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Recreational Feminism

Is our casual relationship with feminism a good thing?

By Hannah MacdermottPublished about a year ago 6 min read
<a href="https://www.freepik.com/free-photo/woman-lying-using-laptop-bed_11229411.htm">Image by wavebreakmedia_micro</a> on Freepik

Feminist discourse is increasingly easy to get involved in. Due to the rise of social media and the internet, anyone can have their say from anywhere. I could be taken as an example of this: sitting in my bedroom, typing away about my opinions on everything. Myself, along with many other teenagers, have found feminist discourse to be interwoven with every type of media- most prominently on TikTok. I know I have a tendency to relate many cultural phenomena back to this app, but (especially for teenagers) the impact it has had on many aspects of life cannot be underestimated.

This has resulted in a movement I would call 'Recreational Feminism', in which people (mostly teenagers) engage in feminist debate much in the same way they engage with everything else on social media. Feminist ideas are mixed with regular media and entertainment so that they are engaged with in a much more casual, much less academic way.

As I have mentioned, social media has aided spread of social justice movements, and therefore also responsible for how they have been intwined with regular entertainment. I detailed the role of Tiktok in particular in facilitating feminist debate in my Gone Girl essay, which (shameless self promo), I would recommend you check out for a bit of background. But to summarise, Tiktok's short video style provides a breeding ground for under-nuanced takes and bold, flawed statements. As with most social media, Tiktok has an issue with the disconnect between creator and audience- somewhere between them, across the expanse of the internet, the knowledge that the creator is human gets lost, or at least diminished. This leads to genuine critique being replaced with personal attacks and stereotyping.

My addiction to TikTok was deepest from 2020-21, for obvious reasons, and although I still frequently use the app, the extent to which my views and opinions were shaped by my For You Page has lessened significantly. I am slightly embarrassed to look back on how easily I was swept away by movements, and not because of what those views were (this was undoubtedly the time where I began getting involved in progressive and leftist movements, which I have no regrets about), but because of how uncritically they were formed and how I perceived people with other views. At the time I was in my mid-teen years, as with many other viewers, so had the fatal combination of limited background knowledge of politics, ability to be easily influenced, and a great desire to make a positive change in the world. This combination is what allows for both the incredibly positive development of personal viewpoints and political engagement, along with a susceptibility to get swept away with it all and forget critical thought.

The TikTok algorithm is notorious for how it responds to your interests and pushes you towards certain niches in the highly personalised 'For You Page'. For me, it responded to my engagement with political, leftist discourse, and I was inundated with these kinds of videos, so much so that it became quantity over quality, and I found myself uncritically adopting surface level views rather than taking time to dissect what I had been presented with. During lockdown, I feel that there was a definite trend towards endless outrage and intense criticism of others, driven by this mentality of careless consumption of videos leading to matching the outrage of any creator that pointed out any flaw. Something that, on a personal level, is unsustainable. When I first had this idea of 'recreational feminism', it took a very different form to what I believe there is now. The first type of recreational feminism existed in this social media landscape, and contributed to this constant infighting and outrage.

Social media is one of the most casual ways of consuming feminist ideas. Often ideas are shown using jokes and satire, or in short form, as I have mentioned, that inherently lacks nuance. This makes engagement with feminist ideas feel like more of a hobby, something that pervades relaxation time spent on TikTok, rather than a political movement that is coupled with an academic understanding of feminist ideas. On the one hand, recreational engagement with feminism allows these ideas to reach a widespread audience, making them more palatable and easy to understand. I personally think that without my recreational feminism I wouldn't know as much about issues important to me and the movement as I do now. On the other hand, the lack of nuance and lack of encouragement of critical thinking as a viewer both provides a breeding ground for unproductive infighting, and does not help in people developing their own views and ideas, therefore inhibits original thinking. When watching these videos, that on TikTok will be interspersed with other videos- jokes, edits, music, adverts- it's natural to not engage the academic side of your brain, hence creating this uncritical and recreational consumption.

The second kind of recreational feminism, that I feel is more prevalent now, is formed by a current culture of apathy. It's similar to what many other observers have dubbed 'dissociative feminism', a style of feminism caused and propagated by apathy and nihilism. The dissociative feminist no longer engages fully with feminism, and no longer participates in any kind of campaigning or action. Dissociative feminists are well-versed enough in feminist thought, and agree with feminist ideas, but no longer act on this. I would argue this plays into recreational feminism. The wave of fatiguing outrage and push for constant engagement and action is passing- that's not to say that there aren't people who are still active and angry- but many do not have the motivation to continue feminist action. This is where the previous form of recreational feminism, one characterised by anger without nuance, morphs into a second form, one so paralysed by nuance that it does not know how to act.

It is important to note that this essay is heavily influenced by my own experiences, where I went from a younger, angrier, less knowledgeable feminist, to one slightly older, slightly more tired, and slightly more knowledgeable. Personally, looking back on my younger self, I notice my tendency to get wrapped up in anger. Nowadays, I am more cautious about understanding things more completely before I take a stance. I think this, coupled with a general sense of apathy, has lead to a kind of paralysis, where many do not know what opinion to take or how to act, so just don't. The recreational aspect of my initial involvement with feminist action I think is what caused this eventual slowing. Lumping it in with other sources of entertainment and therefore consuming incredibly frequently, with a mindset of quantity over quality, leads to being overwhelmed. This type of apathetic recreational feminism I feel is more dangerous than the active type. It only really affects people privileged enough to let it affect them. People, like myself, who only feel the impact of a very narrow array of issues due to privilege in other aspects of life, and therefore can allow themselves to ignore the sense of urgency that others, who are more affected, may feel.

At this stage, it is essential that anyone who considers themselves a feminist, dissociative or not, recreational or not, recognises if they are failing to critically consume media, or if they have become apathetic. There are trends and ideas at the moment that disprove things I have just discussed- the current infatuation with 'female rage' in the media, for example, or the large numbers of strong feminists who have not let this become merely a hobby and are out in the streets protesting. But there is an alarming number of feminists who have expressed a sense of apathy, and I'm sure there are many more who have let their motivation drop in the past year or so. Therefore, I still feel it was worthwhile to point this out. The one thing I feel that is at the core of any functioning feminist idea is intersectionality, so for the sake of women who are affected in different ways to yourself, make your feminism into something more than recreational.

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About the Creator

Hannah Macdermott

the rantings and ramblings of an inconstant mind.

[email protected]

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