Erica Bakayake’s sex-realist feminism dismantles modern feminism by centering biological sex differences—male-female dimorphism and caregiving burdens—as foundational, not oppressive. She traces how leftist movements abandoned 1970s feminist goals (protecting motherhood, family structures) for trans-influenced "equality," ignoring women’s preference for part-time work or homemaking, especially among the poor. Critiquing both sides for forcing women into full-time labor to boost GDP, she argues abortion rights reflect "male normativity," not true autonomy, and contrasts this with historical feminist protections for domestic life. Her The Rights of Women and Fairer Disputations collective (with Mary Harrington, Louise Perry) challenge the erasure of women’s roles in policy, law, and culture, framing homemaking as essential yet undervalued. [Automatically generated summary]
I don't want to categorize it because it's between different women with different points of view.
I'll call it generally conservative feminism, but a lot of them don't want to be called conservatives either.
But it's just very clear that more and more I'm reading articles by highly intelligent women saying, calling themselves feminist, but saying something very different than I understand feminism.
I always say I'm not a feminist because I think it elevates male values over feminine values.
So it doesn't, it has never worked.
But we had Mary Harrington on.
She was great.
I think we had Louise Perry on.
There's a lady who writes wonderful things about postmodernism, Angela Franks.
I think she's absolutely beautiful writer.
And today we have Erica Bakiake, who has written a wonderful article in First Things called Sex Realist Feminism.
She's a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Her most recent book is The Rights of Women, Reclaiming a Lost Vision.
So I just want to hear what she's talking about and what she's thinking.
Erica, thank you so much for coming on.
Thanks for having me.
And I love all those women you've mentioned.
They're dear friends of mine, all of them.
Yeah, I can imagine because I think this is a really important discussion that's going on.
And I'm listening.
I want to know because I think that obviously women are sort of being erased on the left.
The entire category of being a woman is under question on the left, not to real people, but to people who are on the left.
And so I want to know, you know, you talk about sex realist feminism.
Can you define it?
Can you tell me what we're talking about exactly?
Yeah, sure.
You know, sex realist feminism, I mean, I go about this in a sort of deeply philosophical way in my piece in First Things, where I look at sort of the way in which Plato and Aristotle both got something right, lots of things right, in fact, but then also got some things wrong that sort of put us in a position where we've had to sort of women have had to sort of think through what feminism might mean throughout the centuries, really, right?
But so what sex realism feminism, realist feminism really is doing is just taking reality seriously, which, you know, isn't being done all that often by feminists, especially as we progress here through the trans ideology.
So what are we taking seriously?
Well, the reality that human beings are sexually dimorphic, right?
We come in two bodies, male and female.
We cannot change our sex, but really also the reality that the burdens and privileges of sex, so of sexual intercourse, but also of sex differences, are asymmetrically distributed, right?
So I think that that's a really key play is like, why is it feminist then?
Is because these asymmetries, because of these privileges and burdens, that women do have interests that are particular to, say, their vulnerability and dependency that comes with being the sex that, you know, reproduces within itself.
And the fact, the reality that men and the male body is on average, stronger, faster, more sexually desirous, more aggressive, et cetera.
And so these, with these burdens and privileges that are asymmetrically distributed, women have certain interests and someone needs to speak for those interests.
And so, you know, this was something that the early women's rights advocates in our country did quite well in thinking about really taking seriously those reproductive and sexual asymmetries and then responding to them with moral appeals, with social appeals, with legal, you know, a legal movement.
And that's something I really try to trace in my recent book.
So this is all that all makes perfect sense to me.
There's an added part of this, though, that since we are evolved creatures, since we come into being over time, Women have an emotional stake in the bodies that they have and in the life that they have and in the lives that they produce that it seems to me has completely been eliminated as a playing card in the game of trying to figure out how men and women are treated.
So, women like babies.
I mean, that was one of the things I loved when I was talking to Mary Harrington.
She said, you know, I found out, oh, I kind of like this baby and I want to take care of this baby.
How do we take that into law?
I mean, can that be considered in law?
Yeah, so my expertise, I mean, I have a background in political philosophy.
My expertise is actually in equal protection law.
And so what I also try to do in this piece in First Things and also in my book is kind of trace the evolution, or I guess we could say devolution of sex discrimination law.
