In recent days, we have witnessed a wave of indignation in the feminist world, above all in Germany and Northern Europe, following the deepfake case involving Collien Fernandes. What began as a justified act of protest and criticism, as has often happened in recent decades, soon turned into a stream of fury and hatred directed not merely at criminals, abusers, or voyeurs, but at men as such and at so-called “toxic masculinity” in general.
It is not difficult to find posts on social networks in which the male world is no longer presented as the ordinary world of fathers, workers, professionals, and grandfathers, within which some, even many, rotten apples may exist, but as a world that is itself perverse and dangerous, with its apparently healthy side reduced to a mere mask.
The purpose of this article is to suggest that such a view rests on an essentially a priori assumption. It is not deduced from the complexity of facts, but imposed upon them in advance as an interpretative key. Particular crimes and pathologies are no longer treated as concrete evils to be judged in their specificity, but as revelations of the allegedly true nature of the male world as such.
This is where one may speak of what I would call Suburban Feminism (SF).
By SF I mean a derivative and artificial form of feminism, shaped in culturally and socially protected environments, which no longer fights primarily for concrete rights or protections, but sustains itself through the moralization, dramatization, and stereotyping of gender conflict. It has little to do with the cause of equality for which generations of women strove and fought. It is, rather, a post-historical imitation of those struggles: if we may use an image, a plaster cast taken from a bronze statue, preserving some of its outward lineaments, but neither the strength of the material nor the truthfulness of the form.
SF flourishes above all in the major centres of the Western world, especially in countries marked by Protestant roots. The possible link between SF and Wokeness, on the one hand, and a certain Protestant moral background, on the other, would deserve further investigation. For the moment, it is enough to observe that SF does not arise from direct confrontation with material oppression, nor from a serious cultural criticism of concrete injustices, but rather from milieus in which social protection and symbolic capital have already rendered many of the historical battles of feminism largely indirect or inherited experiences.
In such environments, gender conflict is moralized, dramatized, and stereotyped. Reality is filtered through ready-made categories, and social identity increasingly expresses itself through recognisable slogans, gendered language, rhetorical formulas of indignation, and symbolic markers of belonging. What emerges is not a deeper understanding of reality, but a theatre of moral positioning.
Male actions are interpreted as expressions of an oppressive collective structure. In some of its more radical forms, even the mere presence of men, and their divergence from an increasingly moralized feminine norm, comes to be treated as implicitly suspect. The countless acts performed daily by decent fathers, husbands, workers, and citizens are symbolically eclipsed by the pathologies of exceptional and deeply disturbed individuals. What is nonetheless striking is that certain acts of violence committed by individuals from strongly patriarchal societies, steeped in religious fanaticism, are at the same time justified or minimized by SF movements when those individuals come from a migrant background. The case of Northern European countries is emblematic, above all the case of Sweden.
Sweden is regarded as exemplary by many supporters of SF, both because it has built a society with a high level of gender equality and because, in recent decades, it has promoted the so-called Swedish Sex Purchase Act. This law, strongly supported by Swedish feminists, does not criminalise the woman who sells sexual services, but rather the purchase of such services and thus the male demand that sustains the system. What is striking is that Swedish law treats the purchase of sexual services as a specific moral and criminal problem, while alcohol is addressed mainly through public-health regulation and narcotics through a different, though also highly punitive, legal framework. The asymmetry therefore does not lie in punishment as such, but in the distinct moral and symbolic meaning attached to male demand in prostitution. The person, whether male or female, who struggles with alcohol or narcotics and may therefore pose a danger to society is viewed in Swedish moral culture primarily as someone to be helped and reintegrated. The sex purchaser, by contrast, is viewed as the person responsible for the very existence of prostitution. What is punished, rather than the criminal organisation that sustains and profits from prostitution, is the sex buyer, whereas the organisation itself may continue to survive by retreating into the black market, without any real reduction in supply. One thus cuts off merely one head of the hydra while leaving the body untouched.
To the objection that the real issue is the need to re-educate the male into renouncing prostitution altogether, one may reply by asking why this logic is not applied, with the same moral zeal, to the ubiquitous presence of eroticised images, pornography, and the many disgusting websites on which forms of sexual commodification involve not only adult women, but, in legally ambiguous cases, even underage girls. Is it the degenerated male demand that creates the supply, or perhaps the supply that continually nourishes the demand? If SF chooses the first option without hesitation, we would argue instead that the two processes are deeply intertwined and mutually reinforcing.
The so-called Nordic paradox is exemplary in this respect: societies that present themselves as morally advanced in matters of gender equality may at the same time display high levels of intimate partner violence, while in some cases also showing lower disclosure to the police than the EU average (see: Science Direct).
Whatever the ultimate explanation may be, this already suffices to cast doubt on the idea that moralized gender discourse automatically produces healthier relations between men and women.
So, to answer our question: is feminism still relevant?
Not if it survives only in the form of SF, as seems increasingly to be the case in parts of Western Europe. In such a form, its central concerns are no longer pay gaps, coercion, exploitation, and the concrete abuses suffered by women, but punishment, ritualized indignation, anthropological suspicion toward manhood, and the promotion of new and often sterile forms of language, faintly reminiscent of what Viktor Klemperer associated with the “language of the Fourth Reich,” as a democratic yet illiberal successor to the language of the Third. What we do not need are further retreats into sexual fortresses, nor new forms of mannerism or, in the worst cases, censorship, perpetuated by poorly educated individuals and fed by a chaotic and badly digested mass of material consumed through the hyperuse of smartphones and social media. These phenomena are little more than shadows enlarged by the spotlights of the modern metropolis, destined to disappear once the lights of prosperity dim and people are forced once again to struggle for more concrete values, more directly connected with their own survival. What we need instead is a new Humanism, one capable of restoring dignity to both man and woman in their uniqueness and in their splendid difference, a difference grounded in the enduring and immutable laws of Nature.
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