Hey Dana Jane

Category: Feminism

  • The Influencer Who Wants You to Know She’s One of the Good Ones

    You know the woman.

    She has 450,000 followers and a perfectly lit kitchen.

    She talks about the invisible labor women perform every day. She talks about the mental load. She talks about how mothers are expected to remember the dentist appointments, buy the birthday presents, schedule the physicals, pack the lunches, notice when the toilet paper is running low and somehow know that Tuesday is “wear red for spirit week.”

    And you know what?

    She’s often absolutely right.

    She says women shouldn’t have to carry everything.

    She says mothers deserve more support.

    She says women shouldn’t have to make themselves smaller to make everyone else comfortable.

    She talks about workplace inequality, the pressure placed on mothers, unrealistic expectations of female perfection and the absurdity of expecting women to simultaneously have successful careers, spotless homes, emotionally regulated children and immaculate eyebrows.

    And I’m nodding along.

    Yes. Exactly.

    And then she gets to politics.

    Suddenly, the woman who just spent ten minutes explaining that women are complex human beings becomes remarkably comfortable reducing roughly half the country to a caricature.

    Republicans are stupid.

    Conservatives are hateful.

    Trump voters are immoral.

    Anyone who disagrees with her worldview is either ignorant, selfish, bigoted, or apparently suffering from some mysterious deficiency of empathy.

    And there it is.

    The contradiction.

    Because apparently the lesson is:

    Don’t stereotype women. Unless they’re conservative.

    Don’t reduce people to political labels.

    Unless the political label is Republican.

    Don’t assume you know someone’s life.

    Unless you can infer their entire character from the candidate they voted for.

    Don’t judge people.

    Unless you’re judging the people who deserve it.

    And somehow, this is presented as compassion.

    The mental load apparently has a political party

    Here’s what fascinates me about this particular brand of influencer.

    She will tell you that women are exhausted because they’ve been conditioned to monitor everyone else’s emotions.

    Then she’ll spend three hours monitoring the moral failures of strangers on Facebook.

    She’ll tell you that women shouldn’t be expected to perform emotional labor for everyone.

    Then she’ll demand that everyone around her demonstrate the correct emotional response to every political event.

    She’ll tell you that women should be allowed to define themselves rather than being defined by other people.

    Then she’ll define millions of people she has never met as selfish, racist, hateful, stupid or dangerous based largely on their politics.

    She’ll criticize the patriarchy for creating rigid hierarchies of human worth.

    Then she’ll create her own hierarchy:

    People who think correctly.

    And everyone else.

    That isn’t feminism.

    That’s tribalism wearing feminist jewelry.

    And this is where the psychology gets interesting

    I’m not interested in diagnosing some random woman on Instagram with narcissistic personality disorder because she made a smug political reel.

    But there are legitimate psychological concepts that help explain this behavior.

    One is moral grandstanding: using moral language partly to establish status, prestige or social standing.

    Researchers studying moral grandstanding have found that status-seeking motivations are associated with greater political and moral conflict, and that prestige-motivated grandstanding is associated with ideological extremity and affective polarization.

    In other words, sometimes the point of a moral statement isn’t merely:

    “I believe this is right.”

    It can also communicate:

    “Look at what kind of person I am for believing this.”

    And social media is practically engineered for this.

    Post something nuanced about the difficulty of balancing motherhood and a career?

    You might get 200 likes.

    Post something about how your political opponents are horrible human beings?

    Now you’re getting comments, shares, applause, outrage and people tagging their friends.

    Research on social media and morality suggests exactly this kind of dynamic: morally and emotionally evocative content is especially good at capturing attention, while social media can amplify outrage, status-seeking and conflict between groups.

    So the platform gradually teaches people something.

    Nuance gets polite applause.
    Outrage gets engagement.

    And engagement feels an awful lot like validation.

    The hero complex

    Then there is the temptation to become the hero of your own content.

    Every story needs a villain.

    The exhausted mother needs an oppressive husband.

    The enlightened woman needs the ignorant woman.

    The feminist needs the misogynist.

    The compassionate person needs the hateful person.

    And the politically enlightened influencer needs the Republican.

    It creates a wonderfully simple story:

    I am fighting injustice.

    And if I’m fighting injustice, then anyone opposing me isn’t simply disagreeing with me.

