Most people do not understand feminism.
They understand parts convenient to them.
They think feminism is anti-men, when it is co-men.
This selective interpretation has bred something else entirely: pseudofeminism. It wears the right labels, uses the right hashtags, but lacks the intellectual discipline feminism was built on.
It pains me to see how far we've drifted. I write this as a feminist, as someone who has spent years reading, listening, and believing in the core values of feminism. It was never meant to be a weapon. It was a mirror.
The first wave - Seneca Falls, 1848 - was about legal rights. Property, suffrage, the simple idea that a woman was not an extension of her husband.
The second wave - the 1960s and 70s - exposed the subtle machinery of patriarchy: unpaid labor, sexual objectification, structural exclusion.
The third wave - starting in the 90s - broadened the lens. Intersectionality, identity, choice. It welcomed plurality, complexity.
Each wave built on the one before it. None were perfect. But all demanded critical thinking. They did not ask for conformity. They asked for analysis.
But now I see something else taking over. A kind of ideological rigidity, where any disagreement is betrayal. I’ve heard it firsthand.
A friend once said to me, proudly, "I unfollowed every man who disagreed with my post on gender bias. I don't need that energy."
I asked her, "Was the disagreement sexist or just critical?"
She replied, "Doesn’t matter. Men don't get it."
It pains me because feminism, real feminism, was always about dialogue. It was about making the invisible visible. But not through blame. Through analysis, solidarity, and hard-earned progress.
Pseudofeminism is not concerned with nuance. It operates in binaries. Men are oppressors. Women are victims. And within that model, nothing is up for debate.
Thomas Sowell described this pattern in The Vision of the Anointed when ideology becomes sacred, dissent becomes heresy.
I don’t write this to defend men or attack women. I write it to defend feminism from decay. From simplification. From being hijacked by resentment.
Feminism was never anti-men. It was anti-inequality. bell hooks taught us that love between genders is political. Martha Nussbaum insisted on capabilities and dignity for all.
But these voices are being drowned out. What we hear now is louder, angrier, simpler.
And I fear we’re losing the substance.
We need to return to source. To the books. To the debates. To the contradictions. To the humility of not always being right.
It pains me to say it, but some of what I see online - the outrage, the absolutism, the disdain - is not feminism but performance.
If feminism is to survive and grow, it must remain porous. Open to scrutiny. Open to men who care. Open to complexity.
We owe that to the women who marched when it was dangerous. To the thinkers who wrote when no one listened.
And to the future, which needs ideas, not gender war.