I think at root in our country, sex discrimination law really provides a corrective to, you know, the way in which American law at its origins really, you know, took, did sort of what I think Aristotle got wrong, which was overplaying biological difference so much that women, especially married women, were kept out of or excluded from certain professions and all of that.
What sex discrimination law said was: hold on.
Yes, women have these distinctive reproductive capacities, and that's actually what makes them women.
But we don't want to define them exclusively by those capacities.
And so, really, you know, just because you can become a mother, whether or not you are one, doesn't mean you can't be a lawyer or practice law.
And so that's a real corrective, I think, that early on in the 1970s, sex discrimination came to see.
Now, where they went wrong, and this I also get into my article, as well as my book, is really having a kind of false understanding.
Well, first of all, downplaying sexual difference quite a bit and something someone like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but also having, I think, a false understanding of what it is to be human.
Why Women Center Home Life00:08:57
That, you know, men and women both are trying to attain excellence.
It's not just something like market equality, you know, the right to, I don't know, work the same number of hours and have the same sort of prominence and all that, but we want to make room for in our law those sexual differences, right?
Those the way in which women are more burdened, but also more privileged by childbearing.
And I think that would be the way to go about that is really to make more room for the family and for the great, important, culturally essential, kind of deeply formative work of the family in our institutions, both in terms of the market, but then also in terms of our politics.
I mean, if you think about it, and I know you know this very well, is that the work of the family when done well is really that which makes all other goods possible, civic, political, economic.
If we're not, we're slacking.
If moms and dads are slacking, we don't have virtuous citizens.
We don't have virtuous friends and spouses and all that.
And so that work is deeply important and is something that the early women's rights advocates, the Mary Wilson craft, were all very invested in, that they saw mother and father, mother and fatherhood as really, really important, important work.
And they wanted to really shield those formative, that formative institution of the family from kind of encroaching market forces.
And I think we need to continue to do that today.
Well, see, this is a really interesting thing, because I completely agree with you.
I was talking to my son last night and I was talking about Anna Dostoevsky, the woman who saved Dostoevsky's life.
And I said she wasn't great because she saved Dostoevsky's life.
She was famous because she saved Dostoevsky's life.
There are a million unseen women doing exactly that kind of work all the time.
And it's not just the men in their lives, but the creation of homes, which seems to be a special talent of women.
I think that this is the thing that, you know, people say, well, a man can do this.
Well, a man might do it, but women in general do it and seem to be naturally formed for it.
And it seems essential.
And yet, I can't tell you how many letters I get from women who say that paying respect to the work of homemaking is rare.
They are usually felt that they're excluded.
So is that, I mean, I have a hard time having women address this because they feel immediately put on the dime.
Am I taking them out of the market?
Am I making them less?
Am I?
I mean, is there some way to address this?
Well, I think the really pointed point here is that the way in which our economy now functions, there are many, many, many women, poor women, working class women, who would much rather be spending time with their own children than punching a clock and doing work that barely covers their, you know, their expenses, et cetera.
So I think that there's a way in which if we were to elevate the work of the home, and it's not for me, of course, women are the ones who are sort of the center of the home in so many ways because they're the ones who bear the children, right, and nurse the children.
I mean, that takes a lot of time.
And if you have multiple children, it takes years and years.
I have many, many, many children myself.
But I think it's also the work that fathers do in the home, which many, many men take very, very seriously, and that it's something that is formative for both moms and dads, that that shared work of parenting, it looks different.
Men and women, you know, parent differently.
Fathers and mothers are different, but that both are necessary for the good of the children, that women's lives, mothers' lives are greatly enhanced when fathers are deeply engaged in the work of fatherhood.
So I'm sort of an advocate of both, of really engaging in sort of domestic life in general and seeing that life, that life that we share in the home as much as possible as just taking priority to market life.
That profession, I love my profession.
I engage in it and I've been married part-time for most of my life, more full-time now, but and it's important to me.
But my children and my husband and the family that and the home we've created is far more important.
And I think more people would like to see that work elevated above the work that they do out in the world to make that life possible, really.
I mean, I think, I mean, one of the things that I thought was left out of Mary Harrington's book, which I loved, I thought it was a great book, but she sort of acts as if men, you know, yes, fathers are immensely important and fatherhood is important and being a husband is important.
It's an incredibly humanizing experience.
