Feminist Ideology Wrecked My Marriage. And It’s Wrecking Women’s Politics.

Women are more often victims of our own beliefs about men than actual men.

Eight years ago, I walked my daughter, then seven, down to PS 34 in Lower Manhattan to cast my vote for Hillary Clinton for president. The air was thick with impending history. Already a little activist, my daughter wore white in a nod to the suffragettes. We took selfies together. I was overjoyed to show her that I was voting for the first female president. I imagined her telling this story to her granddaughters decades from now. Her bedroom was decorated with “Girl Power” posters, and books titled Strong is the New Pretty. RBG was her punk hero.

Lilah Fisher Wise and her daughter on Election Day in 2016.

Watching the returns come in later that night was like watching a slow-motion car crash. It didn’t seem real until it did, and as I watched more states flash red, my stomach formed knots until I grew nauseated. Eventually, I stood up. “I can’t watch anymore. I’m going to bed,” I said to my husband, who was watching from a blissful emotional distance. I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t bear to watch them call it for Trump. Something was going horribly wrong, and the MSNBC newscasters’ confusion made me feel dizzy. Rachel Maddow was nearly speechless.

I lay in the dark, and the tears came.

I sobbed, my hands covering my face and becoming wet. My heart hurt, my throat raged, and I felt what I believed to be the leaden immovable forces of the patriarchy suffocating me. Fear throbbed through me from a bone-deep place. Both for myself and for our world. Women wouldn’t make it yet again, I thought. A rapist and sexual predator would win yet again, I thought. The system had failed us, and progress didn’t come. I would actually have to face my daughter in the morning and tell her that the worst had happened.

My husband, Jeff, came in a while later. He held me and wiped my tears. I could tell he was confused about my response, and I felt the difference between us. He would never understand it. Disbelief coursed through my veins. How was it possible that the nation had voted for Donald J. Trump, a lewd, cartoonish buffoon over a stateswoman like Hillary Clinton?

The next morning–though I am embarrassed to say so now–felt similar to 9/11. We all walked around, zombie-like, with tear-stained faces. People called in sick. We held each other. We called each other to grieve and process the trauma of the election.

My husband, while also opposed to Trump, couldn’t understand my particular strain of sorrow. This was both surprising and unsurprising. He was a man, of course he didn’t understand. He was blinded by his “male privilege.”

I came of age in the late 80s and nineties. I attended an all-girls’ school for thirteen years. I had two brothers, and three boy cousins. I knew I was not like them. My family back then was conservative, my grandparents prominent in the Republican Party in Pennsylvania. I remember my mother’s bitter tone when Anita Hill testified on Capitol Hill. When Bill Clinton won, my dad railed against Hillary. “What a feminazi!” he would say.

I went to college in upstate New York and voted for Bill Clinton. Democrats loved women, I was told; I was a woman, had a uterus and it was no one’s business what I did with it. My grandmother, though a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, was a staunch supporter of reproductive freedom. She was a leader in the now-extinct Republican Majority for Choice. When she got involved in politics, campaigning for Ike, the majority of conservatives didn’t care what people did in their private lives. They had not yet been conquered by the religious right.

I moved to New York City and volunteered at St. Vincent’s Hospital Rape Crisis Center. I spent weeks in training, being drowned in scary statistics about sexual assaults, STDs, and how hardly any rapes were ever prosecuted. I walked down the streets at night, becoming wary of men and skeptical of any advances. I leered at the construction workers who called out to me, “Smile, pretty!” My anger fumed. How dare they.

Over time, society would develop names for what women had been complaining about for decades. Toxic Masculinity. Man-spreading. Entitlement. Male privilege. I grew up with two older brothers, and a father who routinely let his gaze fall on the ass of our young, female server. I would roll my eyes. “Men are pigs,” he would warn my sister and I after making a crude joke we didn’t understand. Now with Trump we had a pig in the Oval.

I felt my blood boil as our new President was inaugurated. I saw my daughter’s disappointment, her confusion laced with fear. I felt angry and cheated, both as a citizen and as a woman.

I looked at red-meat and red hat America with disdain flecked with pity. They were ruining the planet and society. Any woman who voted for Trump was obviously full of self-hatred and had little self-respect.

