The Newest, Shiniest Kindness: A Review of (Un)kind | by Therese Doherty
The core of the issue is "that women cannot be defined in terms of their own interests, only those of others."
Victoria Smith, (Un)kind: How ‘Be Kind’ Entrenches Sexism (Fleet: London, 2025).
I was reading (Un)kind during the week in April that the UK Supreme Court handed For Women Scotland their celebrated victory, clarifying the law in favour of sex-based rights and protections. The ensuing tantrums of trans activists and their supporters, with all the usual histrionic threats of violence, and the doubling down on ‘being kind’ by organisations and individuals (including the Vagina Museum, Disability Rights UK, and a ‘radical’ anthropologist), were perfect illustrations of Victoria Smith’s argument that women are deemed ‘unkind’ for simply asserting the fact that we exist.
The title of this book might confuse or dismay, but Smith is quick to reassure, with her habitual wit, that ‘This is a book about kindness, relationships and creating a society in which everyone’s needs are met’, not ‘a guide to being a total bastard’ (pp. 1-2).
(Un)kind is an examination of what Smith dubs JustBeKindism—the ‘newest, shiniest understanding of kindness’ (p. 2)—which, despite rainbow sparkles, has a pernicious side. It claims gender-neutrality, yet is awash with gendered expectations. The latest strategy of the never-ending patriarchal backlash, it disallows critical thought and distorts feminist principles whilst disseminating ‘progressive’ mandates that shame many into obedience. As Smith summarises:
At the heart of JustBeKindism is the demand that women once again embrace passivity, emotional suppression, intense self-monitoring, the erosion of boundaries, self-doubt and the transfer of female-created resources to male people. When women object to this, they are told not that they are unfeminine – an old-fashioned way of enforcing compliance – but that they are unkind. (p. 8)
Smith asserts that many ‘progressive’ advocates of JustBeKindism ‘declare themselves very much against the idea that women ought to be kinder than men’ (p. 8), as if old-fashioned sexism has been successfully superseded, rather than just obscured. Yet, ‘Old entitlements are subtly reinscribed, not, we are told, because male people have the right to take whatever they want (the conservative position), but because everyone has the right to everything and “rights aren’t pie” (the “progressive” one)’ (p. 7). This is what makes the subject so complex—‘we see a convergence of left and right expectations of women (the same goods and services are being sought, albeit via different routes)’ (p. 25)—so contradictions and incoherences abound. What I find brilliant about Smith is that she is able to wade through and assess all the misogynist dross and bring us some much-needed sense, grounded in real feminist principles.
The book is structured around the five imposed ‘commandments’ of JustBeKindism—Just Be Pure/Giving/Inclusive/Perfect/Yourself, which explore different aspects of the phenomenon. They include essentialist ideas about women’s ‘true nature,’ sexual consent, trauma and reproductive justice, the phantasmic ‘true self’ versus the embodied ‘relational self,’ and the denial of sexual difference and the gender hierarchy. Recent nominally ‘feminist’ texts are cited throughout, which, worryingly, ‘instruct women – particularly younger women – to ignore feelings of fear, disgust, resentment, anger and desire if such feelings are deemed an obstacle to other people’s self-realisation’ (p. 20).
For instance, in protests following the Supreme Court ruling, trans activists vandalised several statues in London, including that of women’s suffragist Millicent Fawcett, and held placards displaying violent rhetoric. The campaigners of For Women Scotland were also sent abuse and death threats. The new culture of ‘progressive’ kindness would have it that women’s legitimate objections to these displays of other people’s so-called self-realisation is ‘evidence of fragility, privilege, bigotry or even latent far-right tendencies’ (p. 21). Such accusations ‘[function] to condition, exploit, shame and/or silence women and girls’ (p. 24), and pressure them to disregard their awareness of risk and boundary violations. Smith’s discussion of other past and present feminist texts provides helpful antidotes to this misinformation.
The core of the issue is ‘that women cannot be defined in terms of their own interests, only those of others’ (p. 38), and ‘women’s acts of kindness are instantly coded as “natural” and hence not really kindness at all’ (p. 23). This is a continuation of gendered socialisation that demands that women be selfless, having no needs, desires or boundaries of their own. As the eternal ‘givers’, women are denied subjectivity, and required to contort themselves, emotionally and sexually, to always put others first. When kindness and care work are deemed natural functions that are only to be expected (and no kindness is ever quite enough, nor is care work ever done), women can therefore be punished when these things aren’t endlessly forthcoming, even when what is being demanded is entirely unreasonable. This is a powerful way to ensure women self-police and comply with their marginalisation, shrinking their own needs so that others (usually men) can thrive. While this is nothing new, the justifications for it are:
The JustBeKindist model reinforces the giver/taker hierarchy by reinventing it as oppressor/oppressed, or privileged/marginalised, without allowing for shifts, reversals and overlaps. It views one set of identities as sacrosanct and untouchable, with other people – who, far from being ‘the privileged’, all too often turn out to be the same givers as before – ordered to make space for them. Instead of seeing us all as porous to a degree, JustBeKindism sees one group as impenetrable, another as passive, vacant, existing only to be occupied and used. (pp. 19-20)
As we have seen from the aftermath of the Supreme Court ruling, the common sense assertion of women’s most basic rights in law are seen as an ‘unkindness’ because they acknowledge the reality of female selfhood and boundaries. Yet the claim that men should be allowed to identify into the category of women is the real unkindness, as it’s an infringement on rights with very real consequences.
