How to DATE as a FEMINIST

Hannah Ferguson thought wanting a boyfriend meant she'd failed as a feminist. Here, she figures out how to have her cake and eat it too

Feminism has gone too far,” a man told me on a dating app. It was his opening line, which was incredibly charming and one of many sensual, romantic comments I’d been presented with in the two years I’d been swiping in Australia’s second-largest city, in an era I had wrongly believed to be further progressed than 1912.

Time after time, the same shit arrived under the photo of me smiling with my debut book, Bite Back: Feminism, Media, Politics and Our Power to Change it All: “the gender pay gap isn’t real”; “feminazi”; “does that mean I can hit you then?”; “you should be conscripted for war too”; “you can pay for dinner”; “I’ve always wanted to fuck someone taller than me”. And those are just a small sample of the top-notch crap I’ve received.

The rebuttal to be made is that these males are the night watchmen of patriarchy, not the majority. But this isn’t a cohort of extremist incels, this a significant portion of young adult men.

Australian men hold some of the most misogynistic views in the Western world, according to 2022 data by research firm Ipsos and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership. The findings showed 32 per cent of Australian men agree that men have “lost out” economically, politically and socially “as a result of feminism”.

In this global study, Australian men were the second-highest cohort surveyed who agreed that “gender inequality does not really exist”. We came second to Saudi Arabia. Yet the extremism of straight white men is not seen as a radicalisation worthy of alarm in Western society.