Feminism was the only answer that made sense.

The day after the inauguration, my husband and I took our three children uptown to the Women’s March. We had to do something. We had to be heard. We stood for everything he seemed to stand against. I’ll never forget the sign I saw that read “this march has the best people.” Boy, did we feel good about ourselves.

A few weeks after Trump took office, I made an appointment with a fancy hairdresser I’d never met and had him hack my long hair to my chin. I wanted to get rid of the long hair that seemed to be holding me down. I needed to do something bold and radical, as if I could rid myself of any pull towards traditional femininity. I didn’t want to be part of the system of oppression anymore, I wanted to be free of the toxic stew of the male gaze. As I watched inches fall to the floor, I felt pounds lighter. Some despair was mixed in with my hair on the floor.

I didn’t tell my husband I was cutting off my hair. I came home and walked into our bedroom. “Whoa,” he said. I didn’t admit to myself that I desperately wanted his approval, and was now doubting my decision. I knew he liked my long hair. He didn’t find short hair very attractive. My insistence on my new hair style, while my own decision, felt tinged with adolescent rebellion. I am woman, hear me roar!

“Do you like it?” I asked him.

“Do you like it?” he asked, which meant he didn’t like it. I burned with insecurity. I was caught between worlds: my own version of femininity and his. I became angry that he didn’t like it. I cared deeply about what he thought, but I was taught that it was bad to care what men thought, to cater to oppressive beauty standards. I couldn’t win. I was pissed off because I was a woman in a man's world, and I would never win.

By leaving Jeff out of the conversation, I had convinced myself that I was my own woman. No man was going to tell me what was what. And the fact that he was my husband, and I should care what he thinks about my appearance, never entered my mind. Jeff felt my hostility toward him, towards his maleness, but remained silent. I remained silent, too, but felt disappointed in his lack of support. He only likes me because I have long hair, I thought. He doesn’t really love me. I’d been trained to see the bad, oppressive man, and here he was.

The womanly anger I felt had been in my marriage for a while by then. We had three small kids, and though we were best friends, our attraction to each other was fraying. We didn’t know how to talk. Resentment was bubbling underneath every interaction. With Trump’s election, I felt a surge of anger and bitterness.

But my husband wasn’t my enemy. He wasn’t the one keeping me down. My own thinking was. I’d been steeped in feminism to the point where I was making my own marriage miserable.

I sought his desire for me as a woman, while hating that he had any male desire–for me or anyone else. I saw his masculinity as a threat. How could a man walk up to a woman anymore and express his attraction? It was easy to see this dynamic taking hold in bars across the nation, or on college campuses, but it was harder to see it playing out in my own marriage.

Anytime he ventured into the territory of my body’s struggle to lose weight, I snapped like a vicious animal. Misogynist! I would scream. How dare a husband try to control a wife?

The more I identified with contemporary feminist ideology, the more lost I became. I chose to take my husband’s name when we married and I remember telling people with an embarrassed flush, as if I deserved thirty lashes for betraying the feminist ideal. I didn’t know what to do with my desire to stay home with my children. I didn’t know what to do with my body, even. Every attempt to lose the unhealthy pregnancy weight I’d gained was met with self-hatred for giving in to the “patriarchy”.  Simply being a woman had become confused with victimhood, with not enoughness. If I didn’t play the game, I felt I was betraying all women.

I cooked delicious, healthy meals for my husband and children, and felt embarrassed, as if I were a 1950s housewife. Even though my husband did at least half the housework (probably more, to be honest) I still resented him. There was no way for me to enjoy motherhood, my feminine curves, or any way my femininity expressed itself because it meant I was submissive, regressive, and a victim of male aggression. My husband did the repairs, he took the cars to the shop, he grilled the meat, and, yes, he appreciated an attractive woman. All the “manly” things he did because he actually thought to do them, and I didn’t. We naturally fell into gender roles that were more traditional than I ever thought they would be, which made me anxious. I wasn’t free to enjoy the life I’d chosen.

