Renee Bracey Sherman

Thanks to social media, more people are finding feminist content creators who break down the trending topics of day in quick, easy to digest bites, helping the viewer to understand what is happening all around them. Everyone from my teen cousins and casual online acquaintances to my mother and her friends slip into my DMs to share a video, wondering if I’ve seen it, sharing what they learned, or exclaiming, “She sounds like you and the stuff you say!” The ability to sit with someone, processing and tussling with ideas, is not only the beauty of learning but feminism itself. It’s what I always loved about school and deconstructing a good book or idea—the conversation we get to have with ourselves and one another to further our learning. That feeling is exactly what ignited for me as I read Soraya Chemaly’s latest book All We Want is Everything: How We Dismantle Male Supremacy. 

All We Want Is Everything reads as a thoughtful-provoking conversation with that astute friend who leaves you equipped to take on the world. The book is anchored in stories—little vignettes of memories in Chemaly’s life or moments from the news cycle ripe for dissection and analysis. In one instance, Chemaly describes two interactions with school administrators: one who excitedly told Chemaly that she gave a copy of Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s We Should All Be Feminists to “all students,” which Chemaly later realized meant only girls; and another at an all-boys school who would not allow the students to watch a documentary on sexism in the media because they would feel “bad” and responsible for a problem they did not cause.  Chemaly thoughtfully walks readers through this example of gendered innocence feeding male supremacy culture, oppression, and rigid sex binaries that deeply harm all of us. Her perspective helps open our eyes to the systems at work beyond our immediate outrage at, for example, a New York Times headline casually wondering if women ruined workplaces, and redirects us to the larger systems at play. “Male supremacy’s greatest trick,” Chemaly writes, “is convincing the world that men are the primary victims of violence—when women bear its deepest, most consistent quotidian costs.”  

“Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” was the title of Ross Douthat’s interview of Helen Andrews and Leah Libresco Sargeant. It was later changed to “Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?”

Chemaly’s signature storytelling style is infused with graspable concepts untangling the more nebulous concept that is “male supremacy” yet not losing the academic rigor, feeding the student in all of us. Each chapter is an easy-flowing dialogue ending with the statistics, facts, and figures we’ve come to expect from a nonfiction book, putting a fine point on Chemaly’s arguments. 

What I love best about the book, as superficial as it may sound, is what it looks like. Its small, pocket size and bright blue cover make the book, and the topic, feel approachable and accessible. That appeal is what attracts people to the algorithmic stream of videos on social media—and it had people reading the cover or asking about the book when I read it in public. People are eager to understand the complex systems in the snippets of time they have to learn. All We Want is Everything is a perfect explainer for the feminist-curious and those ready to crush male supremacy alike. I believe it’s important that we have media in all forms that act as stepping stones for all of us to continue learning until we reach liberation. 

Koritha Mitchell

Republicans’ war on expertise and education has been successful. Writing for an audience with a sixth-grade reading level had long been the gold standard for outlets aiming to reach the largest possible number of Americans. However, in recent decades, simpler seems to be the only option. And, increasingly, no one expects people to read. If it’s important, then the message should come in a flashy video. Further, if you want people to watch a video in its entirety, shorter is better. In this environment, an entire book arguing for a specific term may seem like a mistake, but impoverished national conversations have reigned for too long.  

Impoverished discussions led to our current situation: a man who is not admirable in any way occupies the White House. He displays all the characteristics of a perpetrator, so 74 million Americans voted to make him Predator in Chief in 2020. In that role, he also behaved like a dangerous toddler, so 77 million voters gave him the nuclear codes (again) in 2024. Why? Because, when many Americans saw a dignified Black man rise to the presidency, they vowed, “Never again!” 

Donald Trump made himself politically relevant by harassing Barack Obama into “showing his papers,” his birth certificate and academic transcripts. In the process, Americans proved that while they typically view the South as uniquely backward, Southerners understand the USA better than most. After all, it was one of the nation’s few Southern presidents, Lyndon B. Johnson, who said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket.” Trump and his accomplices are demolishing the White House, stripping Americans of healthcare, and disregarding the Constitution, so “the lowest white man” isn’t the only one whose pocket is being picked.   

