Of course "feminism" isn't a unified lockstep movement.

But is there a thing, let's call it "pop feminism", which is widespread enough and whose adherents share enough basic ideas and positions, that we can usefully predicate things of it? Absolutely. And, well, that's the problem.

For example, when I see people use terms like "patriarchy" in earnest, I tend to grimace a bit. Not because I think they're crazy radical idiots, but because I think they're dangerously behind the times. The concept of unilateral patriarchy (i.e., a system in which most/all advantages based on gender accrue to men while most/all disadvantages based on gender accrue to women) is something like thirty years out of date at this point. We know now that the enemy is gender essentialism, which rigid, constrained roles and systemic advantages/disadvantages emerge from. We also know now that it's not a unidirectional oppression -- the resulting roles have aspects which harm people of all genders, and give at least some advantages to people of all genders.

But for every one person who gets this there are a thousand, or more, who just read sites like Jezebel, or feminism-related tags on Tumblr/Facebook, and end up imbibing pop-feminism ideas that are woefully out of touch with what we now actually know about gender in our society. What's worse, those ideas tend to reinforce essentialist gender roles rather than seek to overturn them.

The wage gap, currently being argued in the usual stupid way in another front-page thread, is actually a wonderful example of this. Research has shown, time and again, that much of the gap results from women being assigned, by society as a whole, a "childbearer/caregiver" role. And the consequences are clear. Women are more likely to work part-time, women who work full-time work fewer hours and less overtime, women actively seek out "child-friendly" workplaces, women start out with relative earning parity but it falls off a cliff once they have or start thinking about having children, a whole raft of stuff that adds up really really quickly.

A real solution to this would be to throw out the essentialism and the notion that child-rearing is "women's work". A real solution would seek to push women out of automatically assuming that bearing and raising children is a vitally important life goal, and would seek to push men out of automatically assuming their role doesn't involve caring for kids. A real solution would question basic ideas about what a successful life looks like and throw out any and all assumptions about "I am of this gender, therefore I should desire that"

But pop feminism doesn't do any of that. Instead it assumes that being a woman is mostly identical with wanting to have children and be their primary caregiver. So pop-feminist articles focus on how to "have it all", how to "balance" raising two kids with working 80-hour weeks at a law firm or running your own business, and argue that the important thing is to provide things like on-site day-care and generous maternal-leave policies to ensure women can keep right on performing the same rigid role they've had imposed on them for centuries.

What's more, we know these policies really don't work. There are countries which have implemented them, and they still see drastic drop-offs of women's lifetime earnings post-childbirth. What those policies do really well is make it easier to slide back into that role of "raising children is what I'm really supposed to do with my life".

But rather than attack the real problem, and ask the real, really hard questions about gender roles and how to overturn them, most people who identify as "feminist" just forward and share and retweet the same old pop-feminism drivel. And if you believe there isn't a relatively large group of people who identify that way and do exactly that, with relative ideological unity in terms of underlying assumptions, then I just don't know what Internet you're spending time on.