    They’re part of the injustice.

    That is an extraordinarily comfortable psychological position.

    Because once you have cast yourself as the hero, you don’t have to examine yourself nearly as closely.

    Your anger becomes righteous.

    Your contempt becomes courage.

    Your certainty becomes intelligence.

    Your inability to tolerate disagreement becomes “having boundaries.”

    And your political tribalism becomes “knowing where I stand.”

    But here’s the hypocrisy I can’t get past

    If your feminism teaches that women deserve to be seen as individuals rather than stereotypes, then apply that principle universally.

    If motherhood has taught you that people’s lives are complicated, assume other people’s lives are complicated too.

    If you believe women deserve grace for imperfect choices, perhaps extend some grace to the woman who voted differently than you.

    If you believe people should be judged by their actions rather than assumptions about their identity, don’t assume you know the character of millions of strangers because of their political affiliation.

    And if you genuinely believe empathy is important, don’t make empathy something you reserve exclusively for people who already agree with you.

    Otherwise, what you’re practicing isn’t empathy.

    It’s affiliation.

    And conservatives do this too

    Before anyone starts congratulating themselves, let’s be clear:

    Conservatives have their own version of this.

    The Christian who constantly talks about loving thy neighbor while treating political opponents as enemies.

    The “family values” guy who thinks every liberal mother is destroying America.

    The person who talks endlessly about personal responsibility while making excuses for his own side.

    The person who demands free speech until someone says something he doesn’t like.

    The difference isn’t that one political tribe is uniquely hypocritical.

    The difference is that we are exceptionally good at noticing hypocrisy in our opponents and exceptionally creative at explaining it away in ourselves.

    That’s the real problem.

    Maybe the question isn’t “Are you a good person?”

    Maybe the better question is:

    What do you need other people to believe about you?

    Do you need to be the smartest person in the room?

    The most compassionate?

    The most enlightened?

    The most oppressed?

    The person who “gets it”?

    The person brave enough to say what everyone else is afraid to say?

    The person on the right side of history?

    Because social media gives us an unprecedented opportunity to construct a public version of ourselves and then invite strangers to applaud it.

    And once your politics becomes part of your identity as a good person, changing your mind becomes much harder.

    You’re no longer defending an opinion.

    You’re defending yourself.

    That’s why political disagreement can feel so personal.

    If I say your policy is wrong, that’s an argument.

    If you have convinced yourself that your political beliefs are evidence of your compassion, intelligence and moral character, then disagreement can feel like an attack on your identity.

    And suddenly, the person who disagrees with you isn’t merely wrong.

    They’re bad.

    Research on online moral discourse suggests that people routinely overestimate how much outrage and hostility exists between opposing groups, which can make the political world look even more divided and hostile than it actually is.

    So maybe we should be suspicious of anyone—left or right—who seems to require a villain in order to establish their own virtue.

    Especially when that villain is always someone else.

    Because there’s a peculiar kind of arrogance in saying:

    “I don’t judge people.”

    while spending half your feed explaining why the people on the other side are terrible.

    And perhaps the most uncomfortable possibility is this:

    Maybe some of the people shouting loudest about being good aren’t actually trying to make the world better.

    Maybe they’re trying to make themselves feel better about who they are.

    And those aren’t always the same thing.

  • Part Two: Who Gets to Define Womanhood?

    My last post was about a Rebecca Solnit quote that has been rattling around in my head for months:

    “One of the rights that the powerful often assume is the power to dictate reality.”

    The more I think about it, the more I see another uncomfortable question hiding inside it.

    And this one takes me somewhere I suspect a lot of people would rather I didn’t go.

    What happens when someone enters a category historically defined by the exclusion and oppression of another group—and then assumes the authority to tell that group what its own category means?

    Let’s talk about women.

    Specifically, trans women.

    Before anyone reaches for the outrage button, let me make something very clear: I am not questioning whether every trans person is sincere about their identity. I’m not suggesting every trans woman has the same life experience, social circumstances, privilege, or relationship with power. Some trans people experience profound discrimination and vulnerability, and I’m not interested in pretending otherwise.

    That’s not my argument.

    My argument is about power.

    And Solnit’s quote gives us a fascinating lens through which to examine it.

    What happens to power when you change categories?

