This is such a great article.

I used to be the head admin of a Facebook group called Being Feminist for almost 6 years. At its peak it had 120 000 members. I would spend up to three hours a day on it, searching the internet for feminist articles and news from around the world, and I thought initially that I was doing a good thing for the world and for the movement.

Eventually I got burnt out, and I also got disillusioned with "online feminism TM" in the way you describe .

Over time I noticed that simple memes about male tears would get thousands of likes and shares, while news about how climate change is affecting women in the Global South disproportionately would get like 8 likes and no shares. Articles about Taylor Swift's problematic tweets would get far more attention and energy from so-called feminists, than serious issues like FGM or poverty.

I started my work with the page in 2012 and in 2013 feminism went viral online, and media companies decided that feminism made good content. Unfortunately this contributed to the overall watering down of feminism into increasingly trivial issues. "Is lipstick feminist or not feminist", "Are you a bad feminist if you shave your legs", "Is Captain Marvel a feminist icon or not", "Should we cancel the Lord of the Rings for not having enough female characters" etc. And I noticed that all across the internet the attention of feminists were diverted from serious issues to increasingly fighting amongst each other over these trivial issues.

Then intersectionality, which I initially thought was a brilliant concept (and still do in its original meaning), became warped so that feminists started to fight each other over whether or not they were themselves oppressors. I was almost cancelled because I used the term "biological female" in a post about endometriosis (even when I acknowledged that trans men could have endometriosis). Increasingly my job on the page was less about banning actual sexist trolls, and more about trying to make peace between different feminists who agreed on 95% of issues and yet hated each other for the 5% difference.

The collective energy of feminism was increasingly being wasted in all this in-fighting, and it seemed (and still does seem) as though subconsciously a lot of feminists would prefer to spend their effort on these minor issues because they can feel as though it's easy to "win" and feel like you make a difference when you're talking about celebrity tweets and popular culture, cancelling someone for not being aware enough of their cis privilege, or for not also being a socialist as well as a feminist. Is it anti-feminist to not vote for Bernie Sanders? Is it anti-feminist to not be vegan? Is it anti-feminist to compare human's treatment of cows to rape? Is it anti-feminist to say "innocent until proven guilty"? Etc etc.

Eventually I turned away from online activism, and now try and focus more on the people in my immediate life, can I help them become more open minded and tolerant? I think I can still make an impact for good, just in a different way than I thought.

Also I don't want to live my life constantly mistrustful of every man and scrutinising every action through the lens of patriarchy. I want to enjoy life. I want to be happy. And so I am.