it and own it". Steinem has suggested a boycott of Limbaugh for his use of the term, stating, "Hitler came to power against the strong feminist movement in Germany, padlocked the family planning clinics, and declared abortion a crime against the stateall views that more closely resemble Rush Limbaugh's". According to The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, Limbaugh used the term "to marginalize any feminist as a hardline, uncompromising manhater", and The New York Times has described it as "one of [Limbaugh's] favorite epithets for supporters of women's rights". Toril Moi writes that Limbaugh's terminology reflects commonplace ideas that feminists "hate men", are "dogmatic, inflexible, and intolerant", and constitute "an extremist, power-hungry minority". The activist Gloria Steinem writes, "I've never met anyone who fits that description [of wanting as many abortions as possible], though [Limbaugh] lavishes it on me among many others". Aftereffects Limbaugh's words prompted a shift in the public perception of feminism across the American political spectrum starting in the mid-1990s, according to Toril Moi, who writes that Americans came to see feminists as dogmatic and power-hungry women who hate men and who are incapable of challenging their own assumptions; though the term feminazi may have been created to describe a small group of particular feminists, it calcified into a stereotype of all feminists or all women. Moi writes that feminism became "the F-word," a label that women hesitated to claim for themselves lest they be seen as feminazis, even among those who agreed with the goals of feminism. In the 2010s, there were prominent efforts to re-claim the word feminism from the stereotype of the feminazi. These included a performance at 2014 MTV Video Music Awards in which Beyoncé displayed a large lighted sign of the word feminist, together with a definition of feminism by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Feminist news blogs like Jezebel and Feministing reintroduced support for feminism into mainstream journalism. See also Antifeminism References Further reading External links Google Trends for "feminazi" The Rush Limbaugh Show Political neologisms Criticism of feminism 1980s neologisms Stereotypes of women Pejorative terms for women Nazi analogies