    A person who was born male and raised in a society that, rightly or wrongly, often affords males greater physical, social, and institutional authority does not necessarily shed every bit of that history, conditioning, confidence, or socialization simply by changing their identity.

    Why would they?

    We don’t generally believe that social conditioning disappears overnight.

    And yet, in some of the loudest contemporary arguments about sex and gender, I see something that feels strangely familiar.

    A male person enters a female social category—and then, in some cases, tells women what womanhood means.

    Tells women what their boundaries should be.

    Tells women what language they should use.

    Tells women which spaces they should be comfortable sharing.

    Tells women that their discomfort is prejudice.

    Tells women that their understanding of their own sex is outdated, bigoted, or simply wrong.

    And I can’t help thinking:

    Isn’t that exactly the kind of power Solnit was talking about?

    The irony isn’t lost on me.

    For centuries, women were told what we were by men.

    Men defined our roles.

    Men defined our sexuality.

    Men defined our legal rights.

    Men defined our reproductive choices.

    Men defined what was appropriate for women to wear, say, think and do.

    Men told us what our bodies meant.

    Men told us what we were allowed to be.

    And now we’re having a cultural argument in which some women are being told that their understanding of womanhood itself is wrong.

    By whom?

    Increasingly, by people who were not born female.

    That’s a pretty extraordinary historical reversal.

    And I think we’re allowed to examine it.

    Here’s the question that makes this uncomfortable.

    If one of the privileges of the powerful is the assumed authority to define reality for others, what happens when that authority crosses the boundary between sexes?

    Does identifying as a woman automatically erase the socialization that occurred while being raised male?

    Does it erase physical differences?

    Does it erase the experience of having moved through the world with a male body?

    Does it erase whatever confidence, social conditioning, or authority may have developed along the way?

    Of course not.

    But neither does being trans automatically mean someone retains every aspect of male privilege forever.

    Both things can be true.

    A trans woman can experience genuine discrimination and have experienced aspects of male socialization.

    A trans woman can be vulnerable and still possess forms of authority or confidence associated with having been raised male.

    Human beings are complicated.

    That’s precisely why I don’t buy simplistic arguments on either side.

    But here’s where I really want to push the question.

    What happens when someone’s identity becomes an argument for overriding someone else’s boundaries?

    Because women have spent centuries being told that our boundaries are negotiable.

    Our bodies are negotiable.

    Our privacy is negotiable.

    Our discomfort is negotiable.

    Our safety is negotiable.

    And we’re still expected to be accommodating.

    Be compassionate.

    Be understanding.

    Don’t offend anyone.

    Don’t make anyone uncomfortable.

    Don’t ask difficult questions.

    Don’t notice the obvious.

    Don’t say the wrong thing.

    And above all:

    Don’t make the other person feel bad about themselves.

    But here’s something I’ve learned:

    Being compassionate toward someone does not require surrendering your own boundaries.

    And respecting someone’s dignity does not require pretending that sex doesn’t exist.

    So let’s conduct a little thought experiment.

    Imagine the sexes were reversed.

    Imagine women had historically possessed greater physical strength, institutional authority, political power and social dominance.

    Imagine women had spent centuries telling men what their bodies meant.

    Imagine a man said:

    “I don’t want to change clothes in front of someone female.”

    Would we immediately tell him he was hateful?

    Would we tell him that his discomfort was rooted in prejudice?

    Would we tell him that his understanding of male privacy was merely a social construct?

    Would we tell him that his boundaries were invalid because another person’s identity mattered more?

    Would we call him insecure?

    Fragile?

    Bigoted?

    Or would we suddenly understand the concept of sex-based boundaries?

    That’s the thought experiment I want people to sit with.

    Because something interesting happens when the sexes are reversed.

    Suddenly, a lot of people discover principles they weren’t previously willing to extend to women.

    And here’s an even harder question.

    If you believe women should surrender sex-based privacy because gender identity determines access to female spaces…

    Would you be equally comfortable surrendering your own privacy?

    Not theoretically.

    Not philosophically.

    Personally.

    Would you be comfortable changing clothes beside someone whose biological sex you knew was female but whose gender identity was male?

    Would you be comfortable showering beside that person?

    Would you be comfortable with your teenage children doing the same?

    And if your answer is no, ask yourself why.

    Don’t immediately call yourself a bigot.

