Safe to say “I am woman/hear me roar,” would never be recorded today.

Just ask Adele, best selling artist in the world, savior of a dying industry, now the woke mob’s latest target.

Her crime? In picking up Artist of the Year at last night’s Brit Awards, she lamented the loss of male and female categories, saying:

“I understand why the name of this award has changed, but I really love being a woman and being a female artist. I do! I’m really, really proud of us. I really, really am.”

That’s it. That’s all. But for that she’s been slandered a TERF — a trans-exclusionary radical feminist.

Really, the only thing Adele should be catching grief for is postponing a multimillion-dollar Vegas residency at the last minute.

There’s been a push of late to make arts awards gender-neutral. The Brit Awards may have been the only high-profile event to make the leap, but there are calls to erase “Best Actress” at the Oscars and “Best Female Vocal” at the Grammys — part of an overall movement to make gender irrelevant.

For a Gen X-er like me, the pride taken by women in rock — from the 1990s riot grrrl movement to Courtney Love, Fiona Apple, Lauryn Hill, Liz Phair and a generation of women pushing sexual, political and economic boundaries — is not that long ago.

And it’s not like feminism has won. Women still make less money than men. We are still fighting for our reproductive rights. Still we are underrepresented in tech, politics, finance, film, and, according to a 2021 McKinsey report, all sectors of management.

Here’s what women couldn’t do just 50 years ago, in America: Get a credit card. Serve on juries. Take birth control pills if single (a huge slice of the market!). Get pregnant without fear of losing our jobs. Attend an Ivy League school. Refuse sex with our husbands.

Women have fought for a lot. We’re still fighting. We get to be proud of how far we’ve come.

As should Adele, a vanishingly small kind of global music superstar.

Consider what Courtney Love told Dazed & Confused magazine in 2016:

“There’s maybe 30 [female stars] if you count pop stars,” she said. “Think about that — on the planet. Rock stars, I don’t know — I’ve never really sat down and counted female rock stars. There’s a few, there’s 10, 15 . . . but throw a TV out on the balcony, the same stuff that Keith Richards did, the same stuff that Jim Morrison did, the same things that Bono did — that we all forgot about — yeah, I think I get judged by a double standard a lot, but that’s just the way it is.”

Adele is a grown woman singing about her experiences as a woman. Why should she be expected to defuse or deny what, essentially, is her superpower?

For all the crap she caught on Twitter, others came to her defense — a sign that we are possibly, maybe, beginning to emerge from an understandable state of overcorrection.
“Thank you @Adele,” tweeted author and refugee advocate Onjali Rauf. “For speaking the 2 words being vilified. Woman. Female.”

A Spectator op-ed by educator Debbi Hayton was similarly effusive, thanking Adele for risking the fate of J.K. Rowling and other women who “have been pursued and persecuted mercilessly, simply for standing up for their sex. Adele’s message to women and girls was inspirational.”

Thirty years ago, Kurt Cobain opened the 1990s in a dress. Who would have thought Adele’s speech, embracing and affirming her womanhood, would be considered just as transgressive today?