Throughout the book are pithy insights: that ‘exclusionary’ seems to have replaced ‘man-hater’ as an anti-feminist pejorative (p. 37); and that ‘Feminists butchering an argument about the impact of female socialisation in order to make it more inclusive may in fact be the perfect illustration of female socialisation’ (p. 87). Noteworthy is the ‘kindsplaining’ of ‘Progressive Man’, who gleefully redefines feminist slogans—like biology is not destiny or her body, her choice, which have specific, contextual meanings—for his own ends, thus ‘conflat[ing] the bigot he claims to be fighting with any woman who suggests … that endless accommodation on the part of women is not the solution to everything’ (p. 81-2); And, importantly:
Any interrogation of our desires ought to start from the position that we need to be able to centre ourselves more. We can only do this, however, in an environment in which male entitlement is challenged rather than treated as something about which nothing can ever be done. (p. 125)
Also present is a great deal of wry humour, because apparently ‘Women have all the fun stuff and none of the existential crises’ (p. 139), which makes what is often eye-rollingly exasperating subject matter very entertaining. Subheadings such as ‘If being a woman is natural, stop telling me how to do it’ (p. 85), ‘Your mum might be a feminist, but feminism is not your mum’ (p. 129) and ‘The stunning bravery of doing whatever you want’ (p. 176) gave me a chuckle, as did the anonymous quote, ‘A male feminist walks into a bar, because it was set so low’ (p. 173). Smith often turns the ‘progressive’ language back on itself, pointing out its absurdity.
Of particular value is the discussion of care ethics and the relational self. Contrary to JustBeKindism, which is largely performative and ‘relies on a one-dimensional view of any complex situation’ (p. 162), genuine kindness requires constant negotiation of the messy betweenness of relationships and competing needs. Feminists have long known this,
prioritis[ing] analyses of human interdependency and relational identities, understanding the problem of patriarchy as one of how all human beings relate to one another as opposed to one of how some fixed identities are appreciated more than others … We are not whatever we say we are; we are where we stand in relation to others, whose perspectives will differ. (p. 255)
(Un)kind benefits from Smith’s personal admissions that, immersed as a young woman in the ‘raunch feminism’ (p. 104) of the nineties, she had questioned many of the things that ‘serious feminists’ theorised, but that now as ‘a seasoned feminist hag’ (p. 4), she sees much more clearly the problems with the mainstream iteration of feminism and the ‘progressive’ politics it has been subsumed into. This ‘reverse feminism – a kind of anti-feminism’ (p. 205), perpetuates the usual sexist double standard under the rubric of kindness and lack of boundaries, making women the designated caregivers for everyone. Feminists, rather than celebrating this as ‘progressive’ or ‘inclusive’, once saw such manoeuvres for the patriarchal deceptions that they are.
Smith discloses that, ‘one of the reasons for writing this is my own fear of hardening towards that to which we should remain soft and open. When the phrase “just be kind”, or even the word “kindness”, starts to trigger an angry or even fearful response … there is a problem’ (p. 24). That women are waking up to this problem is encouraging. We know there is no ‘invisible hand of kindness [that] will sweep down and make sure no one gets left out’ (p. 123). Life is far more complicated than that.
By addressing the maddening muddle of JustBeKindism, Smith describes what a woman-centred feminism distinct from ‘progressive’ misrepresentations is, why it exists, and what it wants to achieve—and it ‘is not an anti-kindness movement … It imagines a world beyond that of female givers and male takers’ (pp. 253-4). As Smith states, ‘the feminist who still insists sex matters … disturbs the natural order of things by making other women think they exist and matter as independent beings’ (p. 221-2). We have to keep insisting that we exist, and that we do matter, no matter how ‘unkind’ that makes us.
Therese Doherty lives with chronic illness and occasionally writes and makes art, but mostly just reads a lot. She can be found @offeringsfromthewellspring and you can peruse and purchase her artwork at Offerings From the Wellspring at Redbubble.
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