Dissident Feminism and Cyber Suburbia
I coined a term.
On 15 May 2019, I checked into All Seasons Thamrin, Jakarta. Lying on the bed while listening to Drake’s “Weston Road Flows”, his ode to Toronto. Life seemed perfect. A book that contains my writings was about to be released in the evening. I’d signed up for a European charity that connected me to top women’s footballers. Life could only get better.
July 2024. I’ve communicated with Torontonians daily, more than I can say with Melburnians or even Indonesians. I am selling my copy of that book. That European charity has been inactive for about a year, and I hesitate to return to it. You know what happened. Half of the people you saw as good people have outed themselves as Jew-haters.
You know what’s gone wrong with 2020. The pandemic, the lockdowns, the mostly peaceful protests, the cancellations of whiteness – white people, white historical figures, white institutions. But all the wrong signs had begun in 2019.
What is the opposite of Leftists on social media supporting Hamas? Leftists on social media who opposed Hong Kong protesters. No umbrella emoji, no Free Hong Kong, no boycott of pro-CCP brands. Instead, propaganda from pro-Beijing accounts was retweeted, and proudly communist Westerners stood against female and gay Hong Kongers.
The Left loves to say that China isn’t communist, but because Hong Kong protesters demanded the European values of democracy and representations (which to be fair, never occurred in Chinese history) therefore they were pro-USA and pro-UK and must be opposed. Some protesters indeed brought the American flags and the colonial flags of Hong Kong, but it wasn’t the blunder that turned against them. Whatever flag the Hongkongers carried, any foreigners supporting the US and the UK in 2019 must be opposed, and anyone opposing them must be supported.
Ironically, the same Left constantly read and wrote for American and British publications, and that’s the point. Red and blue flags represent conservatism, while the other flags represent its opposite. Call it (shit)lib, progressivism, socialism, wokeness, black nationalism, or even now, the omnicause. The point is hatred for red and blue.
That mindset might have been set the moment I stepped into the book launch. I had attended several events in Jakarta in the mid-2010s and they had been fun. I met fellow writers, and fans, and found out the identities of anons. We did karaoke, we sang along, we played games, we ate and chatted. I loved those events and those people.
Not so that evening. I found strangers who were never interested in saying hi. I found dour people who never smiled throughout the night. I felt the icy air of awkwardness despite it being a milestone moment. My then-boss said that they waited a while after the presidential election passed. Yes, there was a riot scare in April (the deadlier one came a week later), but I am sure every Indonesian in the room voted for Jokowi or invalidated their ballot. But there was no conservative in the room.
Now I understand what happened. In 2016 I spent the evening with gay men and lesbian women, and yes, at least one bisexual person. In 2019 I spent the evening with queer people. Ironically, in that decade I used ‘queer’ as the concise alternative to “LGBT+” or the longer “LGBTQIA”, unaware of the political difference.
The funny thing is the original meaning of the word stands. A gay person is gay, happy, and merry. A queer person relies on the strangeness, the weirdness. Queer is about resistance, not acceptance. It’s about discomfort, not comfort. The 2016 crowd accepted me being a straight ‘ally’, while the 2019 crowd was suspicious of my um, cishet presence.
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One bad thing led to another, and that’s before the pandemic. I left Twitter because I felt I was a horrible person, and because everyone else talked about how horrible life was. I never knew about Harper’s Magazine’s “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate”, which must have created some uproar among my old contacts. All I knew that eventually, I read right-wing American media previously forbidden to open (they might be still excluded as Wikipedia citations). The Federalist. Fox News. New York Post. News.com.au. The Spectator.
Eventually, I found City Journal and New Discourse and hesitated to turn to conservatism. Too many men, too nutty perhaps, too apocalyptic…but the mainstream websites like CNN and the Guardian and ABC News weren’t being truthful either. More demands. More racism against white people. More unearned praise for black and trans people.
Sometime in 2021, I found Bari Weiss’ newsletter Common Sense with Bari Weiss, now The Free Press, and perhaps that was the beginning of the way out. Not all women were fine with BLM. Not all conservatives were homophobic. Democrats and Republicans could agree on some things. And other people were thinking what I was thinking.
In 2022 I read Quillette and UnHerd and was amazed to find that many female writers had unorthodox, critical, and sober analyses on various political and feminist issues. Ideally, by mid-2022 I would have returned to Twitter. But I hesitated.
