Nina Power

Nina Power is a British feminist philosopher, best known for her international bestseller One-Dimensional Woman (2009), and later What Do Men Want? Masculinity and its Discontents (2023). An expert on German and French philosophy, she has published on thinkers such as Ludwig Feuerbach and Alain Badiou, but also on film, art, feminism and politics.

In What Do Men Want?, Power wrote critically on the consequences of the #MeToo movement, including simplistic claims of 'power imbalances'. She wrote:

Campaigns like #MeToo, for better or worse, make people think twice about what is and isn’t appropriate. They also create an atmosphere of fear and anxiety over the smallest things. We live under constant surveillance. The twenty-first century will perhaps be a time of the recorded encounter, the documented consent, the algorithmic fuck. It will become harder to lie, but also harder to be carefree. [...]

[A]t the extremes we are seeing attacks on people, famous or otherwise, for ‘power imbalances’ in their relationships. If we water down terms such as ‘abuse’ to include any time anyone has been hurt, it will be safer simply to never engage with each other again. We will be consigned to a life lived ‘safely’ online, consuming the culture various platforms deem we should watch and talking to our ‘friends’ from behind virtual glass.

In an interview with alternative media journalist Andrew Gold, Nina argues that sexually agentic 16-year-old females do in-fact have power:

There's a power in being young and attractive, and going and having sex with an older guy. [...] We're in this very uneasy moment where we don't quite know where to place ‘power.’ Either some people have it or they don't. We don't really know what it is... I mean, a beautiful young woman has lots of power. [...] She has the power to attract and seduce and manipulate – and crush men's hearts – and so on.

"It’s not true," Power states, that the age of consent is 18 in "most other countries." "The problem is," she argues, "you hit, sort of, reality."

Teenagers do tend to be very horny. And, I kept all my teenage diaries, and I wouldn’t have thought I was particularly exceptional... But they are just extraordinary, reading them back, seeing how obsessive they are. [...] What’s revealing is how that sexual feeling is so dominant.

She argues that, "There’s a way in which women don't want to acknowledge that they have power," mentioning "the victim mentality" and "the feminization of institutions."

See also

• Slavoj Žižek - The two are friends, and both featured in the documentary Marx Reloaded.