The rise of The Fashion Feminists
On my dating quest I came across a rare yet, increasing vocal beast known as the fashion feminist. Growing in numbers since #MeToo, this peculiar specimen is a master of camouflage.
This creature can wax lyrical about his love of Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison. Nodding in sympathy as you explained crying at The Color Purple. He watches RuPaul’s drag race because he issn’t scared that a fashion programme would ever make anyone question his ‘masculinity.’
Yes, this was the emergence of the Woke Feminist Male aka Fashion Feminist. The dater who quickly realises that whilst hunting for prey is costly and time consuming, a few Pussy Pandering posts on twitter and facebook gets him the same amount of play from a much richer pickings.
Hood Feminist
One wore the t shirts. Like literally he wore feminist t shirts and talking about the need for equal pay. Of course at the time I didn’t realise that all of his ex-girlfriends and his mother had funded his life. Then one day we were on a subway train and a woman sitting nearby got really agitated when a man ignored all of the empty seats around us and sat directly next to her. She jumped up and ran to the other end of the carriage. He argued that this was way overkill and now ‘his man’ would be feeling deflated at his rejected approach. Dudes can’t start with a ‘hi’ from across the way? They have to invade your space?
Same dude described himself as a hood feminist. Apparently his feminism only stretched as far as women looking after him whilst he sat on the stoop and had sex with them whenever he wanted.
The Feminist Rinser
This one was more nuanced. He waxed on and on and on and on pre-empting my every problem with a feminist twisted solution. I was impressed. He nearly made me reach for old favourites like Paglia and Hook. He always centred women in his narratives and had very few male friends. Something I thought was refreshing yet weird as he was really into playing team sports.
Turns out he was a rinser and all of these women were marks. He’d borrowed too much money. His own family had had enough of him as he hadn’t told them about a whole child he had. He also liked to get things for free. Like me helping him by editing a book he’d written on, get this, DATING! Yeah he was good. Reading that told me that everything he said were from Youtube soundbites and that he didn’t like women at all. He liked what they could do for him for free.
I then found out that he wasn’t even paying rent and was sleeping with his female bestie to keep a roof over his head. When he hinted to her that he would be moving out as he moving in with me (a fact I wasn’t aware of) she told him in no uncertain terms that he owed her. That’s when he disappeared.
What to do
The first thing to do is avoid men who openly claims to be a feminist. Labelling yourself without use of the word ally is worrying.
Where were they before? The short answer is that there was no value in being a feminist so they didn’t bother. They weren’t buried deep somewhere hoping one day their own brand of wokeness would be rewarded. They evolved from a response to the women’s movement. They are reactive, opportunistic feminists.
But Fashion Feminist is that, like all fashions, tend to fade quickly. Chances are they’ll move on once they’re caught out. You want to get yourself a true feminist who believes in partnership and roles that you both create like him working from home so that he can collect all of your Amazon packages and lovingly watch you as you rugby tackle Hockey Hannah at the ‘friendly’ rugby match every other week. You will take out the trash because your love for recycling outweighs his and you will cook because you want to and, despite him being a feminist, he can’t cook for shit.
© Chelsea Black 2020
