Trad-wives are trending; the boys are being red-pilled; political regression generally seems on the cards. The latest solutions, clothed in viral buzzwords and misappropriated terminology, have encouraged women to “decentre men and escape the male gaze”.
We’ve all seen the memes: man-hating sentiments, adorned with doe-eyed animals and glimmering pink bows. But are these colloquial catchphrases really proactive at all? The alarming speed of trend cycles and algorithm turns has inhibited legitimate change, especially when restricted to the online sphere.
Let’s take the internet’s focalisation of the “male gaze” as an example: what was first an indicator of the rise in digital conversations surrounding the patriarchy has now become embedded in the vernacular of many. There are, of course, positives in introducing the academic theses of Laura Mulvey and Margaret Atwood to the mainstream. However, by amalgamating such complex concepts into a palatable critique of internalised misogyny, it seems their application has only diluted their meaning.
Instead of truly raising awareness of how patriarchy infiltrates the private sphere, virality has taken its usual toll on what could have been a powerful expression of female self-actualisation. The internet’s disregard for cultural literacy and critical thinking saw the true concept of the male gaze reduced to a trending hashtag and an abundance of empty style advice: a loss of political meaning in exchange for the attention of the masses.
Then, before a conversation on the phrase’s origins could take place, the internet’s interest was exhausted. Almost overnight, the new infatuation with alleged digital feminism took its place. It wasn’t enough anymore to escape the male gaze: the girls were now decentering men altogether. Once again, the trend’s origins were irrelevant. Online reactions replaced the need for context and education, but this time, the buzzwords being used were explicitly instructive.
The phrase “decentering men” has a less academic and socio-political history, seemingly originating from online creator Charlie Taylor, known under the online persona Charlie’s Toolbox in 2021. Taylor obtained online recognition through her series of blog posts, which guide women to gain self-confidence by the interrogating the roles men play in their lives and, in her words, “decentering” them. The popularity of this advice then saw her publish her 2025 book Decentering Men: How to Decenter Men, a title which – in its own words – “dismantles the toxic myth that women exist to be the property or caretakers of men”.
It is difficult to argue against Taylor’s intention to treat women as autonomous individuals in her work. However, the notion that the societal history of women being viewed and treated as property is a “myth” can be considered acutely ignorant. It is not merely a myth that women undertake extreme emotional labour, are sexualised, abused, and routinely oppressed in 21st-century society.
Considering the amount of devoted activism, ruthless sacrifice and shameless vocality that composes our recent timeline of women’s history, the idea that women are disillusioned by a “toxic myth” of gender inequality is dismissive of the efforts of feminist activists spanning back decades. Considering this insensitive understanding of the modern patriarchy, clear faults emerge in the online application of this phrase as empowering.
The popularity of “decentering men” epitomises the problems of 21st-century digital feminism. To build an online reputation and mainstream vernacular based on a provocative but underdeveloped concept is inherently problematic. This reduces not only the alleged feminist intentions of the book but also dismisses the book’s social impact as a whole.
The advice Taylor gives online includes being “realistic about men” and “[imagining] yourself happy now”, which is harmless in a context of an advice column, but lacks the depth necessary for it to be treated as a political proposal, as online fourth-wave feminists propose. Therefore, the issue here is less to do with the content Taylor creates, and more rooted in the internet’s thirst for provocative, digestible language. The ease with which online work can be decontextualised and reframed is a catalyst in the reduction of feminism to a series of trending hashtags.
In order for online feminist spaces to hold any actual depth or influence, they must be rooted in legitimate goals and hold clear expectations. Instead of expropriating or inventing academic-sounding terms on the internet, we need to either promote critical concepts in their entirety, with an understanding of the consequences and intentions of enacting them, or create online language that captures the simplicity and modishness of the behaviour being described.
The misunderstanding of political terminology holds consequences for those outside of the conventional female identity. In the internet’s haste to decentre men, we have become inclined to shut down conversations surrounding the complexities of masculinity and femininity.
Escaping the male gaze is not as easy as re-evaluating your outfit for the day, or wearing less foundation: it is acknowledging that there is a world outside of how you are perceived and conditioned to act. This is vexing for those who function outside of cisgender, heteronormative frameworks, and erases what could be a truly powerful use of trending political concepts to generate discussion around how the patriarchy conditions binary thinking.
If we stop falling for these so-called feminist takes, disguised as elaborate through their use of critical buzzwords and misused terminology, perhaps we will stop being distracted by the myth that all liberation is individualistic. Fame from a viral TikTok in which you denounce the male gaze will not liberate you in the real world, but reading into the concept itself might help you identify how to.
Another thing we must learn to set aside is the internet’s endorsement of individualistic values. If we look past the language of these trends and pursue genuine feminist philosophy, we may realise that women’s societal autonomy is inherently a communal construct. The popularisation of ‘feminist’ self-reflection could then become less an infatuation with isolationism (you must decentre men) and more a resource to identify patriarchal behaviour (we have been raised in an androcentric society).
With all this in mind, the bottom line is such: feminist trends are not the issue in themselves; it is the ease with which they are mistaken for feminist theory that is problematic. As a society, we must be able to identify the transformation of complex critical concepts into hashtags as a ploy for attention, and not a form of liberation. Not every theory needs to be marketed online if it dilutes its actual meaning.
