system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: Feminism has been appropriated and it's time to move on

Feminism was, and to an extent remains, a powerful force for cultural change in the United States. The rights, freedoms, and benefits it secured for women and society at large are too many to list, and it is safe to say that life would be significantly worse for *everyone* without it. However, as with so many popular movements, the widespread adoption of feminism has left it either toothless or antagonistic to progress.

I want to interject with a concession: I understand that "feminism" is not a monolith, so this argument is not about subgroups of intersectional feminism or anything. These submovements are still at the cutting edge of social justice, but I will argue that the banner they all fly under is problematic because of its cultural cachet.

Throughout the 1800s and 1900s, the major drive of feminism was granting women access to male-dominated spaces. Access to workplaces, pollbooths, and political offices was a specific, ambitious goal with clear markers for success: either women gained access or they did not. In recent decades, however, advancement has become muddled by the movement's partial success. For instance, the metric of income inequality has essentially transformed from "women should earn wages" to "women should earn the same amount as men". The key difference between the two is the ambiguity of the latter, a fun play space for right-wing pundits and centrists alike.

When discussing the wage gap, the conversation never focuses on a clearly graspable issue and rather turns into a diatribe about semantics. "The same amount" can mean "the same amount for the same work" or "the same amount controlling for education" or any number of variations that distract from the core issue. Unfortunately, both access and income equality are plagued by punditry debating causality ("women don't want to" is an oft-heard argument against both), but the lack of precise goals in modern feminism only complicates the issue.

However, poor mission statements are hardly a reason for a movement to be retired. A few tweaks and edits could reposition modern feminism as a radical and undeniable movement. Intersectional feminists have much more clearly defined goals, for instance. Unfortunately, those feminists who wield disproportionate influence among the broader public, i.e. rich white women, are the ones who define the movement's public goals. Conveniently, famous public feminists like badass Hillary Clinton and boss-babe Sheryl Sandberg push a neoliberal feminism that precludes any meaningful change. And, due to the recuperation of feminism by neoliberal elites, the public perception of feminism is one of a pro-capitalist, status-quo movement. Essentially, the average person views a feminist utopia as "this, but more women".

Mainstream feminism's adherence to the status quo extends beyond the economic sector, dipping its fingers into culture, politics, and international relations as well. The early successes of feminism gave the movement an undeniable cultural significance and granted credence to anyone who donned the sacred title. However, because of the mission drift over the past decades, that means the name of feminism has been used to dehumanize trans people, target muslims, and soften the image of oppressive western militarism.

Now, this all may seem as petty and semantic as right-wing arguments about the wage gap, but my problem is that the public image of feminism drowns out the smaller movements that have real change in mind. Words have meaning and meaning drifts; the right wing understands this and constantly appropriates left-wing language to pull in centrists. In the same way that socialism was redefined in 1920s Germany to pacify centrists, feminism is being redefined to maintain a neoliberal status quo that preserves the classist structures the first waves of feminism fought to topple. "Feminism" had a good run, but the term has been coopted by the very people it fought against. It's time to abandon it and move on as intersectionalists, anarchists, or, hell, anything else (not humanists, that's been appropriated, too).
gpt
If you are forced to change your name every time someone uses it in a way you dislike, you will never be able to keep a name for longer than a year, and that's a horrible branding problem.

Plus, given that the first wave of feminism was pretty racist, it seems ridiculous to claim that Hillary Clinton isn't a 'true feminist' because she's neoliberal.