U2 and feminism

Maddy goes deep in a personal essay on Joe Rogan, women and what U2 has to say about gender

Warning: contains upsetting themes, as well as spoilers for the TV show Adolescence.

My recent viewing material has been the film adaptation of Bono’s memoir, Stories of Surrender—more on that below. Yet earlier this week I was bingeing something quite different; Bono‘s appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast.

It took me a while to stomach listening to it. Rogan’s views on women and, well, almost anything are risible, but I couldn’t resist three hours of interview time from Bono. I was pleased and proud when he regularly mentioned how often his wife and daughters challenged him and gave sage advice, even if he hadn’t always taken it on board, and admitted that if he’d been more mature in his 20s and 30s, he would have looked to more female singers as guiding lights. I was keen to know who he meant, but Rogan’s paltry interview skills meant we never got much detail. Still, it was a relief to know Bono was savvy enough not to be drawn into Rogan’s nonsense, all while using the time to get his message out to a more challenging audience.

Yet I had other, more personal reasons for feeling uneasy about Bono’s choice of interviewer. A few days beforehand I had been bingeing Netflix’s Adolescence. Like lots of women, it got me thinking about the times I’ve rubbed up against serious misogyny—the sort propagated by many of Joe Rogan’s listeners.

I think Adolescence is a masterpiece. However, there’s been a lot of talk about that show—maybe (maybe) too much talk. Some of the chatter around it has been grating. It annoys me that for a show about femicide, the stories of the victims are often eclipsed. Perhaps that was the point, given the girl at the centre is dead, with the implication that snuffing out her story was the natural end-point of such noxious masculinity; yet the analysis has leaned towards the idea that feminism, rather than male hatred of women, drives purposeless men and boys to kill, as with 13-year-old Jamie’s stabbing of his classmate Katie.

It’s a bewildering angle given that none of this is new. A sizable cohort of men and boys have treated women and girls like shit for as long as humans have existed. Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan are a symptom just as much as a cause. The message to come out of Adolescence seems to be that violent misogyny isn’t a problem we should have paid attention to years ago—rather, women getting any kind of equality is just a zero-sum game, inevitably making life worse for men. One side’s gain will always be another side’s loss, with fatal consequences, rather than a win for humanity at large.

All this made me reflect with discomfort on my own school experiences. The things that happened to me in my teens remained under emotional lock and key until the #metoo movement.

I have never written any of this down before, but seeing other women open up about harassment and abuse made me feel able to tell my dad about the time when I was walking down the street near school and a boy grabbed and twisted my nipple, and the time when another group later slapped me on the arse in the school corridors. Either side of that I regularly had to deal with being wolf-whistled at and hearing remarks made about my weight, my skin, and my hair. It was relentless. I often wished I was dead.

It all drove me towards U2 as a source of relief. I still vividly remember running home in floods of tears after getting cat-called all the way down the street, and feeling some kind of relief when I put on The Best of 1990-2000 at full blast.

Two decades down the line, when many men in the public eye are getting the Jacobin treatment for past sex crimes, it’s notable that U2 have avoided the guillotine. You can say many things about them; chauvinistic pigs they are not. It would have been pretty devastating if they were.

Yet, it’s worth fully unpacking what this means in practice. When I first came across the band I wasn’t a feminist, but with hindsight, it meant a great deal that Bono would say from a young age how in awe he was of women. On the Zoo Radio broadcasts and in interviews with the NME in the ‘90s, Bono would talk about how badly women get treated. U2’s lyrics often pay tribute to some kind of mystical, muse-like feminine who has some inscrutable power compared to men—“Original of the Species” and “Mysterious Ways” each have this as their central theme.

Wish you were her? (Source: Beth Whittern)

I scoffed at this 20 years ago, finding it mawkish (which is odd given what I was going through), but it now means a lot to know they would have been on my side. I felt like I was being told, even before I could appreciate it, that my gender made me special and gave me innate value.

We don‘t all have to be at war with one another, they seemed to be saying. I want you to flourish, and you should want the same for me. We’re all in this together.