I mean, I have written at length about what an incredible, humanizing experience it is to be married to a woman.
You know, it's just an amazing thing.
But at the same time, I think that most of the men I know live in their profession.
Their identity is connected to their profession.
I'm an artist, so my entire identity is connected to my profession in a way my wife's is not.
I mean, she did the same thing.
She raised children and then went full-time into a profession, but it's still not all of her life.
And I think that that's normal.
It may not, obviously, it's not universal, but it's normal.
I guess my question then is, is there a feminism that can take into account the difference that men feel, the intensity with which they perform their profession, the intensity with which they wish to support their family and wish to have play the role of breadwinner in their family?
Yeah, I mean, I think that that, why not, right?
I mean, in terms of taking sex differences seriously, I think that the more that men take very seriously, as my husband does, his profession and provide space for me to do incredibly creative work.
I mean, the work I've been able to do with a male breadwinner in my home and raising many children has been incredible.
I mean, the freedom I have is, it's so funny to hear of people, you know, saying that there's more autonomy somehow in the workplace and the autonomy I've had to engage in in the intellectual life, really, while raising my children and shaping their characters with very much the engagement of my husband whenever he's around and has been enormous, enormous freedom.
Now, again, we live a middle class and, you know, and potentially upper middle class life in the way that he's provided and that now I can provide.
Not many women have that, right?
And so I think the way in which so many have to be really engaged very much in the market, much more than they potentially would want to, especially when they're having children, I think is a real shame.
I mean, if you look at the data, most women, when they have young children in the home, want to work part-time at the most.
And so that's where, you know, this push that we see, I think both on the right and the left, but of course, especially on the left, of, you know, getting women full-time in the marketplace so that we can increase GDP is a shame.
Like, why not think about what it is that women and men want, especially in those who are economically, you know, really struggling?
Like, what is it?
How could we benefit?
How could we think about family policy that could really benefit women so that they weren't, especially those low-income women who don't have the kind of freedom I do, you know, could not have to go to work two weeks later, which many women do.
And I think that that's a place where, you know, people who value the work of the home really need to kind of get behind the kind of, you know, the real struggles that lower income Americans, especially women, have.
Yeah.
And they're frequently the people who are hired to take care of the children of rich women as they go to work.
Talking to Erica Bakayake, her book is The Rights of Women Reclaiming a Lost a Vision.
I'm running out of time.
I do want to ask one thing that you are, you're a Catholic, I believe, and you are opposed to abortion.
Does the feminists essentially claim that without abortion, women have lost their equality?
Why are they wrong or are they wrong?
Yeah, so this is a huge bit of my legal scholarship is really taking on the equal protection arguments for abortion rights, which are really the most popular in the legal academy.
And I really think there's a deep male normativity in that argument.
I think that the argument that is that women ought to be just as autonomous.
I mean, it's an equal autonomy argument that women ought to be autonomous just like men.
So whereas men can walk away from an unexpected pregnancy, women ought to be able to walk away too.
Of course, women and men have different bodies.
And so when women are being expected in some sense, and then the market and political institutions and public institutions are shaped around that capacity to walk away from caregiving, then women who choose to care don't have that kind of room for caregiving there.
And so I think it's been incredibly, I think it's been actually a hatchet against really transforming the marketplace and our politics around the needs of the family.
I think it's been in that way devastating for so many women, like the ones I've talked about.
And I think that male normativity goes to the core, but it's something that very few feminists see.
I was very glad that Mary, the brilliant Mary Harrington, was able to see that and many others, I think, coming around too as well.
Erica Bakiyoke, thank you so much, Bakiyaki.
Fairer Disputations00:00:49
Thank you so much.
The book, again, is The Rights of Women Reclaiming a Lost Vision.
And her article was on sex realist feminism.
You know, you guys, I have to tell you, all of you are doing work that I'm finding absolutely fascinating and exciting and new and fresh.
You know, Mary and Louise Perry and Angela Franks and you, you're just doing tremendous stuff.
And I'm sorry you're not on all of the networks, but you're always welcome here.
I hope you'll come back.
Yeah, can I make a, can I make a final plug, which is that we actually are all together at Fairer Disputations.
You can find us on Twitter at FairSex.
And so we're all featured authors at this one site called Fairer Disputations.
So come read our work there.
And we've actually curated lots and lots of work from other authors as well.