What happened to the salience of feminism?

[Beet]

It lost. The social justice crowd decided that race was more important than gender. Gamergate happened. Then Trump happened. There was an attempt to make rape the biggest feminist issue, (perhaps because it's the most emotional?) and there came to be a collective realization that if a guy rapes a girl in her bedroom and they both know each other, no one can prove anything and he can basically get away with it. Then RBG died and Roe was overturned, leaving women with fewer rights than 50 years ago. For the first time since perhaps the Gilded Age, and the first time ever for women, a major civil rights advance was rolled back. The left-wing narrative of progress was shattered. Then, left wing activism in general went into abeyance after 2020. Public opinion going 100-to-1 for Johnny Depp in his defamation trial proved that #MeToo was dead. That is too many blows for any one movement to absorb. A lot of feminists took the opportunity of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, and subsequent lifting of censorship that was protecting them, to basically fade away.

If it comes back, my guess it would come back in a more Old Left form. More prudish about sex, still taking a back seat to race. One thing that is coming to be understood is that feminism is not compatible with the sexual marketplace, where women are valued for their beauty and men are valued for things that they can do. That will always create incentives for women to underachieve. An entire generation was misled by Madonna looking like she was in control of her sexuality and that was the path to success. Monogamy is best for gender equality. Of course, the left will eventually realize that class, and perhaps nationality, is more important than race.

Overall, I think a lot of people on the left will conclude the late 20th century post-structuralist school of nihilism, represented by the Frankfurt School, was counter-productive and reactionary. The New Left has been the dominant force on the left now for 70 years, and 50 of those years have been clear decline and Right-wing ascendancy. Whereas the previous 200 years before that, the left was continually on the rise. So the Frankfurt School and post-structuralism in general was the worst thing to happen to the left.