When many Americans saw the achievements of marginalized groups and wanted to remind those groups of their “proper” place of subordination, they elevated Donald Trump. They insisted that being a white man is what matters most. There’s no need to be admirable.   

As the country grapples with what “the lowest white man” wanted only certain of his fellow citizens to experience, many feel disoriented. Soraya Chemaly’s All We Want is Everything has arrived to reorient the populace. It offers clarity, empowering readers to change this ugly reality.   

The reorientation this book promotes aligns with a shift I encourage every chance I get. Rather than focus on disadvantage, focus on unearned advantage. Telling the truth about the barriers marginalized groups face is important, but being explicit about unearned opportunities is equally so. When we focus on disadvantage, too many people believe they can do nothing about it. They understand obstacles should not be in others’ way, but they aren’t erecting those obstacles, so there’s nothing for them to do. However, when unearned advantage gets the spotlight, more people can see how such advantage only accrues when it is not identified and marked as a problem.  

By insisting that conversations directly engage “male supremacy,” Chemaly shines a necessary light. Synthesizing decades of feminist wisdom, she speaks with clarity and precision and urges us all to do the same. She understands that “things get wonky for supremacist systems” when individuals “begin questioning patriarchal control and its racial hierarchies.” In other words, when people notice unearned advantage and call it out.  

In countless ways, All We Want is Everything models a reorientation. To name one more: each chapter ends with a “Male Supremacy Index” that offers statistical data. Statistics appear only after a woman’s expertise. A woman’s insights remain at the forefront, guiding us to keep securing what male supremacy is trying to reverse, the “new world order” we have been succeeding at creating. 

My copy of All We Want is Everything is littered with Post-it Note flags. When I was leafing through it the second time, every one or two pages, another yellow or blue rectangle shouted at me: Pay attention to this! This is important!  

Soraya Chemaly has written the treatise on our times — a takedown of not just the manifestations of gender discrimination that touch our lives, but the systems, structures, and powerful people hellbent on ensuring that those imbalances remain in place. In a moment of chaos, destruction, and division, she connects our disparate experiences and inspires us to imagine a future with a different status quo.  

But most importantly, Chemaly’s embrace of the notion of male supremacy gives us a new vocabulary. The term itself is a stark reminder that the lopsided nature of our lives is not an accident — that the discrimination we face is not a bug but a feature in a world built to maintain the power, dominance, and entitlement of men. To recognize it opens the door for a powerful reframing of even the most mundane parts of our lives.  

All We Want is Everything is a handbook for rewriting our collective reality.  

Where we see emotional labor, Chemaly sees emotional servitude. Where we see mental load, she sees obligatory compliance. Where we see hermeneutic labor, she sees submissive generosity. And she sums up everything that is wrong with the explosion of male-driven podcasts in just two words: speech dominance.  

Chemaly also challenges us to redefine the vocabulary we have to hone in on exactly what is unfolding before us — to reframe the dating crisis as men’s equality crisis; to recognize attacks on women’s bodily autonomy as a form of fascism;  to understand gender-based violence as a form of both bullying and honor violence; to claim attacks on the social safety net as a cause of a different kind of “economic anxiety.”  

Feminists know well the power of language. Until words like “domestic violence” and “rape” entered our cultural dialogue, women couldn’t name or come together around their experiences — and perpetrators were permitted to continue moving through their lives as if such behaviors weren’t abhorrent or even abnormal. The insistence on calling survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s global sex trafficking operation “underage women” — instead of sexually exploited girls — is a modern reminder that language is key to forcing this country to fully reckon with just how many systems function as little more than machines of gender-based violence.   

Chemaly challenges feminists to think beyond gender equality, a frame she rightfully exposes as male supremacist. After all, what kind of feminism champions women’s right to fit into the systems men have built — to exploit, dominate, and hoard resources? Instead, she encourages us to focus on disrupting and toppling those systems and building in their place new models for shared prosperity, justice, and human rights. She calls on us to continue to name what is broken, to change the conversation, and to leverage our feminist imagination. And she inspires us to believe that remaining steadfast and committed in our dreaming will keep us powerful, and make the impossible more possible.  

Pay attention to this book. What Chemaly has to say is incredibly important. 

