Feminism: The Evil Goddess That Failed
Janice Fiamengo's The Goddess That Failed (2026), arrives as both personal testimony and cultural diagnosis. Once a committed feminist who completed a doctorate in feminist literature and theory, Fiamengo recounts the slow collapse of her earlier faith. What began as a conviction that women had been uniquely oppressed and that female empowerment would elevate society gave way, under the pressure of evidence, to a starker recognition: the ideology she had embraced was not a path to equality but a sustained assault on reciprocity between the sexes, on the family, and on the basic conditions of civilised life.
The book's strength lies in its refusal of abstraction. Fiamengo does not merely assert that feminism has gone wrong; she documents the concrete harms. She examines the institutionalisation of female grievance in universities, the systematic discounting of male disadvantage in education and employment, the legal and cultural mechanisms that treat male responsibility as default while treating female wrongdoing as contextual or excused. She shows how the rhetoric of victimhood has licensed rage, encouraged the denial of biological and psychological sex differences, and eroded the mutual obligations that once held families together. Fathers shut out of their children's lives, young men discouraged from achievement, and women encouraged to view ordinary adult constraints as oppression form a recurring pattern across the chapters.
What makes the argument persuasive is Fiamengo's insider knowledge. She writes from the experience of having once accepted the central claims, only to watch them collide with observable reality: the refusal to acknowledge male vulnerability, the celebration of female aggression when directed at men, the insistence that any disparity unfavourable to women must be structural while disparities unfavourable to men are natural or deserved. The result is not a simple reversal of feminist talking points but a demonstration that the ideology cannot deliver the reciprocal respect it claims to seek. By telling women they are perpetual victims and men that they can never be good enough, feminism corrodes the very possibility of genuine partnership.
Fiamengo is particularly effective when she links these domestic and institutional failures to broader civilisational costs. A culture that systematically devalues fatherhood, treats male strength as suspect, and frames ordinary sex differences as injustice will struggle to maintain the cooperation and mutual regard required for stable societies. The book does not romanticise the past; it simply insists that the alternative offered by radical feminism has proven worse: more bitter, more litigious, and less capable of sustaining the next generation.
The Goddess That Failed is written with the clarity of someone who has abandoned a false religion and is determined to warn others. It is not a call for the subordination of women. It is a call for an end to the one-sided moral accounting that has dominated public discussion for decades. In an intellectual climate still heavily shaped by feminist assumptions, Fiamengo's willingness to name the costs: shattered families, demoralised men, and an ideology that thrives on perpetual grievance, makes the book both bracing and necessary.
https://www.amazon.com/Goddess-That-Failed-Feminisms-Civilization/dp/1966833148/ref=sr_1_1
https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/feminism-cannot-be-reformed
"Unlike others who have criticized feminism's excesses, I contend that although there are some moderate feminists, there was never a moderate feminism inspired by reasonable goals and untainted by anti-male fanaticism. Feminism did not go wrong at some point in history, whether after the Second Wave or before, whether in anti-sex or pro-sex zeal. It was always rooted in resentment and envy, warped by utopian longings and false notions of female moral superiority.
Decades of feminist grievance-mongering and accusation have led inevitably to our present time of ceaseless complaints, anti-western causes, hysterical accusation, rampant divorce, a declining birthrate, millions of abortions, and anti-male cruelty. Feminism has undermined and will continue to undermine the stability and viability of all western societies.
No version of feminism escapes the binary logic whereby the world is divided up into (sometimes intricate, overlapping) categories of oppressor and oppressed, victim and victimizer, to be treated differently and valued differently according to their identity category. …
Because it thinks in terms of groups and divides the world into innocent and guilty, feminism is incapable of devising universal principles or pursuing individual fairness or freedom. It is distorted by its victim thinking, incapable of extending empathy to those feminists see as oppressors, and incapable of demanding accountability from those feminists see as victims."
