What Does a Feminist Look Like in 2025?

2010s feminism died. What has replaced it?

For reasons I can’t fully explain, model Emily Ratajkowski’s 2020 essay about her pregnancy has been doing the rounds this week (Okay, fine, I can explain why: her toddler son appears to be wearing feminine clothes in a recent photo of them together, and one thing led to another on right-wing Twitter. You’re welcome for staying up to date so you don’t have to.)

Ratajkowski’s essay feels very 2020 in a way that everything from 2020 kind of seems like a fever dream. It’s as foreign-yet-familiar as that guy dressed up as the Grim Reaper to shame people for going to the beach. The whole essay is overwrought with anxiety about various gender-related things, from the stress that a baby girl might be under if she had a beautiful mother, to the fact that despite intentionally getting pregnant, Ratajkowski never imagined herself having a boy (sorry to break it to you, lady—it’s a bit of a coin flip!)

Anyway, a few quotes were taken out of context, mostly that she describes a friend of hers being devastated upon finding out she was having a boy: “It was hard to come to terms with the fact that I was bringing yet another white man into the world. But now I adore him and can’t imagine it any other way.” Of course, this quote was misattributed to Ratajkowski herself, which was disingenuous and unnecessary, especially because she openly said something similar in the same essay: “I’m scared of having a son too, although not in the same way. I’ve known far too many white men who move through the world unaware of their privilege.”

This essay did not make waves in 2020 except on various rage-bait conservative website. I don’t even remember seeing it. This type of talk was everywhere in the mid-late 2010s, peaked around 2020, and it was just part of the background noise. We lived over a soundtrack of “I hate white cishet men” and Mumford & Sons. I found this rhetoric obnoxious even then, but you were either a feminist (who spoke this way or at least agreed not to tone-police people who spoke this way) or an anti-feminist misogynist. And you couldn’t just hate men, but white straight men, because if you were a white woman who “hated men” that might be racist.

But of course, most of the women who nominally “hated white straight men” had white straight boyfriends and husbands. No matter what they said about “fuck your beauty standards” they went to great efforts to look good, stay thin and be attractive to white straight men (Emily Ratajkowski’s entire career has been based on her appeal to this dreaded demographic!) The women who said things like Ratajkowski and her friend about being “afraid to bring another white man into the world” deliberately chose to procreate with white men, knowing there was a 50% chance that a future white man would materialize. Given the fundamental reality of how often these women still willingly interacted with, and slept with, white men, I never took their bluster seriously. It all felt a bit performative, something that you just said to signal that you were up-to-date on the way a 28-year-old woman in coastal cities was supposed to talk. In a way, it signaled that you were attractive, although I’m sure they’d deny that motivation. Only an ugly, desperate “pick me” would signal her appreciation for (or even vague tolerance of) men. If you hated men, and they still wouldn’t leave you alone, you were really hot shit.