You’re at a women’s empowerment event. Everyone on stage speaks fluently and eloquently. The language is crisp, the tone measured, and the slogans aligned. It’s a feminism that photographs well and aligns with the brief. One woman speaks about leaning in and radical courage. Another talks about smashing the patriarchy with an air of practiced conviction. A third delivers a polished monologue on intersectionality, never once stuttering on the right phrases. The crowd applauds.
No one asks a real question.
Everyone mingles during the reception. There are polite smiles, strategic affirmations, and knowing nods. ‘I love what you said about emotional labour. It’s so important!’ ‘As someone with privilege, I wanted to amplify what she said.’ A few pose for photos to share later so their followers have evidence of participation and proximity.
This is the kind of feminism that soothes, flatters, and photographs well. It’s been fully optimised for optics: curated spaces where everyone agrees, reposts each other’s talking points, and leaves feeling righteous. No one’s too challenged, but everyone’s a critically conscious changemaker.
Still, something feels off. Not wrong … just uncannily hollow. Like empowerment has been run through a PR firm. The words are right, the politics are approved, the applause is generous… but the energy is flat. It’s like acting in a corporate training video with better lighting. You walk out wondering why you feel heavier, not lighter. Maybe it’s you. Maybe you didn’t clap hard enough. Maybe your resistance to being inspired is, itself, a microaggression. After all, isn’t progress supposed to feel uncomfortable?
Progress, it turns out, already happened. But the addiction to constant change and the drama that so often precedes instability leaves little space for reflection, integration, or course correction. Instead of taking stock or assessing risk, the push for perpetual progress drives many to assimilate into a moral identity complex that increasingly resembles a cult. Feminism, in this form, hasn’t evolved — it’s metastasised. It operates through coercive control, not liberation. It doesn’t challenge power so much as hoard it, using loyalty tests enforced by a fear of exile.
Assimilation is not the same as conformity. Conformity is behavioural — fitting in through visible adjustments, whereas assimilation goes deeper. Assimilation is the psychological and moral reshaping of the self in order to be granted conditional access to a dominant group, system, or identity. It’s the slow rewriting of your values, instincts, and voice so they match what’s rewarded.
There are three types of assimilation:
Active assimilation, whereby you deliberately adopt the dominant tone, stance, and language to gain access and protection.
Partial assimilation, whereby you mimic the dominant culture just enough to be tolerated, but never fully accepted.
Passive assimilation, whereby you don’t even realise it’s happening. You’ve internalised the norms so well you think they’re your own.
When feminism becomes a tool for assimilation, it stops being a challenge to power. It becomes power. It installs itself as the moral authority — arbiter of what counts as truth, who deserves protection, and what qualifies as dissent. It no longer confronts hierarchy when it is the hierarchy. It becomes a passport to moral legitimacy and a license to police others. The performance is for social capital, masquerading as liberation. The reward for a flawless performance is access to exclusive spaces, insulation from critique, and protection from ever having to admit your flaws because there are always intersecting systems of oppression to blame.
It mirrors what others have described as a midwit phenomenon: language fluency mistaken for depth, consensus mistaken for clarity. Feminist assimilation thrives in these spaces, where saying the right thing matters more than asking the right question — or shutting up, turning the cameras off, and being of service through physical action.
If you’ve ever found yourself absentmindedly parroting a phrase you didn’t fully believe, nodding in agreement just to avoid discomfort, or hesitating to ask a clarifying question out of fear of looking unenlightened, you’re in the process of assimilation. Not because you’re insincere, but because you’re adaptive. You’re trying to survive the correct moral expectations of the moment and succeed by being a great ambassador for the feminism arm of the moral industrial complex.
To assimilate is to disappear without appearing to vanish.
The Feminist Fluency Complex
There’s a kind of feminism that rewards performance over presence. You know the type, regardless of gender. They know all the terms: gaslighting, patriarchy, emotional labour, and decolonisation. They repost infographics, write long captions about collective healing, and amplifies the correct marginalised voices, with hashtags. They are the curators of solidarity.
However, beneath the curated feminism is a deep desire to belong. To remain in the in-group and seen as one of the good ones, especially if they are not part of the community they’re advocating for. Their activism is sometimes not solidarity, but strategy. A performance of borrowed struggle in a social hierarchy that needs its adherents to make it look good.
Feminism, when used to avoid self-examination, becomes a costume of virtue. It allows people to:
- Center themselves in every conversation about womanhood.
- Shun women who don’t perform the ideology correctly.
