Virginia Weaver, Senior Staff Writer 

Microwaved Beef is a column by Virginia Weaver that reflects on flashpoints from the last few years in the culture wars. The rapid pace of contemporary discourse makes it easy to forget critical moments and trends that have defined our current social and academic lives. Microwaved Beef brings those moments back into the spotlight.   

In online feminist discourse, one of the most damning accusations one woman can sling at another is that she’s a “pickme,” sometimes converted to a proper noun: Pickmeisha. The term “pickme” refers to women who, rather than dedicate their time and energy to other women, allegedly prefer to stand out from other women and so appeal to men. The sardonic question, “Did you get picked yet?” is a common way of phrasing a pickme accusation. Relatedly, the concept of an “NLOG,” a woman who prides herself on being “not like other girls,” refers to women who allegedly put down other women to appeal to men. 

Although terms like pickme, Pickmeisha, and NLOG are new, the conceptual framework to which they refer dates to the beginning of feminism’s second wave. Historians of feminism often pin the beginning of second wave of feminism in 1963, with the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Friedan argued that women’s liberation required freeing them from household drudgery and allowing them greater access to education and careers. As the feminist movement grew, Friedan expressed displeasure at the idea of including lesbian acceptance under the umbrella of goals her organization, the National Organization for Women (NOW), should pursue. In 1969, Friedan coined the term “lavender menace” to refer to the risk she felt lesbian activists posed to the momentum of her more respectable feminist movement. 

The next year, at a major feminist conference, the lesbian feminist group Radicalesbians stormed the stage and distributed a manifesto, “The Woman-Identified Woman.” In this manifesto, Radicalesbians accused heterosexual feminists of trying too hard to appeal to men. The pamphlet poses an opposition between the woman-identified woman and the male-identified woman. The latter, they allege, is a woman who dedicates most of her energy to men. 

The woman-identified woman, however, cuts her political and psychological ties to men and ends her reliance on them: “Our energies must flow toward our sisters, not backward toward our oppressors.”  

Friedan’s line of thought was not radical enough for Radicalesbians; it sought greater satisfaction within a society that radical feminists believed is deeply patriarchal and requires uprooting in more fundamental ways. Etymologically, after all, radical comes from Latin radix, meaning “root.” Radical feminists believed that women were engaged in a “sex class” war against the male sex class, and that this sex class warfare has defined all human history. For a woman to identify with the other sex class was, to radical feminists, literally traitorous. 

“Pickme,” today, is a replacement for the second-wave feminist pejorative, “male-identified woman.” When a feminist calls a woman Pickmeisha, she is implicitly accusing her of breaking ranks, of betraying her side in a long war. Even though the radical feminist idea of sex class war has faded into obscurity, the sense remains among many feminists that male identification is a serious threat to the movement. Issues of course persist with the accusation of pickme behavior: for instance, since there’s no one shared definition of what feminism is, one woman’s feminism might be another’s NLOG or pickme treachery. Among mainstream feminists, Radicalesbian’s ideal of woman-identified womanhood has taken a back seat to their critique of male-identified womanhood. 

Radicalesbians’ ideals have experienced some mainstream resurgence within the last few years in the US. South Korea’s 4B movement, which promotes female separatism from men, caught the eye of many feminists in the US after the re-election of President Donald Trump. Although the 4B movement started almost a decade ago in South Korea, it’s been unable to gain significant traction there, and found little, if any, in the US, at least in practice. 

A much larger trend in popular western feminism, however, might indicate some practical, moderate revitalization of Radicalesbian’s ideal of woman-identified womanhood. The concept of being a girl’s girl originated on social media in around 2023 and refers to what was once termed woman-identified womanhood: prioritizing relationships with women and supporting other women instead of focusing primarily on male attention and approval. As some critics note, the girl’s girl trend has come with a renewed, heavy dose of anti-Pickmeisha vitriol.  

Feminism is still experiencing the 55-year-old clash over what woman-identified womanhood should or could look like and what constitutes male-identified womanhood. Now, it would be rare for a woman to be accused of being “male-identified.” But a feminist might ask instead: “Did you get picked yet?”