According to the 2025 State of the Academy (SOTA), while 97.6 percent of respondents support “advocacy of equality of the sexes and the establishment of the political, social, and economic rights of the female sex,” only 69.3 percent of respondents consider themselves a feminist.
The core difference between these two questions lies in its language. The first asks respondents if they support the definition of feminism according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The second explicitly uses the term “feminist.” What is preventing Andover students who agree with the definition of feminism from calling themselves feminists? Is there a stigma behind this word? This disparity is not new — since the 2019 SOTA, when the definition question was first added to the survey, the proportion of students who support the equality of the sexes versus those who identify as a feminist has remained similar.
To examine this disparity, we look towards the two factors that seem to be at the forefront of shaping language and its connotations: politics and social media. Feminism, most fundamentally, is a movement that advocates for equal rights between genders. But online and in the media, its connotations have superseded its definition. During the feminist movement in the early twentieth century, conservative groups framed feminists as aggressive, “manly” threats to traditional family values and social stability; today, feminists continue to be conflated with antagonistic, fanatical “man-haters.” Granted, maybe some self-identifying feminists do engage in “man-hating” behavior; extremists exist in any movement, and exploring the nuanced history of feminism is a task for another editorial (or a history book). But this generalization of an entire movement based on the most provocative voices exemplifies the inflammatory rhetoric that divorces words from their actual definition. Especially when used in a political context, words can easily become associated with certain political views.
Social media only complicates the web of associations. Some content, for instance, plays on performative feminism by satirizing how some men might adopt a feminist stance to gain favor in the eyes of their partners. Other content dramatizes feminism with irrational caricatures. Between jokes that exaggerate feminist behavior and parodies that stereotype male feminists, feminism is further trivialized online by reels and memes.
The word “feminist” thus becomes tied to entire identities and lifestyles. People who avoid the label might not disagree with the fundamental ideology of feminism, but all the assumptions that come with it. Maybe they don’t want to be confined to certain identities, maybe they don’t want to be made fun of. As a result of these stigmas, people are often reluctant to engage with the term at all, even though statistics reflect that the majority of people do support gender equality.
But there’s one more place that shapes the meanings of words. Our community and the people around us. When friends see each other interacting with feminism as a joke, they are discouraged from aligning themselves with the movement, creating a cycle of stigma.
However, we can also turn this trend around. When we recognize the stigma behind many politicized words, we can see beyond the overly politicized and polarizing associations each term carries. No matter what someone chooses to call themselves — “feminist,” “liberal,” “Republican,” or anything else — take a second and push away the assumptions that come to mind. Make an effort to learn the deeper reasons behind their views to understand who people are beyond the stereotype.
This Editorial represents the opinions of The Phillipian vol. CXLVIII