- Use feminist language to deflect accountability.
This is happening in workplaces, online spaces, social movements, and communities that pride themselves on being progressive. And it has consequences.
Behind the polished feminist rhetoric is often a person who no longer knows what they believe, only what they’re rewarded for saying. The pressure to perform a flawless moral identity creates a fragmented self. What emerges is not true self-confidence. It’s narcissistic compensation: overidentification with the cause, emotional hypersensitivity to challenge, and the compulsive need to be seen as righteous.
Feminist fluency, in this context, becomes a form of narcissistic self-stabilisation. The self that has assimilated too deeply must now be inflated, protected, and defended at all costs.
Dissonance and Damage
Eventually, something begins to rot inside the movement. Feminism no longer speaks truth to power because it has taken its place, issuing decrees, setting terms, and punishing disobedience. Feminism becomes a closed loop, impervious to critique. Adherents must speak the right words, align with the right people and related causes, and exile those who don’t.
The space for contradiction disappears. Women who question too much are labelled difficult, regressive, or accused of internalised misogyny. Those who don’t speak the dialect fluently are deemed unsafe. Ironically, a movement meant to liberate, tolerate, and include begins to exclude on aesthetic and ideological grounds.
When harm is done within the movement, it’s deflected with therapy-speak or denied outright. Performative feminists don’t need to apologise when they can intellectualise or better yet, instruct you to ‘educate yourself’ rather than offer what they call unpaid emotional labour. They cite their allyship toward those most in need and shift the conversation elsewhere.
This moral laundering does real damage. It pushes out women who don’t fit into the neatly defined sacred victim box— women who are politically noncompliant, spiritually inconvenient, or who maintain a strong internal locus of control despite hardship. It creates an ecosystem that rewards loyalty and conformity cloaked in feminist language.
These covert narcissistic traits are fragile, anxious, and relationally volatile. The assimilated feminist becomes so fused with her moral role that dissent feels like betrayal, and disagreement like attack. Critique is reframed as harm. Accountability is nowhere to be found.
This is how assimilation births a culture of collective narcissism: a curated community bound together by shared scripts, mutual praise, and unspoken threat.
The De-Assimilating Feminist
Return to the panel.
One woman takes the mic. She’s an audience member during the Q&A. Her voice trembles slightly, from the weight of what she’s about to say.
‘I don’t actually feel empowered by any of this,’ she begins. ‘I’ve spent years trying to keep up … saying the right things, resharing the right posts, performing the right kind of outrage. But I feel more fragmented than ever. And honestly, I don’t know who I’m doing it for anymore.’
The room stiffens. People glance sideways. A few sip their drinks. The moderator smiles tightly, preparing to intervene.
She keeps going.
‘I’m not here to burn it all down. I just want to tell the truth without being shunned for it.’
She names her own complicity. She admits the ways she’s been performative, punitive, and addicted to being seen as righteous. She refuses to flatten complexity into simplicity, or to pretend empowerment has felt like anything other than exhaustion.
She’s not fluent in the dialect, so her tone doesn’t land cleanly. This is not the feminism that trends. It’s not inspirational. It’s inconvenient. Unpackaged. Uncomfortable.
It doesn’t go viral. It doesn’t get a standing ovation. But it cracks the veneer.
This kind of truth disrupts the moral industrial complex because it can’t be monetised. It doesn’t sell empowerment merch or flatter anyone. It does what assimilation never can:
It makes visible what was meant to stay hidden.
It ruptures the performance.
It destabilises the curated moral self.
And in that rupture, liberation begins.
De-assimilation doesn’t produce the polished activist. It produces the awkward, unfiltered, and often inconvenient truth-teller. She’s the one who no longer performs feminism because she survived it. Her presence feels disruptive. She’s not narcissistic — she’s just done playing the game of fake sisterhood and faux belonging.
The path back to self is not through louder moral signalling. It’s through integration of rage, grief, contradiction, and the parts of us we cut off to be accepted by the cult of feminism.
Not to reform it.
Not to redeem it.
But to walk away from it intact.
Nathalie Martinek, PhD traded biological research for decoding toxic relationships and workplaces. Her work exposes the hidden dynamics of female aggression, narcissistic behavior, and toxic feminism that quietly erode professional wellbeing. Think of her as a guide through the minefields of personal relationships and modern professional life, equipping people with the knowledge and skills to interrupt dysfunctional patterns, relate better, and restore stability. Find more of Nathalie’s writing on her Substack.