Millie Bobby Brown, the British actress and model known for playing Eleven in Stranger Things since childhood, has grown into a young adult shaping global conversations about image and resilience. Recently she drew attention online by naming the persistent harassment aimed at her appearance and how it endures despite success. Brown pointed out that the sharpest comments often come from women, revealing the irony that can accompany supposed allyship. The deepest hurt, she has shown, can come from someone who should stand with her.
In the days after International Women’s Day, the moment invites reflection. New conversations indicate that solidarity among women is thinning with every year. A 2023 survey in Spain found that 43 percent of women say feminism has moved too far. This signals a backlash quietly spreading in parts of the world, including North America, where debates about equality, safety, and fairness continue to echo in homes and workplaces.
Why would nearly half of Spain’s women feel that equality efforts harm men? That question deserves careful scrutiny, because it signals how machismo can survive by shaping expectations about how women appear and act. The result is a cultural drag that bites hardest when the critic should be a partner in progress rather than an opponent.
Trap
It is troubling when some women fall into that trap. Voices contend that March 8 should be spent at home protecting family roles, a stance sometimes echoed on social media. The sense is that the holiday shifts focus away from the wider struggles women face and toward men. The contradiction is plain not all men, yet a man remains at the center of the message.
Something has gone wrong when women turn on other women, and a segment seems to profit from that fracture. Each year a divisive message circulates, sometimes pushed through male dominated spaces, echoing a 2021 lyric that mocked feminists as dull and overly emotional. The line no longer reflects lived realities on the ground, and real progress comes from action, not slogans.
Divide and conquer echoes through the discourse, a phrase that surfaces whenever factions pull apart rather than build together.
Those who push for different strands of feminism often do so with a divide and conquer mindset. Today conversations swing between reverence for traditional roles and calls for woke or radical approaches. The aim seems to slow momentum by drawing lines that fit a favored narrative. Yet skeptics and doubters amplify that split, letting fear win over solidarity and shared purpose.
Men as a group cannot fully grasp the fear that accompanies danger in daily life, though many try. Brown has emphasized the gap in understanding, and dismissive comments sting more deeply when aimed at someone who has earned admiration from millions.
The times are unsettled. The far right casts a longer shadow, incidents of harm in relationships persist, legal systems sometimes question victims, and workplaces still hide troubling conduct beneath a veneer of openness. The most troubling truth is that some women question these realities through action or inaction, making progress for true equality more challenging than ever.
The conversation continues in homes, offices, and communities as people seek safer, fairer treatment for all.