After scrolling past hundreds of “microfeminism” hacks — “standing your ground” and “taking up space” as a woman in public areas, “rage-bait men and fight the patriarchy” — I waited for the broader feminist movement to push back. But instead, I continue to be met with more unserious plugs for feel-good activism.
With the rise of the second Trump administration and its “conservative realignment” movement, national media has slowly morphed into a frightening place full of toxic mainstream influences. Trends like “90s heroin chic” and “tradwifeism” are being fed to the new generation, companies are capitalizing upon women’s insecurities as a marketing tool with increased vigor and the celebrities whom many of us look up to play into this epidemic for profit.
Amid the rise of these influences, and in an effort to appeal to an increasingly conservative audience of women, the feminist movement has responded by taking a step backwards, encouraging subtle mentality shifts and “microfeminism” in an era when effective advocacy and active resistance are more essential than ever. This new, more passive wave now threatens to revise our modern-day definition of radical feminism in the United States. TikTok has become full of supposed feminists rejecting the rising influence of GLP-1 products or posting a reel of themselves competing in sports in response to Sydney Sweeney’s advertisement — modern-day feminism in its most radical form.
While noble in virtue, these acts fall short of radical feminism and cannot, by themselves, drive effective social change. Suffocating advertising tactics and a growing appeal of tradwifeism in the entertainment industry have accumulated in shaping a dangerous general attitude that can and will undermine the feminist movement’s progress. We cannot suggest to followers of the feminist movement that feel-good advocacy and small shifts in our everyday lives are enough to uproot and overturn a system rooted in decades of patriarchy. Radical feminism was never intended to be about simple acts of resistance — it requires a sense of anger and urgency that you cannot confine to minimalist actions. Our conscious mentality shifts are easier to practice than rioting in the streets, incriminating ourselves or publicly denouncing powerful figures; however, we cannot continue to foster the idea that a conscious mentality shift is powerful enough to override systematic oppression.
I remember watching an advertisement in which one of my favorite female athletes endorsed a GLP-1. I then opened Instagram to find another influencer yelling at me to “stop scrolling!” and buy a product to fix a problem I wasn’t even aware I had. As the author describes in “It’s never ‘just sports’ — the broader picture of how social narratives are undermining female athletes,” we are now living in an era where companies profit by reinforcing the idea that our value as women is dependent upon the judgments of others. Novig is a prime example of this, and Sweeney’s “unserious” jab at women’s sports highlights her willingness to give in to these mainstream attitudes for personal gain.
If you’ve scrolled far enough, you’ve likely encountered Nara Smith, Lex Delarosa or another “Tradwife” influencer equivalent. Often manifesting as dainty women in tight “cottage-core” dresses making sourdough while their husbands are off at work, the #tradwife movement has regained significant momentum since the beginning of Trump’s second term. This trend, primarily found on social media, is unsurprisingly correlated with several MAGA ideologies and urges viewers to resume their “traditional” roles — in short, to be homemakers. “I just want to be a Pilates princess” and “manage the home so he can do his big boy job,” they say.
These women — with millions of followers, including large female followings — are not only rising to fame by promoting the idea that women belong in a place of submissiveness, but also by promoting the idea that such submission to a most likely male figure is fulfilling and idealistic. When we pilot this idea to young girls, we urge them to set aside their hopes and dreams and hyperfixate on satisfying another individual — a cycle that will inevitably foster codependency long term.
The cherry on top of this toxic content is the concerning weight-loss and personality changes observed in several pop stars, actresses and influencers. TikTok has now coined the alarming rapid weight loss of several Hollywood stars as the return of “90s-heroin chic” — because everything is somewhat chic nowadays, I suppose?
At first, I watched silently, denying my concern, as my favorite actresses and singers became skeletal shells of the women they used to be. But I’ve grown to deeply resent how the women whom I used to think of as iconic and fearless now appear feeble and drained in each of their press interviews, striving to be smaller and smaller. One of my favorite music artists as a child even went so far as to post a picture of her entire body fitting inside a guitar case on her social media accounts. The deeper, and more concerning issue here, is that we are not just shrinking our bodies — we are shrinking our personalities, our confidence, our energy and our zest for life, and doing so while billions of women watch and make note of it.
Microfeminism ultimately makes it easier for us not to feel guilt for our own inaction. As much as we would like to believe it, the edit you posted on Instagram of women in sports, the “microfeminism” you partook in by referencing a hypothetical doctor as “she” or the fact that you left an “instant facelift” device in your shopping cart is not enough to overhaul an entire repressive system. We do more harm than good when we suggest that mundane acts are the new “radical feminism,” and to be frank, we need to stop trying to make feminism palatable to everyone. I cannot emphasize enough that the simultaneous rise of these toxic influences is not a coincidence. It is the systematic product of our current government administration, which first prompted the resurgence of anti-feminist trends and has slowly begun to chip away at our rights.
It is easy to convince ourselves that with the end of the Trump administration, the pendulum will swing in the other direction and restore our progress as a movement — that all we have to do is wait. The issue with this fallacy is that many young girls will grow up with these harmful influences shaping their ambitions and self-perception. The damage we do to an entire generation cannot be simply reversed with the rise of a new administration. If we trust that reform will happen for us if we block out this messaging and wait for social change, we forfeit our accountability for our next generation of female leaders and enable these existing problems to continue proliferating across our society.
In a college consortium where a significant proportion of the student body would consider themselves feminists, we each have a responsibility to discuss the dangerous rise of these influences. We have a responsibility to openly critique the women feeding into anti-feminism and microfeminism, and to highlight the damage they create. We have a responsibility to understand that advocacy is not simple, nor quiet, and that we cannot step backwards and sacrifice our progress to make this reality feel comfortable. We have a responsibility to organize as a collective and riot, and in turn, to seek out how we can make our voices unavoidable rather than subtle — we owe it to ourselves, our futures and to the women who paved the way for us to have the privilege of choosing to tone down our resistance efforts.
Olivia Brinkman Schooler PO ’29 grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is the oldest of four girls in her family, and she wrote the contents of this article with them in the forefront of her thoughts.
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