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The Great Feminist Exhaustion

Anne Helen Petersen · 16 Jul 2025

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  1. When I say exhaustion, I mean it in two ways: first, the term feminism has been exhausted of its meaning - and, insofar as it's deployed in popular culture, its politics.
  2. There are mortgages and college funds and 401ks in this quadrant, but there's also a lot of student loans and "unused" degrees and credit card debt and the feeling that you're in the "hollow middle class," as maintaining the status quo has come to mean "maintaining a lot of debt."
  3. The fact that so many women are opting to return to this sort of life, or at the very least fetishizing it, underlines just the resilience of the patriarchal status quo.

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