Embarrassing boyfriends or patriarchy? When think-pieces fail to name systems of oppression
By Charli Anderson
Chanté Joseph’s British Vogue article contributes to an illusion that online culture and social systems are mutually exclusive.
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It’s not often that something ‘breaks the internet’ anymore - a phrase I will perpetually associate with Kim Kardashian’s champagne-drenched bubble butt. Online content seems to rarely ripple from our echo chambers, and if it does, it seldom involves long-form text. Yet last month, Chanté Joseph took on the challenge in her British Vogue think-piece: ‘Is having a boyfriend embarrassing now?’ Much like Kardashian’s derrière, it had global impacts.
The article commences with Joseph’s confession that she tends to unfollow or mute influencers who centre their boyfriends in their content. She suggests that until recently, posting your male partner online as an influencer would convert to heightened engagement and financial gain. But now, something in her echo has shifted: fewer women seem to be posting their relationships online.
Joseph suggests this is because “being partnered … is no longer considered an achievement, and, if anything, it’s become more of a flex to pronounce yourself single”. The piece concludes with some questioning around heteronormativity, presenting the choice to remain single as socially superior in the current climate.
Although I’m all for kissing adieu to the “centuries-old heterosexual fairytale that never really benefited women to begin with”, something felt disorienting about Joseph’s depiction of reality. While far-right ideology continues to migrate further to the centre, gender essentialist thinking is on the rise, and the manosphere sucks in men by the thousands, it would be naïve to suggest that Joseph’s reality is shared by the majority.
As think-pieces on digital culture are growing in popularity, I’ve noticed that conversations are increasingly being had about cultural phenomena as if they exist in their own vacuums. The effect is to create the illusion that online culture and social systems are mutually exclusive - as if they can exist in separate realms that are completely detached from each other. Yet often the reality is instead a disfigured Venn Diagram with two circles, where one fits neatly inside the other. The larger circle is (usually) systems of patriarchy, capitalism and/or white supremacy, and the smaller circle is the cultural phenomena being spoken about.
Many would argue that the influence of systems on culture is so abundantly clear that it doesn’t warrant mentioning in every single think-piece, and for the most part, I agree. Except when we’re discussing women’s liberation, its absence is a noteworthy omission.
Anti-intellectualism is on the rise, education is under threat across the Western world, and Margaret Atwood’s system-focused fiction is being banned in schools across numerous states in the United States. The alt-right pipeline is gaining traction as they project rhetoric that disregards social systems entirely and instead blames marginalised groups for all of society’s ills. In this context, our failure to name systems of oppression quickly graduates from a choice to remain ‘light-hearted’ to a dangerous oversight.
The erasure of what I’ll refer to as ‘systems-consciousness’ is intensified when terms used by the left to describe oppressive systems (like ‘fascism’) are co-opted by those on the right to describe the left. This phenomenon was described in Naomi Klein’s book, Doppelgänger, in which Klein describes the far right as existing in a ‘mirror world,’ a place where conspiracies thrive off misinformation.
“How convenient it is for coalescing fascist forces if the term has been so abused…that anti-fascists are loath to use it to accurately describe events in the real world,” she writes. It’s Spiderman and imposter Spiderman pointing at each other – except in this case, they’re calling each other fascists. If we lose the language to describe oppressive systems, we lose the ability to direct blame at the people in power controlling them.
When think-pieces aim to address female liberation, failing to explicitly name patriarchy or capitalism leads us down the garden path. It can certainly be an entertaining walk, but it’s not the hike we really need.
It’s always been so much easier to blame a person or a group of people for a circumstance that causes you grief than a deeply embedded social structure that would require significant collective action to change. It’s far easier to blame women who date shitty men than systems of patriarchy and capitalism that create toxic men and constantly police women for who they date, how they date, why they date, when they date and why they don’t date. This isn’t to absolve shitty boyfriends of their responsibility here, but instead to highlight that we also need to have systemic conversations to unpack why the heterosexual fairytale isn’t working.
If we’re serious about challenging heteronormativity, perhaps we need to focus more on addressing the whopping $40,000 of unpaid labour performed by the average Australian woman each year, the rise in gender-based violence in this country, casual misogyny, rape culture, the gender pay gap and the rise of the manosphere. Choosing not to date men can be a valuable step for some who are seeking to decentre men at the individual level, but it won’t scratch the surface in tackling the broader landscape.
This piece is adapted from a YouTube video shared by Charli in November.
About the author
Charli Anderson (she/her)
Charli is the founder and producer of From the Diving Board, a podcast that unpacks political events and pop culture from a critical feminist lens. Charli’s professional experience in the community legal sector, federal government and academia has shaped a particular interest in gender-based violence prevention through cultural and systemic change.
Now this, I can get behind. Feminism isn’t eating itself, performative feminists who curate their social media to satisfy some kind of ‘aesthetic activism’ will move on to the next trend before our bras are even finished burning. Feminism isn’t how you look to others, it’s an act of rebellion against structures. Thank you for putting in words, more effectively than I could, what is wrong with this (boyfriend free) picture.
Online. That’s the problem. There is no solution. Do something real