For years, I actually feared being attractive. The NYC brand of feminist ideology taught me that women who flaunted their sexuality, or good bodies, were vapid and vain Barbies. They didn’t read The New Yorker or argue about politics and see high-brow theater like I did. My envy lay untouched underneath my judgements. Even my all girls’ school feminist rah-rah lens gave me little more than cartoonish Madonna/Whore dichotomies lacking nuance around modern womanhood.  

But in being captured by feminist orthodoxy, I sought power in the same caricatured masculine way I resented, which meant power over. It was actually a betrayal of feminine ideals. The deep feminine is the creator. It’s the hearth, the root, the home. How this looks for every woman will be different and that is how it should be. Some will be stay-at-home mothers, some will be CEOs. But those are only our descriptors for what we do with our days, not who we are. Not our inherent operating system.

Modern feminism made us worker bees, excelling in productivity rather than nurturing. We’ve been marketed to since the 1950s. They succeeded in selling us a version of 21st century womanhood replete with messages about how terrible and stressful motherhood and marriage is. I bought it all, hook line and sinker.

So why was I surprised that fifteen years into my marriage I was struggling with three small children? I resented my husband for not protecting me, while simultaneously telling myself I didn’t believe in gender roles.

The biggest lie of feminism is the assumption that we aren’t already equal to men. We are not men; we are women. I see now how I tried to be a man in many ways, and wanted my husband to be a woman. Honoring my husband’s masculinity has improved nearly every facet of our relationship. We are equals in our home, while occupying sacred roles of the masculine and feminine. As a result, I’m more attracted to him. I’m not resentful, I’m accepting of myself and my desires.

This may sound like Christian-right hogwash trad-wife bullshit. But if I respect my husband’s role as a man and father, as a protector and provider, he grows in confidence and strength. Isn’t that actually what I want? I realized, finally, that I spent years trying to make my husband a woman, and getting angry at him for not being one. He didn’t communicate like a woman or make love like a woman. He parented differently than me, which I saw as a threat. How dare I let my kids have a father who embodied real love and devotion in a masculine way? I recently read that children and mothers’ oxytocin levels rise when they cuddle. With fathers, it rises in both through play, not cuddling. This is biology. Why are we denying it? As a culture, we devalued the father’s essential role, choosing to spend our attention demonizing the small minority of bad or absent fathers instead.

The truth is I don’t want to be married to a woman. I’m not gay. I am in love with this man, whose ability to express his inner strength and leadership inspires my own. Recognizing this brought an intimacy and expansiveness to our marriage that wasn’t there before, when I was holding the torch of the cursed female warrior.

Women deserve the same opportunities as our male counterparts. There are policies in place that truly hurt women. But policy decisions require nuance and open conversation, which is impossible in a climate where woman equals good and man equals bad. Anything that hurts women also hurts men. How are young women now supposed to find love and mate within the confines of modern feminism? Men have been warped into castrated perpetrators. Some men do perpetrate harm against women, and this should be punished, but to see the exception as the rule is to infect ourselves with a pathology and destroy men and women’s ability to find happiness together. How can you truly love a man while hating his masculinity?

When I look back on the election of 2016, all I see are the wounds of my own beliefs at the time. What I then labeled as “misogyny” clouded very real problems with the policies of Democrats and the corruption of the liberal elite, including the Clintons. Until we stop being distracted by battle cries pitting us against each other, the machinations of the political class will always come out ahead.

I possess a healthy skepticism about politics now, and have cured my “Trump derangement syndrome” by actually listening to the other side. By doing my own research. I learned I can vehemently disagree without hatred and fear. I left the Democratic Party in 2020, disgusted with the COVID policies. I saw how propaganda worked for both sides. I am an independent; I will not be told what to think or what to fear, and neither will my daughter. And I can think of nothing more diminishing to our own sex than voting for a leader just because she’s a female. 

These days I would argue that women are more often victims of our own beliefs about men than actual men. We can’t come together as couples–or a nation—until we can look at the beliefs we hold about ourselves and others, and see each other with clarity and love. What if there is no “other side”? Then the war stops; the desire to make someone else into something they aren’t stops.

Anytime we put ideology ahead of our experience, we lose. Feminism holds good intentions, but has warped to seed victimhood in our psyches, and only something rotten can grow from that. When Feminism overtakes our identities, what else of ourselves gets lost?