Soraya Chemaly

All We Want Is Everything took shape in the months before the 2025 US presidential election. I expected that, regardless of the outcome, there would be a powerful backlash—harsh, punitive, relentless, and strategic—against women’s freedoms, people’s autonomy, racial justice, fluid identities, diversity, and progressive aims.

As I was writing, Trump won, and the book became an answer to the immediate shock and despair that followed. But it was also driven by something less expected: my own optimism and even relief. Optimism because backlash—depressing, cruel, sometimes deadly—is also evidence of feminism’s successes and diffuse impacts. Backlash is what power does when it’s losing its grip. Even the most authoritarian-minded conservative today lives life in a world profoundly shaped by feminist ideas and changes. Relief because a long season of anticipating and warning was over. The argument was no longer hypothetical; more people would now experience abusive power directly, and the stakes would become harder to deny.

The book is also a response to the broader moment that made that election possible: the global resurgence of antifeminist macho-fascist movements, the rise of authoritarian beliefs, deepening violence, and widening social distrust. I wrote it to offer some clarity in a time of cognitive dissonance—a time when it can feel as though decades of hard-won progress are being erased overnight. And I wrote it to refocus myself and readers on what feminist movements have already transformed, what we are still up against, and what, precisely, we have refused and must continue to refuse.

It is in this context that the words male supremacy seemed urgent to focus on. The structure of thought of today’s backlash—its unremitting core—is a supremacist worldview based in biological determinism, social dominance hierarchy, and the free exercise of legitimized violence. This worldview holds that some people have the right to control others physically, politically, epistemically, institutionally, and symbolically.

Male supremacy is defined as a cultural, political, economic, and social system in which cisgender men disproportionately control status, power, and resources, and women, trans men, and nonbinary people are subordinated. Established in intimate settings and early childhood, male supremacy does the heavy lifting for other supremacist systems, facilitating white supremacy, hetero supremacy, cis supremacy, ableism, and other rankings that are supposed to determine the course of our lives. And yet, our language, even within intersectional feminist circles, struggles to synthesize this. Neither gender equality (describing outcomes) nor patriarchy (describing institutions), for instance, clearly names the belief system driving gender oppression (male superiority). Neither lends itself, like male supremacy does, to structural entwinements with other systems of supremacy, for instance, white, cis, or heterosexual.

Naming male supremacy, as Koritha Mitchell writes, enables us to shift our focus from disadvantage to the unearned.

Naming male supremacy seemed to resonate with my readers, all of whom write about the importance of naming and reframing in dismantling systems of power. I was particularly happy to see that the precision of the term male supremacy, and others that I raise in the book, was understood as a good way to illuminate a problem, shape consciousness, and bring vital clarity to the challenges we face.

Shared language and learning, I agree, is surely one of our most powerful tools. I have always been grateful to thinkers who have created or expanded language that has made my own experiences legible. I am happy, in reading these reviews, that I have perhaps done the same for others during a time when we all need new ways and concepts to resist and refuse systems deliberately designed to obscure injustice.

I was particularly heartened by Renee Bracey Sherman’s writing about how the book mirrors the feminist practice of collective learning, allowing us to witness, process, question, and grow together. Likewise, I share with Koritha Mitchell a belief in the urgency of reorienting public understanding and attention, especially at this inflection point in our history. Similarly, along with Carmen Rios, I know that in day-to-day life, work, and activism, many of us are involved in translating complex feminist theory into action through relatable stories and pragmatic reasoning, all while trying to retain complexity, ethics, and intellectual rigor. I am glad if this book, as she writes, helps others in this task.

It is easy, in these times, to forget how effective feminism has been during the past seventy years. As a sprawling, diffuse, leaderless, global force, it has been overwhelmingly transformative. Even when we acknowledge this, however, we also know that we are just getting started—hence my title, All We Want Is Everything.

I have deeply benefited from the thinking of so many others who worked to transform collective consciousness through words, understanding, and imagination, so I was thrilled to see readers recognize the book as a “handbook,” a “conversation,” and a “manifesto” that provides a vision that helps us cocreate more equitable futures.

Lastly, having written other works that are lengthy and dense with citations and research, I really wanted a book that was small, inviting, and accessible. I am thrilled that all of the readers appreciated this and believe that what I wrote is genuinely actionable. I am so grateful for the time each reviewer took to read and share their thoughts.