Has today’s feminism lost its way?

I have a friend – let’s call her Aoife  – who says that we don’t need feminism anymore.

“The world is such a mess,” she said one night, clutching a glass of red wine. “that feminism has become reductive and meaningless.”

Aoife has been a card-carrying feminist since she could talk – right at the moment boys declared they were stronger than girls.

So it came as a surprise when she revealed that she no longer thought of feminism as a radical or important component of political progress.

She continued: “We’ve got so many problems to figure out, people who are so much worse off than those who happen to suffer from gender discrimination.

“It also feels like,” she went on, setting her glass on the table, “anything we say in favour of feminism won’t be enough. There will always be something more woke we can say.

“The world is ending,” she declared. “We’re flying too many planes and buying too many tops and the people in charge aren’t bothered enough to do anything about it.

“It almost feels selfish to complain about gender inequality” she finished.

As Aoife got up to go to the bathroom, I contemplated the bomb she had just glibly detonated in my face.

No feminism? It just didn’t seem right. It went against everything I stood for. It didn’t match at all with my steadfast belief that feminism was going to save the world.

Then I thought about the last five years, and how much the world had changed in so many ways. Political discourse is now conducted on social media for all to see; ‘call-out culture’ means that conversations about politics are less about critical thinking or challenging ideas and more about one-upmanship and moral highgrounds.

Yes, one can argue that it’s always been like that  – but when social criticism and debate is conducted via the medium of social media, it hits much closer to home and it a much more public way.

The fact is, even the most liberal of us are only too vulnerable to ignorance. It is nearly inevitable that when you’re passionate about a cause or belief system, you will have a blind spot for that belief system’s failings and shortcomings.

Take, for example, feminism: extremely simple in its definition, but a smorgasbord of shite in its practice. Feminism is the means of which gender equality is achieved – which can only be good, right?

It was right in 2013. Everyone was at it. Feminism was the new hot thing – it was radical, it felt a bit retro, and you could buy a t-shirt for it. It had been revived from its former resting place in the late ’90s and rebranded in millennial pink.

But soon, mildew began to grow on its surface – people wanted something new to say, some hotter take to have – and they found it.

Feminism soon became less and less simple – due to its historical ignorance of racial inequality as a mitigating factor in the pursuit of gender equality, it was no longer a cool thing to be. It was no longer enough just to support the cause of feminism – one had to be inclusive in every way. Feminist thinkers and scribes were branded “white feminists” who ignored the plight of women of colour in their conversations about sexism.

Rightly so – for so long, people have had to fight their own fight without allies who, instead of standing by their side, eschewed the fight for racial equality as having “nothing to do with them” – a gross miscalculation on the part of pre-fourth-wave feminism.

Yet this caused divide within the feminist community, with many “white feminists” taking the critique as an attack instead of a call to arms.

While women of colour have always been aware of their race, white women hadn’t – and that realisation was a smack in the face that many could not take in their stride.

At the same time, many people of colour were bored of seeing feminism through the lense of middle class white women and so created their own spaces where they could be heard – without interruption.

Through the next five years that division deepened, with LGBTQ activists (again, rightly) pointing out that modern feminism was not acknowledging the privileges that one had while existing in society as cisgender straight women.

Although the point of inclusive feminism was to diversify and bring together social activists, it often appeared to have the opposite effect.

All the while, these divisions were taken advantage of by anti-feminist groups of misogynistic and conservative persuasions, who said that it was inevitable that these divisions occurred.

Instead of pointing out the obvious – that the world was seeing a transitional period necessary for political progress – these groups said it was a failure of activism as a mode of progression.

Internet culture also now posited that everyone had to have an opinion on everything – the more polarised, the better. The fence was no longer the cool place to sit as people were forced ti pick a side or risk exclusion.

Soon, think pieces and op-eds were written before the news pieces were ; you heard there was a reaction before you heard what was said or done – and at that point, what actually happened wouldn’t matter.

Increasingly, we are an anxious planet, fearful that what we think won’t be liked, so we’re better retweeting the last popular tweet we saw.

Because this era of cancel culture is so publicly unforgiving towards anyone, we know we only have one strike and we’re out. So we watch our step – and end up missing the point.

In turn, this has lowered the volume on activism and turned up the volume on pointless, childish wars of words.

Last week, Barack Obama said in an interview that ‘call-out culture’ had become less about progress and more about “out-woking one another.” He pinpointed the growing trend in political discourse that was, ironically, halting it from maturing into something useful.

Intersectional feminism, much like its root feminism, is a great idea by definition – acknowledging that the inequalities that the world faces must be tackled simultaneously to achieve true equality across the board – but in its practice, it is often stilted and can be damaging when criticism is less constructive and more destructive. To use a popular idiom of its genre, it is problematic.

However, modern feminism can also sometimes feel too liberal and not critical enough. Modern feminists say that embracing patriarchal ideals of beauty is a woman’s choice – so if a woman wants to stay at home all day wearing a push-up bra and lipstick, that’s her choice and to deny her of it or to critique it is anti-feminist in itself.

Part of me agrees with this – women shouldn’t be criticised for surviving in the tiny structure that the patriarchy built –  but part of me also longs for the older days of feminism that saw women throwing out their razors, their bras, their powder and stick two fingers up to the man. It felt more like a hot iron rod – whereas sometimes today’s feminism can feel like a wet flannel.

Walk into any high street shop today and shelves are now awash with digestible mini-books on one of the world’s longest-standing inequalities. They package feminism in a way that feels unthreatening and inoffensive. They are accompanied by a podcast or three. Yet in its effort not to be controversial, the books often fall flat and refrain from saying anything groundbreaking about modern feminism today (with a few exceptions – Nimco Ali and Reni Eddo-Lodge both being good examples) and the result is a feminism that feels less like a lunch in the air and more like a tap on the shoulder.

In any case, with so many books covering every corner of feminism, is there anything else to say? Moreover, should we even say it?

Perhaps a certain degree of internal conflict within a movement is inevitable. Yet it feels like if we can shut a conversation down when we don’t like where it’s going, we’ll never get anywhere.

With the world coming down with endless issues, maybe we can no longer afford to choose just one fight and one cause. But what if by trying to tackle all the issues we are faced with – such as those concerning class, race and sexuality – it makes us afraid of being wrong or of messing up and so we think it best leaving the burden of activism to those with a bigger social wound? Do we risk losing our focus on what we were trying to fight in the first place?

As I ponder this, Aoife comes back from the bathroom and flops back down on the sofa, picking up her glass. “Jesus,” she says, sighing. “Sorry about that. Had to let that thought out into the air.”

“That’s alright.” I said, topping up her wine. “I can’t believe you don’t think we need feminism anymore, though. Bit rash.”

She looked at me, wide-eyed. “Christ no, I just had to say it,” she said, taking a large sip from her glass. “I just had to get it out there. Now I’ve said it, I’m not scared of thinking it.”