There was a particular moment where everything seemed to change. While watching Stories of Surrender, I was brought back to the time when I first saw the Live in Boston footage from the Elevation tour. I was 13 years old, and probably at my lowest point. I felt uncertain about everything, including whether or not I deserved to live. The Boston show was the first full U2 concert I’d ever watched. Everything from Bono’s thanks to the audience for giving them a “great life” to the “Hallelujahs” at the end of “Walk On” felt like a journey back to happiness, and to saying “yes” to life.

And yet the most crucial moment was during “With or Without You.” Bono pulled a girl up on stage, gently easing her into his arms and crooning to her as she mouthed along. It was the look he gave her—one that demanded everything but promised everything, particularly that from now on, she might feel complete. She wasn’t me, but she could have been. The hole inside me could be filled. Emptiness could be a route to deliverance. Uncertainty, perhaps, could be a guiding light.

I didn’t have the words for it at the time, but maybe I was sensing that Bono also had a hole inside him, one born of grief and parental neglect rather than abuse. At the end of Stories of Surrender, I welled up when he told the audience, “I got you to fill that hole.” We’d never spoken, but in both those moments, decades apart, it felt like we were each other’s way back to joy.

It’s never diluted my feminism that it was a man that offered me a route out of despair. What mattered was the kind of man he was.

But it’s rarely that simple, especially when you look at U2’s lives outside of their music.

They were all born in the ‘60s, and like many men of that era, would have grown up with the knee-jerk assumption they could have it all. Even if they hadn’t become rock stars, they would not have faced the conundrum of how they would balance work with raising children.

For any hardcore fan, Surrender has some familiar Bono tropes. One of the more touching ones is his tribute to his wife, and how often she was the voice of reason, especially when the couple faced the choice of whether or not to have a family.

I adore him, but the days when I used to fantasise about being in Ali’s shoes (skipping over the 30-year age gap) are long over. She’s put up with a lot, particularly the pressure to smooth down a lot of Bono’s rough edges. Hers is not a life I would choose, mostly because it never truly seemed to be hers.

The scant details we have about Ali’s inner life tell a familiar story. She married young and packed in a potential nursing career to follow Bono around the planet. She came when she wanted to, but for Bono to say she was “her own woman” doesn’t quite stand up, given that by her own admission she was a single parent. His career was the prominent one, and she wouldn’t have had much power over where it went. It was never a guarantee U2 would have become what they did. For all she knew Bono might have had to eventually do something else. Realising that fame meant he would be absent for weeks and months at a time must have been a lot to deal with while also raising a young family.

Ali is sometimes described as strong-minded, and to primarily be a wife and a mother was, up to a point, her decision. There’s a delicate balance to strike when scrutinising other people’s life choices, as it’s important not to take away their agency and acknowledge when they have made a conscious choice. They were also immensely privileged, and no doubt the family could afford childcare and tutors, allowing her to focus on her campaigning work, but it’s hard to believe she would have never felt she had made a sacrifice. The idea that it was simply “her choice” feels like a cop-out, one designed to make the other party feel better. Were their roles reversed, it’s hard to believe Bono would have accepted having the auxiliary status in the marriage.

Other band members’ wives and girlfriends raised families in their absence, even if some (like Edge’s wife Morleigh) had careers. It puts any feminist credentials under strain.

There’s also something dubious about placing women on a pedestal, which Bono arguably does. Worshipping a whole group turns them into a concept, and revering the role they play can take the place of questioning whether they should be playing that role at all—which is sobering given how much adult life has shown me that women contribute more than they should, and get less back, in almost any sphere of life.

That said, many men don’t even make that acknowledgment. It shouldn't be dismissed how unusual U2’s reverence for women, and the crucial role they play, has been in the music industry. Among the bands they grew up with (Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones come to mind), treating women like toilet paper was far more the norm, and whenever U2 dabbled in mild hedonism, it never quite went that far.

The end of the “rock god era” seems to be a common trope. Analysis of how big U2 was for 20 years is often book-ended by a lament (or celebration) that there’s no one out there like them anymore.

That’s sad to me, not least because I can’t have been the only person who often found U2 to be my only positive male role models. There must have been men out there who found it a revelation to see people in the band’s position not being toxic. Bono’s constant nod towards the women in his life, including Ali, is a signal to anyone who knows them that this is who they are, and who they have always been.

It’s an overlooked side of their legacy. And it’s never been more relevant.

©Fry/U2 and Us, 2025