    Don’t immediately call yourself enlightened.

    Just examine the feeling.

    Maybe you’re discovering something very old and very human:

    Sex matters.

    Especially when bodies are vulnerable and privacy is involved.

    And then there’s language.

    I’m fascinated by the idea that acknowledging someone’s identity can sometimes require another person to surrender their own description of reality.

    I can respect you.

    I can be kind to you.

    I can defend your right to live peacefully.

    I can oppose discrimination against you.

    I can even understand why you experience yourself the way you do.

    But does that mean I have to surrender my understanding of biological sex?

    Does your identity give you the authority to dictate mine?

    Does your discomfort with my words automatically outweigh my discomfort with being required to use them?

    And if the answer is yes…

    Who gets to decide?

    Because that is where we circle right back to Solnit.

    Who gets to dictate reality?

    That’s the question.

    And I don’t think the answer should be:

    Whoever is most offended.

    I don’t think it should be:

    Whoever has the most socially acceptable identity.

    And I certainly don’t think it should be:

    Whoever can successfully make the other person feel guilty for disagreeing.

    Because that’s still power.

    It’s simply a different kind of power.

    If we are serious about dismantling oppressive power structures, we should be willing to examine all power—including power that arrives wrapped in the language of compassion, identity and liberation.

    Otherwise, we’re not dismantling the hierarchy.

    We’re just changing who gets to stand at the top of it.

    And women should be allowed to notice that.

    I don’t want power over anyone.

    That’s the distinction I wish more people understood.

    I don’t want to dictate someone’s private life.

    I don’t want to humiliate anyone.

    I don’t want anyone persecuted because they are transgender.

    I don’t want anyone denied basic human dignity.

    But I also don’t want anyone dictating my reality.

    I don’t want someone else deciding what my sex means.

    I don’t want someone else deciding which boundaries I’m allowed to have.

    I don’t want someone else deciding that my discomfort is automatically illegitimate.

    And I don’t want to be told that my refusal to agree is evidence that I hate someone.

    Disagreement is not dehumanization.

    Boundaries are not hatred.

    Questions are not violence.

    And women are not obligated to disappear inside someone else’s definition of womanhood in order to prove that we’re compassionate people.

    Maybe the most radical thing we can do is apply the same principle to everyone:

    No one gets to dictate reality for everyone else.

    Not men.

    Not women.

    Not trans people.

    Not cis people.

    Not doctors.

    Not bosses.

    Not politicians.

    Not activists.

    Not institutions.

    Nobody.

    You don’t have to agree with me.

    You don’t even have to like what I have to say.

    But you don’t get to tell me what I am allowed to experience.

    You don’t get to tell me which boundaries I’m allowed to have.

    And you don’t get to demand that I surrender my understanding of reality simply because my understanding makes you uncomfortable.

    Because I’ve spent enough of my life being told to be quiet.

    To be agreeable.

    To be polite.

    To accommodate.

    To question myself.

    I’m not doing it anymore.

    I don’t need to control your reality.

    I simply refuse to surrender mine.

    And maybe that’s the real lesson hidden inside Solnit’s quote.

    The opposite of being powerful isn’t being powerless.

    Sometimes it’s simply refusing to hand someone else the pen.

  • Who Gets to Decide What Is Real?

    “One of the rights that the powerful often assume is the power to dictate reality.”
    — Rebecca Solnit, Whose Story Is This? (Goodreads)

    That sentence has been sitting with me.

    Not for an afternoon. Not for a day or two.

    For weeks. Maybe months.

    I keep turning it over in my head because the more I think about it, the more places I see it.

    Childhood. Work. Men. Doctors. Politics. Relationships. Institutions. Authority.

    It is the same thing wearing different clothes.

    The powerful don’t always have to threaten you into silence. Sometimes they simply tell you that your version of reality isn’t reality at all.

    That’s not what happened.

    You’re remembering it wrong.

    You’re too sensitive.

    You’re overreacting.

    That’s just how things are.

    You’re misunderstanding.

    You don’t know what you’re talking about.

    And if you hear it enough, from people with enough authority, you can begin to wonder whether maybe they’re right.

    That is the truly insidious part.

    Power doesn’t always look like a fist.

    Sometimes it looks like a person sitting across from you calmly explaining your own life back to you.

    I have been on the receiving end of that more times than I care to count.

