Forget Sydney Sweeney: This is what feminists should be raging about

Et voilà. 

Paloma has poetically documented the female experience, and managed to do so without hashtags or a sponsored post in sight.

The song builds like female rage itself. It begins controlled, with Paloma's ghostly vocals whispering the rune in an almost exhausted way, before erupting into a cacaphoney women - collectively they have finally finding the language for what has been taken from them.

This is feminism’s difficult terrain. Domestic labour. Emotional servitude. Maternal depletion. The ancient expectation that a woman’s love should be measured by how much of herself she is willing to erase.

It is about who remembers the birthdays, books the appointments, buys the uniforms, packs the lunches, soothes the children, absorbs the moods and notices the toilet paper is running out. The mental load laid bare.

It is also about the emotional architecture women are expected to construct and maintain while somebody else simply lives inside it.

This is not feminism as branding. It is feminism as lived experience.

Outrage is easier than thought

For such fervent feminists, armed with visceral opinions about women and the ways women should behave, you might imagine these champions of Feminism 2.0 would be electrified by a song examining the structures that keep women exhausted, useful and quiet.

Apparently not.

Well, colour me purple-haired shocked. Truly.

Because yelling into an echo chamber is far easier than yelling into the void. The echo comes back. It sounds like agreement. After enough reverberations, it can even sound like an original thought.

That is why Sweeney became irresistible. She was famous, beautiful, blonde and clickable. Condemning her required no examination of our homes, relationships or expectations. Nobody had to ask whether the women closest to us were drowning beneath work nobody else noticed.

Paloma actually asks those questions.

Sweeney merely generated traffic.

While a tribe of women reposted, retweeted and regurgitated the same pre-approved opinion, they made Sweeney even more famous and her name even more searchable. Plenty of noise was made. Nothing of substance was challenged.

This is what gives the virtue signalling away.

If your feminism only appears when an approved outrage is trending, it is not conviction. It is content. If your argument has been downloaded wholesale from social media and cannot survive outside the echo chamber, it is not advocacy. It is mimicry with a Canva tile.

The people making the most noise are not always the ones paying attention. Sometimes they are simply scanning the internet for the next socially acceptable target, ready to perform the correct reaction before the algorithm moves on.

Paloma’s labour demands something harder. It asks women to recognise their own exhaustion and men to examine the comfort built from it. It asks us to consider the unpaid work that keeps homes, families and relationships running while remaining so routine it becomes invisible.

There is no neat villain to cancel. No famous blonde to blame. No pile-on offering instant public proof that you are one of the good people.

Just a truth many women know deep, deep, deep down in their bones.

Feminism without permission slips

Real feminism is messy. It must leave room for the athlete who wants her body judged only by its strength and the actress who decides hers is also a commercial asset.

It must defend women whose choices make us uncomfortable, not only those whose choices resemble our own.

Most importantly, it must be capable of identifying the difference between a woman making a choice and a system denying women one.

Because if feminism becomes another system for telling women how to dress, behave and use their bodies, while ignoring the labour quietly consuming their lives, the patriarchy can finally put its feet up.

Its work is being done for it.