What happened to the salience of feminism?

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

I'm surprised no one's mentioned (either the perception of or the reality of) #MeToo overreach and resulting backlash, which was BLM backlash two or three years before BLM backlash was BLM backlash. Left-wing sociocultural movements really need to start accounting for this pattern in their strategy.

It's just harder to have any form of message discipline in the social media era. We're watching this in real time with the pro-Palestine left. Social media is designed to elevate increasingly radical takes. Some of these get adopted and absorbed into the mainstream of the movement, but those that don't still get outsized attention in a way that paints the entire movement negatively. I'm not sure what the solution is, although getting teenagers off social media would be a good first step.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Nothing quite like a bunch of men having a good old chat about what went wrong with feminism is there, chaps?

Nothing like a pretentious Al post to remind you what topics you are and aren’t allowed to talk about.

Really hard for me to imagine how someone could post something like "men can't talk about feminism" unless you believe that men can't be feminists, which, lmao

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

I sidestepped the specifics of "overreaches" of feminism at first because I actually don't think there has been that much overreach from the movement.

But as long as Beet wants to cite the Depp-Heard trial, it's worth pointing out there was some pretty startling overreach in response to that specific trial. Not overreach by "feminism" (Crumpets is right - not really sure you can treat "feminism" as a singular united movement anymore) but certainly an overreach by feminists, including, yes, many male feminists. It was pretty gross seeing so many people treat it as a disaster for the movement that Heard be found responsible for abusive behavior - a pretty clear indication that either "power dynamics" made it impossible for Heard to be capable of inflicting abuse, or that her specific abusive behavior needed to be given a pass for the sake of the entire movement (or some thoughtless combination of both). It was an uncommon perspective, but definitely one I heard from multiple of my (highly academic/nonprofit progressive) friends make, as well as slants used by major news outlets who reported on the story.

So I wouldn't call it an "overreach of feminism" but it certainly showed some adherents in the movement were much more interested in strategy and maintenance of power than it was in any form of principle or justice.