    As a kid, there were things I experienced that other people had their own preferred explanations for. Adults get very good at deciding which version of a family story is acceptable and which version must never be spoken aloud.

    Then there were the terrible bosses I encountered at an insurance company where I once worked.

    There is a particular kind of corporate power that can make you question your own instincts. Someone above you can rewrite an interaction, redefine a problem, minimize something that happened, or make you feel like your discomfort is actually the problem.

    And then there was bartending.

    I learned a lot about power behind a bar.

    Especially male power.

    A drunk man can walk into a room believing that because he bought a beer, he bought a little piece of everyone in it.

    He gets louder.

    He gets meaner.

    He gets handsy.

    He crosses a line.

    And then, somehow, you’re the one who is supposed to manage his feelings about being told he crossed it.

    I’ve watched men behave badly and then watched them construct an entirely different story about what happened.

    And I learned something important:

    Someone’s confidence in their version of events does not make their version true.

    That lesson has followed me into adulthood.

    It followed me into the doctor’s office, too.

    There is something uniquely infuriating about sitting in front of a doctor and describing what is happening inside your own body—only to have someone with a medical degree decide that because they cannot immediately explain it, it must not be happening.

    You know your body.

    You know when something isn’t right.

    You know when you’ve been dismissed.

    And there is a particular arrogance in being told, implicitly or explicitly, that the person experiencing the symptoms has less authority over them than the person reading the chart.

    Expertise matters.

    Doctors know things I don’t.

    But expertise should not require pretending the patient knows nothing.

    There is a difference between saying, “I don’t know yet; let’s investigate,” and saying, “I don’t see it, therefore it isn’t real.”

    The first is medicine.

    The second is power.

    And then there is politics.

    This is where the quote gets especially uncomfortable.

    Because I don’t think the instinct to dictate reality belongs exclusively to one political party.

    Democrats do it.

    Republicans do it.

    Progressives do it.

    Conservatives do it.

    Religious people do it.

    Secular people do it.

    Corporate executives do it.

    Activists do it.

    Institutions do it.

    And ordinary people do it.

    We all have the capacity to become attached to a story so tightly that admitting the story is incomplete feels like admitting we are wrong.

    Political identity can make this particularly vicious.

    Sometimes the argument isn’t really about facts anymore.

    It’s about allegiance.

    Our people don’t do that.

    Their people always do that.

    My side is defending reality.

    Your side is denying reality.

    And suddenly we’re no longer asking, “What actually happened?”

    We’re asking, “Which version of what happened protects my identity?”

    That’s dangerous.

    Because reality doesn’t owe us ideological loyalty.

    It doesn’t care whether the truth makes Democrats uncomfortable.

    It doesn’t care whether it embarrasses Republicans.

    It doesn’t care whether it ruins someone’s carefully constructed worldview.

    Reality is reality.

    And sometimes the most honest thing a person can say is:

    “I was wrong.”

    Which brings me to women.

    I have spent enough of my life being told—directly and indirectly—that my boundaries, perceptions, discomfort, instincts, and experiences should be negotiable.

    That women should accommodate.

    Women should be understanding.

    Women should be polite.

    Women should not make people uncomfortable.

    Women should explain themselves.

    Women should be quiet when the conversation becomes inconvenient.

    And I’m increasingly uninterested in that bargain.

    I don’t believe respecting another person’s humanity requires me to surrender my own.

    I don’t believe empathy requires pretending biological sex doesn’t exist.

    I don’t believe acknowledging someone else’s identity requires me to deny my own.

    And I don’t believe women should be shamed into surrendering privacy, safety, language, or sex-based boundaries simply because someone else has a different understanding of gender.

    That isn’t hatred.

    It is disagreement.

    And disagreement is not violence.

    Women are allowed to say no.

    We’re allowed to have boundaries.

    We’re allowed to have private spaces.

    We’re allowed to describe our own experiences.

    We’re allowed to disagree with people—including people who insist that their interpretation of womanhood must supersede ours.

    And perhaps most importantly:

    We are allowed to define our own reality.

    Because that is what Solnit’s quote keeps bringing me back to.

    Power doesn’t just determine who gets to make decisions.

    Sometimes power determines whose version of events gets believed.

    Whose pain counts.

    Whose memory counts.

