I first read Pride and Prejudice in a feminist theory course. I wanted to be cynical about it and notice the patriarchy, the structural inequity, the horrors of a class system managing the lives of women like commodities and business deals…

But despite myself, I was caught in the dream of a woman who had long since left the earth. A dream that a woman with no financial security could reject a handsome, rich, and powerful man just because she didn’t really fancy him. A dream that a woman could reject an opportunity to save her family estate by marrying the wheezily and predatory Mr. Collins. A dream that a father would recoil from the idea of offering his daughter to a lifetime of compelled sex, of legal rape, in order to secure the family estate.

It was a dream for Austen, and it is today for many women who are bought and sold for sexual and reproductive labour, for the pleasure of men, and for the making of alliances.

Pride and Prejudice is a cultural artefact, a letter from another time, a love story wrapped in a message of oppression and desperately wanted political and social change.

Feminists are not supposed to be caught up in the dream of Austen because the entire scenario is problematic. Elizabeth Bennet’s happily ever after is a life of landed aristocracy based on the exploitation of tenant farmers, the surplus capital of the estate is used to pursue a life of ridiculous luxury surrounded by people that are trapped in generational servitude.

The feminist icons that are offered to girls and women have become so bourgeois, institutional, and harmful, it is now the job of dissident women to dream of an escape from feminism. For me, I dream of feminism’s return to women.

The 2022 Joan of Arc, like Elizabeth Bennet, is a character of fiction, rather than live in a cage of femininity she has cast aside ‘femininity’ and therefore she can’t possibly be a woman. The 2022 Joan of Arc is a cultural artefact and will be remembered as completely consistent with bourgeois feminism.

Femininity is the high tower that feminists have been attacking as the source of their oppression since the concepts of sex role stereotypes was first pondered. Femininity is the word we use for the gender of the female sex, for many feminists a prison of compelled performance and sex-based obligations. Femininity is seen by many feminists as a tool of the patriarchy to secure female bodies for controlled reproduction, contractual sex, prostitution, and pornography.

The re-telling of Joan of Arc as something other than a woman (by the Globe Theatre, of all ironic places) is the elevation of masculine roles and power as beyond the grasp of a woman, and the preserving of femininity as a delicate, submissive role only suitable for those who choose to display the breasts that clearly indicate a female body.

Bourgeois feminism is an institutionally bred ideology that elevates gender to a power even greater than that of its patriarchal predecessor. In a dim light, one could barely tell one from the other. The gender identity ideology at the core of bourgeois feminism radical feminists would argue, is part of the modern-day patriarchy, and of all the things I disagree with Radical Feminists on, this is not one of them.

‘Gender’ has become the diligent study of the poorly educated, cripplingly entitled, joke-degree youth who think their professors have invented a type of rainbow soul that frees them from their sexed bodies – sexed bodies that have been walking the earth since the beginning of humanity.

Just because humanities professors have performed the modern-day miracle of seeing a man give birth, they are deemed smart enough to know how to completely cure material oppression with the speaking of magic words and the changing of materially unchangeable designations. If Bougie feminists had a dream told in fiction, it would best be placed in the genre of science fiction.

Bougie feminism can only embrace this nonsense because it has completely distanced itself from everyday lives and the everyday suffering of women. Feminism has become so embedded in the bureaucratic and capitalist mechanisms of Western nations that it has been paid to mould an entire theology that abandons the most vulnerable of women and celebrates the most privileged of men.

The magic theological invention of humanities professors is now going to cure a rare psychological condition, prevalent in a fraction of a percent of the population, with the complete re-engineering of human sex, sexuality, language, religion, and customs. It is a holy crusade that will not be completed without compelled language change, coercion of women, the disregarding of safeguarding principles, in other words tyranny.

It is not uncommon to see tweets such as this one from an Australian feminist:

‘Terfs, like the fascists with whom they willingly align themselves, should be shredded by all moral people at all times. Middle-aged white men should be doing the heavy lifting on this issue as much as anyone else.’

This sort of thing is reminiscent of the ‘top girl’ at school sending the boys after the rest of the disobedient girls who refuse to submit. In this case, feminists claim that the denial of male access to women’s sport is ‘literally’ denying the right of some men to exist.

We have seen the invention of a new, ‘most oppressed’ class of women that look, act, and sound exactly like entitled men. You can say what you want about the Australian bourgeoisie, but they know how to control their women.

To be fair to the arts world, The Globe as a British theatre has long been dependent on patronage by those who run the economy, the culture, and the religion and it is usually kind enough to pay homage to those who pay to keep the lights on.

But feminism owes the aristocracy no such homage. The abuse of women as ‘terfs’ is in no way the logical endpoint of the feminist revolution our grandmothers started.

Elizabeth Bennet remains forever trapped in our collective dreamland with nothing before her but roaming Pemberley in a mud-trimmed skirt, having turns around the parlour with women she despises and enjoying an endless supply of steaming hot sex with a Mr Darcy who looks just like a younger middle-aged Colin Firth emerging from a midday swim in a cold spring. Joan of Arc will be 2022 non-binary icon, breasts bound, hair short ready to fight for ‘the new religion’.

The feminism of shouty Australian media personalities is never going to get us to a sprawling Pemberley with a hot Mr or Ms Darcy. They will bring us to the marriage with Mr. Collins; the horny, creepy clergyman who tends to the ego of his Mistress because she upholds the system that gives him sexual access, social status, and a ride to the shops on her electric horse.

I am excited to be part of a rebuilding or reviving of grassroots feminism or what some have called ‘fascism’.

Part of me feels I’ve come home, back to the Left, part of me feels like it’s a completely new thing, but I can assure you that gender-critical feminism is the furthest thing from ‘fascism’ you will find. Fascism has its authority in the state, feminism holds its authority in women’s bodies and history.

Let me assure you that this new Terf-y feminism is growing like wildfire among Australian women, in secret message groups, quiet chats in restaurants, and from the pages of Twitter where I have just earned a permanent suspension. My crime you ask? I said that men who claim to be lesbians are engaging in rape culture and I’m not sorry.

Edie Wyatt has a BA Hons from the Institute of Cultural Policy Studies and writes on culture, politics and feminism. She blogs at ediewyatt.com and substack.

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