British feminist Victoria Smith describes a booklet, Take a look at yourself, given to her and her female classmates decades ago during their “period talk” at primary school. On the cover, a thin, pretty girl gazes into a mirror. “To look and feel well,” the booklet began, “you don’t have to have a film-star face and the latest kind of fashionable figure. What’s important is your attitude.”
The young Smith took this advice to heart, and her memory of her own obedient submission to prevailing norms of feminine virtue haunts Unkind. She traces a line from the school pamphlet to what she sees as a modern, progressive form of the same kind of “feminine conduct guidance”, in which girls are taught to prioritise others’ needs and conditioned into “obsessive self-observation, self-policing and performative self-shaming”. This, Smith argues, can leave them unable to articulate, let alone defend, their own needs and interests, and has led to a hollowing out of much of what passes as feminism today.
Unkind is not an argument against kindness itself but asks us to consider carefully the nature of social pressure to be kind – a pressure that Smith calls, a little inelegantly, “JustBeKindism”.
She argues this pressure has always fallen disproportionately on women, and that social costs for women perceived as unkind are especially harsh. Meanwhile, in recent years, exhortations to “be kind” have taken on a political valence, becoming closely associated with the political left. Former prime minister Jacinda Ardern used the phrase repeatedly during Covid-19 lockdowns following and the Christchurch mosque shootings, though she is not mentioned in the book.
In an increasingly turbulent and uncertain world, exhortations to show kindness are, at their most benign, a reminder of our interconnectedness and shared humanity. But Smith argues they have also become a moral cudgel, used to discourage women in particular from asserting their interests.
Smith, whose previous book, Hags, concerned the societal disparagement of middle-aged women, is one of a growing number of “gender-critical” feminists who advocate for women’s rights on the basis of biological sex rather than self-asserted gender identity. These feminists have found themselves at odds with prevailing progressive views on a range of issues, including pornography, prostitution and surrogacy (all of which they see as exploitative of women), as well as claims by transgender activists that “trans women are women” and are therefore entitled to access women-only spaces, services and sports.
Although much of the hostility towards feminism historically came from the political right, an extraordinary degree of vitriol has more recently been directed at gender-critical feminists from the left, a vitriol Smith sees as continuous with earlier attempts to subordinate women, albeit in a new guise.
For example, she notes that “female inclusion in sport has long been controversial” because it threatens “patriarchal definitions” of women as “passive [and] non-competitive”. The progressive expectation that women prioritise inclusion of transgender athletes at the expense of their own competitive ambitions – when, given male vs female strength differences, no such concession is required of men – arguably repeats a similar pattern.
A free-ranging traversal of this and other contemporary controversies on sex and gender, Unkind is likely to resonate most with those who have followed these debates closely over the past several years and are familiar with how they have unfolded on social media.
For other readers, Smith’s train of thought may occasionally be hard to follow. Her attempt to explain so many phenomena in terms of JustBeKindism also starts to feel a little stretched. But the book is animated by an urgent drive to articulate a dissident feminist position, aware of and yet refusing to bow to pressure to stay (kindly) silent on controversial topics.
In a self-doubting passage towards the end, Smith questions her motivations for being a feminist at all: “How can I be sure I am not treating the entire political analysis as an acceptable channel through which to express my own self-interest?” She pauses. “There I am again, taking a look at myself, trapped in front of the mirror as always.”
You get the sense that Smith sees no perfect path available to tread; no way forward that will not attract opprobrium. Indeed, she writes that when she was a young woman she thought an earlier generation of feminists had framed their position poorly, and that if only they had done so more politely, more persuasively, anti-feminist hostility would evaporate.
“I didn’t understand,” she writes, “that the only way you can make a female ‘no’ sound feminine is by turning it into a ‘yes’.”
Unkind: How ‘Be Kind’ Entrenches Sexism, by Victoria Smith (Hachette, $39.99), is out now.
