 The gun is good. The gun is good. The penis is evil. She has to have her career family in order by the time she's 35. Your so-called women's march is just a giant temper tantrum clogging our streets and hurting our ears and eyes. Originally we called them winding women of the month of August. Hey baby, want to have an hour-long public conversation about trade policy and the vagaries of Viennese economics? Women are so overrated, right? It's like that. Believe women. It's like all of them. And when they make me look slightly less horrific for television, I always say, as a matter of course, thank you ladies. Is that offensive? Am I offending them? Okay, so back on planet Earth, what actually is feminism? Well, it's the fight for gender justice. Every corner of your life. Your work, sex, politics, health, law. It's all massively shaped by what gender you happen to be. 73% of victims of domestic homicides are women and just 24.3% of politicians. Women do more of the work for a tiny slice of the wages and own a tiny fraction of the land. Women have a lot less access to political and economic power and are left a lot more exposed to all kinds of violence. We do more than our fair share of work to keep the world going, but we don't get much of a say in how that world is run. So it's not surprising that we have a system which leaves a lot of women overworked, underpaid, and sometimes dead, with murdering his own wife. Feminism is an umbrella term for a bunch of different political theories and movements that all diagnose the root of these problems as one thing, patriarchy. Patriarchy literally means the rule of fathers. But we aren't talking here about a cabal of men gathering together to secretly plot the downfall of women. It doesn't mean that men's lives are universally great or women's lives are universally terrible. Instead, we're talking about a way of organising society into a hierarchy that routinely puts women at the bottom of the pecking order. This system punishes anyone whose gender falls outside a very particular idea of heterosexual masculinity. So being feminine is painted as shameful or weak, less valuable, and more deserving of all the shit that's flung our way. Now, not all men benefit equally from patriarchy. Your class, race and sexuality and things like that all come into play here. And it doesn't even guarantee men's happiness, in fact, far from it. But overall, it's about taking power, time and resources away from a huge chunk of the population and concentrating it in the hands of a few people at the top, most of whom are men and all of whom are stinking rich. It's pretty much a huge global scam. Think about it. Your average woman spends two and a half times more time doing unpaid care work and domestic work, which, if people had to pay for it, would be worth nearly 40% of GDP. Meanwhile, the CEOs who might have to cough up for those wages lounge around on yachts. Nice work if you can get it. So while different versions of patriarchy have been around for thousands of years, one thing has remained consistent. People have not taken this shit lying down. Because feminism isn't just an analysis. It can also be a very powerful solution. Some people think feminism is just about replacing men at the top with women at the top. But that still leaves the scam fundamentally intact to keep on screwing over the vast majority of women, femmes, non-binary people, everyone. It's the same circus, just different ringmasters. Historically, people have been a lot more ambitious than that. They used the tools of feminism to build a more just, more equal, less boring world. In the 20th century, Chinese women launched large-scale industrial strikes against the patriarchy and Italian feminists in the 1970s demanded wages for their housework. And of course, the suffragettes fought for the vote. And this doesn't always run smoothly because when you're trying to change the world, you have to tangle with different ideas of what that change should look like. And some strains of feminism have an ugly tradition of excluding more marginalised groups like sex workers, trans women, non-binary people and women of colour. Case in point, some suffragette leaders were also supporters of the British Empire, which disenfranchised and caused a lot of suffering to millions of people. And a lot of those people were women. They just didn't happen to be the right sort of middle-class white British citizen-type woman. What? Yeah, so this kind of thinking relies on rigid and arbitrary and surprise, usually misogynist definitions of what it means to be a real woman or a good woman, one who deserves to have a share in the gains of feminism. Ultimately, this just ends up reinforcing sexist stereotypes and playing into an old game of divide and conquer. It doesn't just weaken the movement. It completely misses the point. Real feminism, the kind that can transform the world, is about fighting for and with anyone who gets a raw deal under patriarchy, not just people with the right kind of job, the right kind of genitals or the right kind of passport. Because whether people say you're a good woman or a bad woman or not quite a woman at all, we're all still being scammed by patriarchy. Playing by the rules won't get us far when the game is rigged against us. So the only way to win is to band together to change those rules for good.