Is it OK to use the 'F' word?

By Kaeley Harms, Wednesday, October 29, 2025

There are certain words in the English language so drenched in connotation they’ve become almost useless for honest conversation.

We all know them — the words that act less like bridges and more like flashing red lights. They don’t invite dialogue; they warn of an oncoming explosion. Words like privilege, diversity, or woke agenda don’t just carry ideas anymore — they carry baggage. And depending on where you land politically, hearing one of them is enough to make you brace yourself, cross your arms, and stop listening.

One of those words is feminism. As a lifelong conservative, I’m not sure I can think of a word that shuts my fellow constitutionalists down faster than this one. (Patriarchy might give it a strong run for its money.)

It’s gotten so bad that a friend recently begged me to stop using it in my own writing and activism. If you looked it up in a right-wing glossary, it would probably read something like: feminism — noun; a secular religion devoted to hating men, destroying the family, and killing babies. 

You can hear this tone echoed across conservative commentary. Ben Shapiro has described feminism as “a war on traditional femininity.” Jordan Peterson has accused modern feminists of being “deeply resentful” and driven by envy toward men. Tucker Carlson once claimed that feminism “has made women unhappier” and “weakened the social fabric.” Phyllis Schlafly, decades before them, called it “the most destructive lie in our nation’s history.”

It’s no wonder the word makes conservatives flinch. In our circles, feminism has become shorthand for everything wrong with the modern world — faithlessness, fatherlessness, gender confusion, moral decay. And honestly? Some of that reputation is earned.

Today’s feminism has veered into something ghoulish. What began as a call for equal dignity has been twisted into a license for violence, both spiritual and literal. Where original feminists fought to transcend the role of sex object, today’s liberal feminists celebrate porn and prostitution as an avenue to empowerment. Where the OGs wanted to be seen as more than breeders, today’s imposters celebrate the commodification of women’s bodies through commercial surrogacy.

It’s hard to defend a movement that champions the “right” to kill a viable baby in the third trimester and calls it liberation. When activists light up skyscrapers in pink to celebrate laws allowing abortion until birth, it’s not empowerment — it’s barbarism dressed in empowerment’s language. When protestors parade around in “shout your abortion” shirts while holding signs that say, “Abortion on demand without apology,” they’re not fighting for equality anymore; they’re celebrating cruelty toward the defenseless.

Remember when The Washington Post published Suzanna Danuta Walters’ op-ed “Why Can’t We Hate Men?” as if collective scorn were a form of progress? Entire online movements have rallied around slogans like “men are trash,” and rather than reject the cruelty, mainstream feminist voices shrugged and said, “Well, we’ve earned it.”

This isn’t liberation; it’s vengeance. It’s the moral inversion of everything feminism was supposed to be.

So yes, if we’re judging trees by their current fruit, it’s understandable that so many good and decent people want to take an axe to the movement altogether. Even lifelong women’s rights advocates like Meghan Murphy and Kellie-Jay Keen have distanced themselves from the label. It’s too corrupted, too far gone to redeem.

And yet I hesitate to abandon the term entirely. Because while today’s feminism has certainly lost its moral compass, original feminism wasn’t born out of rebellion; it was born out of righteous grief.

This is where the conversation gets tricky. There’s a growing chorus of conservative thinkers (pastors, podcasters, professors, etc.) arguing that even first-wave feminism was rebellion against God’s created order. I hear this all the time: “Feminism started when Eve ate the fruit,” or, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote her own Bible, so the whole thing is demonic.”

I keep hearing that I’m supposed to wash my hands of the entire movement because a few early feminists had pagan leanings. Yes, Stanton wrote The Woman’s Bible. Yes, some figures like Matilda Joslyn Gage dabbled in theosophy. But let’s be honest: this selective outrage is breathtakingly hypocritical.

Thomas Jefferson literally cut up the Gospels with scissors to make his own version of the Bible (one that stripped out every miracle of Jesus) and no one on the right is crying “witchcraft” or denouncing the entire American project because of it. The Founders were steeped in Enlightenment philosophy, much of it overtly pagan, and yet we still cherish the liberty they birthed. Likewise, I don’t disown the fight for abolition because some of its leaders held heretical or unbiblical beliefs. William Lloyd Garrison flirted with spiritualism. Harriet Beecher Stowe had universalist leanings. Are we going to throw out the end of slavery because the people God used weren’t perfect?

Of course not. That would be absurd.

So why, then, does this rule suddenly apply to women? Why do we disqualify their cry for justice because a handful of them didn’t fit our theological mold?

Original feminism was born in a world where women were legal property. They couldn’t vote, hold office, sign contracts, or keep their own wages. They were denied custody of their children and protection from marital rape. Domestic abuse was often treated as “a husband’s right.” These women weren’t staging a coup against God. They were confronting men who had built systems in direct opposition to His justice.

Calling out chauvinism isn’t emotional manipulation; it’s naming a sin. And pretending that sin is sacred order doesn’t make it holy; it makes it idolatry.

Yes, early feminists were flawed. Stanton’s racism after the Civil War is indefensible. Some of their spiritual ideas were weird. But cherry-picking their worst moments to dismiss the entire movement ignores the core: women demanding dignity in a world that denied it. The heart of the movement was courage.

Some critics even point out that the man who coined the word “feminism,” the French philosopher Charles Fourier, was a utopian socialist — and use that as proof the whole concept is Marxist poison. But that’s just lazy reasoning. By that logic, we’d have to throw out democracy because Rousseau had bad theology, or abandon capitalism because Adam Smith wasn’t a Christian. The fact that a socialist coined the word doesn’t corrupt the truth it names any more than a pagan calendar invalidates the Resurrection we mark by it.

Blaming feminism for “rejecting God’s patriarchy” assumes that patriarchy itself is divine rather than a human system warped by sin. The Bible’s model of authority is sacrificial love, not dominance. Adam’s curse was toil, not tyranny. Eve isn’t the fall guy. Adam bears responsibility too.

If we’re going to talk about rebellion, let’s talk about the rebellion of men who used God’s name to justify cruelty. The rebellion of churches that told women to submit to abuse for the sake of “order.” The rebellion of cultures that silenced the very image-bearers God made to declare His glory.

So no — I’m not going to wash my hands of feminism because someone on Twitter thinks it’s “witchcraft.” You can call it whatever you want, but I call it what Scripture calls it: justice. Words are never neutral. They carry the weight of history, of triumph and of error.

To abandon feminism because of excess or imperfection is to cede the conversation to those who would twist justice into vengeance. If we truly care about righteousness, we engage, we discern, and we reclaim what was always meant to serve the good.