Embodiment

Feminist thought has foisted all manner of irrational ideas on society: that males and females are interchangeable, that males can literally become females, and that biological sex is a social construct rather than an observable reality. In doing so, we’ve denied the truth of natural selection and sexual dimorphism that is observed in all other species. Sex isn’t a spectrum, and how one chooses to self-present doesn’t literally change one’s sex. I’ve not historically stated this with such force, but it must be said because the denial of dimorphism is perhaps the basis of the professional class’s claim to moral authority. To deny sex as a material reality is asserting theology without a god.

Men and women are different, and this fact doesn’t make me a victim, nor does it imply that men are better. Postfeminism accepts this difference and doesn’t feel threatened by material truths. Equality need not mean sameness, though feminism taught me that there can be no other definition. The acceptance of men and women as different actually liberated me; the feminist insistence on sameness was a mental prison.

Sex is another context in which we’ve been sold liberation, but that’s come to mean freedom from regret. I’ve regretted several sexual encounters in my youth, but feminism taught me I can easily blame the man even if no one was coercing me. I just let sex happen, another result of absent discipline.

I learned to hate my own femininity as oppressive false consciousness. I thought it made me weak and traditional. Feminine appearance has become superficially limited to what women think men like, while we also police each other’s dispositions. Swaths of females have decided they’re not women because they get either too much or insufficient male attention. We’ve let femininity shrink to the contours of the male gaze.

“Pick-me” is one such tool of social discipline to suppress intrasexual competition and lead other women to question their self-concept. It does not occur to many that perhaps some women are simply more male-typical in personality expression, but aren’t doing it for male attention. If a woman receives male attention, it’s often treated as her moral failing, even though that attention is currency among women and a basis for the status hierarchy.

Postfeminism is the acceptance of material reality and not policing other women’s femininity. Masculinity is not the enemy.

Part 3: Public Life

Virtue Through Competition

Feminism taught me that competition is masculine and, therefore, sexist. Competition is often framed in opposition to cooperation, which can lead to enforced consensus. This prevents competition of ideas, such that women’s society is structurally intellectually impoverished. I know some of you don’t believe that feminism could be responsible for the suppression of critical thought.

Many, if not most, women see intellectual challenge from fellow women as a rude personal attack. They refuse men’s attempts at debate by deploying accusations of sexism. ‘Logicbro’ emerged as an insult during the internet feminist wave as a means to evade scrutiny for illogical stances. Critical thinking is structurally smothered among women because of feminist insistence that we not betray the sisterhood.

Resistance to competition also leads status-protective women to hold back excellent ones. If competition is sexist, then no woman can ever be better at anything than others. We see this once again in our evolved tendencies: women have adapted to compete covertly, never overtly. Because the competition isn’t open, anyone can sabotage others regardless of actual ability. This corrodes the concept of merit itself, and we see this happening throughout society.

Findings in evolutionary biology confirm that women know from an early age that they can’t visibly outperform their female peers on pain of being cast out. I have experienced covert sabotage from women whose ideas I dared to question at work. They cynically deploy sexism as a shield against critique from men. Those women are far more numerous than those who are actually competent, because only a minority of people who put in the work can excel at something. We know from broader trends that most women have outsourced their thinking to social media and other women, and therefore lack the focus to develop mastery. One woman’s excellence is another woman’s source of envy, so those of us who put in the work have to downplay our achievements.

Suppression of competition corrodes not only individual ability but also corrupts institutions. No competitive arena is perfect, but that isn’t a license to dismiss competition itself as sexist. One’s ability to compete reveals their character and discipline. I was deeply depressed when I worked in female-dominated environments built on competitive suppression, and it’s no accident my mental health improved after I entered an openly competitive arena dominated by men.

The postfeminist path requires us to earn our standing in the world. Men owe us nothing.

Renewal Through Competence

Enforcement of female solidarity precludes excellence in institutions and individuals. The illusion of equal abilities in all women is perpetuated through credentialism, which prioritizes paper credentials over actual skills. Dependence on credentials is a trap if a woman wants to get somewhere in her career — a false promise of status predicated on rule enforcement.

If women want economic independence from men, as feminism sells, we must chase skills instead of credentials. School teaches compliance, while life calls for selective rule-breaking. I broke all the rules I was handed about being a woman, which was my path to a good life.

Women have been the enforcers of norms and rules throughout human history, but this tendency corrupts institutions that should be built on competence. Instead, women measure each other in terms of social compliance, leading men to withdraw from them at work and in life. Why would men subject themselves to our stifling social rules and invite us into their networks?

Through feminism, we demanded entry into male-built institutions. As the managerial class expanded throughout the twentieth century, credentials and competitive gatekeeping became an effective way to exclude the lower classes. Status today is determined by managed outcomes, not ability; both men and women can achieve success through compliance rather than skill.

Before demanding parity with men who developed rare skills (e.g., the demand for parity in technical jobs), we must interrogate if we developed the competence. I’ve learned from experience that skill becomes undeniable after a certain point, but women are often the ones who refuse to notice competence in other women. The hardest I’ve ever worked to prove myself was to other women.

Demands for status based on arbitrary physical characteristics breed institutional corruption, because the polity loses trust. We’ve seen this happen throughout our society, and particularly at universities and in large corporations. I once built and enforced the diversity industrial complex at various workplaces, and I later saw how I was using my ethnicity to gain social currency instead of developing rare and valuable skills.

Postfeminism in institutions is elevating competence over status markers as the basis of membership.

Conclusion

To build a healthy society, the polity must believe that elites are seeking truth and can admit when they’re wrong. We have a safety-first elite structurally incapable of admitting fault, and this is a wellspring of our social malaise. Because women often resist admitting they were wrong, they are also a significant reason for the collapse of institutions and erosion of trust. While it’s not only women who are responsible, our tendencies in groups significantly contribute to the rot. When I was denying observable reality to assert my victimhood, I was contributing to the erosion of truth in society. Now I write in no small part to repair the decade-plus of damage I inflicted.

Renewal follows accountability.

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Naturally, I expect drive-by bad-faith readings. If you’re about to leave that kind of comment, please know that I will delete it. I do, however, invite reasoned disagreement.