"Feminism is sort of like God. Many people profess to believe in it, but no one seems to be able to define it to everyone's satisfaction"
About this Quote
Aaron Allston captures a paradox of modern public life by likening feminism to God: a vast consensus of allegiance coupled with endless disputes over definition. The comparison is not about faith or disbelief so much as about the challenges of naming something that spans cultures, histories, and personal experiences. Like theology, feminist discourse has denominations, schisms, reformations, and heresies. As soon as a definition is proposed, counterexamples and dissenting traditions appear, not because the idea is empty, but because it is generative and lived in different ways.
Disagreement persists because feminism is not a single program but a family of projects. Legal equality, structural critique, bodily autonomy, labor and care economies, race and class intersections, and global struggles against gendered violence do not fit neatly under one sentence. People also approach the label from varied positions: some see it as a moral baseline, others as a radical critique of power. Media caricatures, culture-war incentives, and online purity tests further fragment the field, producing gatekeeping on one side and slogan-level allegiance on the other. The result is a movement that is both ubiquitous in rhetoric and uneven in practice.
Allston, a novelist known for wit and genre-savvy commentary, uses the comparison to highlight both limitation and opportunity. The impossibility of defining feminism to everyone’s satisfaction can be read as a weakness, inviting charges of vagueness. Yet it also signals resilience. Big-tent ideas endure because they adapt, absorbing new voices and revising old assumptions. Rather than chasing a final, universally approved definition, the more productive task is to ask what forms of justice, safety, and freedom are at stake, and how coalitions can act despite disagreements. Most people who profess belief share a core intuition about equal dignity and agency. The enduring challenge, as Allston suggests with a smile, is to translate that shared intuition into language and action broad enough to unite, precise enough to guide, and humble enough to evolve.
Disagreement persists because feminism is not a single program but a family of projects. Legal equality, structural critique, bodily autonomy, labor and care economies, race and class intersections, and global struggles against gendered violence do not fit neatly under one sentence. People also approach the label from varied positions: some see it as a moral baseline, others as a radical critique of power. Media caricatures, culture-war incentives, and online purity tests further fragment the field, producing gatekeeping on one side and slogan-level allegiance on the other. The result is a movement that is both ubiquitous in rhetoric and uneven in practice.
Allston, a novelist known for wit and genre-savvy commentary, uses the comparison to highlight both limitation and opportunity. The impossibility of defining feminism to everyone’s satisfaction can be read as a weakness, inviting charges of vagueness. Yet it also signals resilience. Big-tent ideas endure because they adapt, absorbing new voices and revising old assumptions. Rather than chasing a final, universally approved definition, the more productive task is to ask what forms of justice, safety, and freedom are at stake, and how coalitions can act despite disagreements. Most people who profess belief share a core intuition about equal dignity and agency. The enduring challenge, as Allston suggests with a smile, is to translate that shared intuition into language and action broad enough to unite, precise enough to guide, and humble enough to evolve.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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