    Whose discomfort matters.

    Whose voice is considered credible.

    Who gets called difficult.

    Who gets called unstable.

    Who gets called hysterical.

    Who gets told they’re imagining things.

    Who gets told to sit down, shut up, calm down, move along, get over it, or stop making everyone uncomfortable.

    And who gets to walk away believing they were right simply because they had more authority.

    I’ve spent enough of my life watching that happen.

    I’m not interested in participating in it anymore.

    I don’t need everyone to agree with me.

    That’s an important distinction.

    I don’t need to dictate your reality.

    But you don’t get to dictate mine.

    You don’t get to tell me what I experienced.

    You don’t get to rewrite my memories.

    You don’t get to define my boundaries.

    You don’t get to tell me what my body is doing.

    You don’t get to demand that I call something acceptable when I don’t believe it is.

    You don’t get to manufacture a version of events and then punish me for refusing to repeat it.

    And you certainly don’t get to silence me simply because my voice makes you uncomfortable.

    I’ve learned something over the years:

    Being silenced and being disagreed with are not the same thing.

    I can tolerate disagreement.

    I can tolerate criticism.

    I can tolerate being wrong.

    What I won’t tolerate anymore is blatant disrespect disguised as authority.

    I have spent too much of my life making myself smaller so other people could remain comfortable with their version of reality.

    I’m done with that.

    You can disagree with me.

    You can challenge me.

    You can tell me I’m wrong.

    But you don’t get to tell me that I didn’t experience what I experienced simply because acknowledging it would inconvenience you.

    I know what I know.

    I know what I’ve lived.

    And I am no longer asking permission to say so.

    I will not be silenced.

    Not because I believe I’m always right.

    But because I have finally learned that someone else’s power does not give them ownership of my reality.

  • Marriage, Resentment, and the Unequal Exchange of Labor

    Marriage has long been painted as a union of love and mutual respect. It’s sold as the ultimate partnership, where two people come together to build a life as equals. But let’s be honest: in many marriages, the scales of labor are far from balanced, and the weight of that imbalance almost always falls on women.

    Women often enter marriage expecting partnership but end up with responsibility instead. Studies repeatedly show that women perform the majority of household labor, childcare, and emotional caregiving—even when they also work full-time jobs. Husbands may chip in, but it’s often the wife who keeps track of doctor’s appointments, plans the kids’ schedules, and ensures the fridge is stocked and meals are ready. This unequal distribution of labor leaves many wives feeling more like exhausted managers than equal partners.

    And let’s not ignore the emotional toll. It’s not just about folding laundry or helping with homework. Women often bear the mental load—the invisible, unpaid labor of keeping a household and family running. Meanwhile, some husbands dismiss this as “nagging” or downplay the significance of what it takes to make a family thrive.

    This isn’t just anecdotal frustration—it’s a systemic issue rooted in patriarchy. For centuries, marriage was less about love and more about ownership. Women were considered property, their roles confined to serving husbands and bearing children. Although we’ve made strides in women’s rights, echoes of this archaic mindset still linger in how many marriages operate today.

    The truth is, marriage doesn’t always protect or support women. In too many cases, it burdens them. And while some men step up, far too many don’t—and women are becoming increasingly resentful of the ones who don’t even try.

    Here’s where feminism comes in. Feminism isn’t about vilifying men; it’s about leveling the playing field. It’s about ensuring that women aren’t entering marriages destined to be one-sided arrangements where they’re treated as the lesser sex. Feminism challenges us to reimagine marriage as a true partnership—a collaboration between equals where the work, love, and responsibility are shared, not dumped disproportionately onto one person.

    We should be entering marriages as teammates, not as master and servant. It’s time to dismantle the idea that wives exist to pick up the slack or bear the brunt of the work. No woman should feel like she has to mother her husband while raising her kids or carry the entire emotional and logistical load of a family on her back.

    The power dynamics in marriage won’t change overnight, but they won’t change at all if we don’t call them out. Women deserve better than marriages that drain them, leaving them bitter and broken. We deserve husbands who see us as equals, who value our time, and who recognize that a true partnership means sharing the burdens of life—not adding to them.

    Marriage can be beautiful, but only when both partners are committed to pulling their weight. Let’s stop settling for less. Let’s demand equality, respect, and balance—not just in society but in our homes.