What would I tweet? Would the discourse be too much for me, with everything seeming different on both Slate and UnHerd? Would I associate myself with racists and weirdos? Would they treat this third-worlder with respect?
On the other hand, the old network wasn’t promising either. Even by the 2010s I had heard that Asians must give way to black feelings. My old place had switched from publishing articles in English with stylish companion art to publishing in Indonesian with the dreaded Corporate Memphis abomination. From talking about women to talking about the queer. I longed for the HGTV normality I loved, and I worried I couldn’t get it on Twitter. It was a warzone.
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Elizabeth II died in September 2022, and I wrote about her monarchy on Substack. Then Elon Musk bought Twitter, and everyone freaked out about it, and many announced their departure. Some said Twitter would eventually fold, just like the liberal media like Vice and Jezebel.
Eventually, I returned after Australia Day 2023 (a day largely canceled in Australia), ashamed that I brought nothing to the environment. I lost maybe about 50 followers - not just get unfollowed (being inactive for four years would do that) but some others had deactivated their accounts. Some followers did announce their departures in November 2022.
I began the rebuilding. Adding the writers, the so-called dissident or heterodox feminists who questioned the attacks on white women. Who didn’t have to agree or disagree with all Democrats and Labo(u)r policies.
One or two months down the road, I figured out a secret: I could break the rules of 2010’s allyship. It’s okay to be a reply guy, provided your reply makes sense. Offensive and problematic are two different things. Normalcy is good. Nuance is good. Praising a woman’s beauty is fine. Following conservative accounts are fine. Individual matters more than identity.
Eventually, I wasn’t canceled. Probably because eventually no one in Asia cared about me. Because progressives in Asia were already too busy fighting the government and themselves. I preferred people to unfollow me because those who didn’t seem to have muted me instead of having such tolerance of deviation.
So, so many people thought that 7 October would unite the world in condemning Hamas. So, so many of us were surprised that the world would unite in condemning Israel even by 8 October. It only took weeks for all the distinguished feminists in Asia to condemn Israel and never mention Hamas – only Palestine. This year, I found it was also the case for Nordic feminists.
That is one reason why over the last 9 months, I’ve written much more about Jews and Israel than Southeast Asia. Honestly, I have minimum contact with Asian feminists or even liberals for the obvious reason: We have nothing in common.
Holly Lawford-Smith is an assistant professor at the University of Melbourne who has become a figure of gender-critical feminism, which says that sex supersedes gender (that’s exactly the title of her book). We’ve interacted a couple of times over the last year, and recently she wrote about what’s next for heterodox feminism.
I replied that interestingly, I couldn’t name famous orthodox feminists, who supposedly dominate the media and X, thus relegating the heterodox or dissident feminists to the fringe. She said it was a good question. Gloria Steinem isn’t a livewire on Twitter and isn’t a superstar columnist, even in her Ms. Magazine. She’s also been canceled for years for being too liberal, too white, too Jewish.
I could only think of Jill Filipovic (who I’ve known for perhaps seven years) who writes regularly for The Atlantic and CNN. She’s been regularly attacked by fellow Democrats as a liberal, and these days, for condemning not just Israel but also Hamas. I always admired her principle and objectivity.
There might be Rebecca Traister, Jane Rubin, Taylor Lorenz, and Moira Donegan…and yet they are not cited anymore outside the United States, and certainly not by the youth.
Hence, I believe that dissident feminists have become the orthodox feminists. Those who believed in intersectional feminism had ditched feminism for years, replacing it with the anti-feminist Left brands of Black Lives Matter, then Trans Activism, and now antisemitism. Two articles from The Spectator by Phoebe Maltz Bovy in 2022 perfectly illustrated this suicide of orthodox feminism, ironically built upon the success of #MeToo.
Katherine Dee, who is about to interview me this month on the Internet in the 1990s, tweeted that motherhood made her a basic suburban mother, albeit her terminally online habit. I replied that this is a condition unthinkable in any 1999 fantasy: The cyber suburbia. The Matrix but not urban. American Beauty and Pleasantville not as dystopia but as status quo.
Dee said she liked the name, which is a serious approval. Western suburbia in 2024 isn’t a heaven: Violent break-ins. Murders. Tragic crashes. But it remains a place of homes, of families, of lives. For all the horrible things happening now, I am allowed to be a part of this suburbia. I’ve helped so, so many women and men in other parts of the world find kitchenware, a repair service, a consolation, a smile, an answer, a connection.
I’m just a middle-aged man from the tropics, who’s somehow put in this world for this purpose.