The Feminist Fourth Wave
The Feminist Fourth Wave
Where to begin? Well I guess the best place is to define what we mean by a "feminist wave". What is a wave? Well for my purposes here, this will be about goings on in my country, the United States, though many of the events overlap with related happenings in many other countries in and around the same time frame. With that established though, it's common to see the term "third wave" used more to describe what's seen as an ongoing period of liberal consensus in the feminist movement that began sometime in the 1980s and is argued to persist today, so it's all one continuous thing, defined by perceived ideology, in this way of thinking. I think this perspective is narrow and fails to account for some highly important developments over the last decade specifically. I also think it more common for people to define a feminist wave in other ways that correspond to surges of activity of some kind more than ideology. Taking both of those things into account, what's really the best way to define a wave of women's advocacy?
Definition 1. Is a wave best defined as a period wherein it's more common than usual for women (or men) to identify as feminists? Well the common historical rates of that hover around 20 to 35% of the American female population, but those can be contrasted with sudden yet short-lived drastic surges in popularity that occurred in the late 1980s (corresponding to the launch of the then-aptly-named Feminist Majority) and once again beginning by roughly early 2016 and lasting through 2023. Throughout that period, surveys on the subject found feminist identification among women generally hovering well above 40% and most often in majority territory, peaking at 61% in the summer of 2020 at the zenith of the George Floyd protests. These surge periods could be considered feminist waves, although I think it's the most narrow possible definition. (See: Gallup's historical tracking poll, 2013 Huffington Post/YouGov poll, 2015 Vox poll, 2016 Washington Post poll <-- surge begins here, 2020 Pew Research survey, 2023 American Enterprise Institute survey, 2024 YouGov poll <-- back to normal.) The surge period, which was clearly underway by early 2016, corresponds to the launch of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and to a wide swath of prominent celebrities ranging from Beyonce Knowles and Taylor Swift to Emma Watson and beyond near-simultaneously proclaiming themselves feminists and defining the term for the public as "equality of the sexes" or "gender equality", belief in that. Suddenly, most of the female population discovered that "I've been a feminist all along and didn't know it!" because equality in the abstract is always popular whether feminist identification is or not. Feminist identification fades from popularity, by contrast, when it becomes more common for the public to perceive it as non-egalitarian.
Definition 2. A more common definition of a feminist wave though would be a period of measurable uptick in street and (these days) online activism. This definition traces the beginning of the most recent North American wave roughly to the infamous SlutWalks of 2011 and its zenith by this metric could be surmised as 2017: a year that began with the first Women's March becoming the most-attended single-day protest action in American history up to that point and ended with Time magazine naming the Me Too movement their Person of the Year. "Feminism" was also the most-searched term in Webster's Dictionary that year. Other arguably related 2017 trivia includes that, for example, all three of the highest-earning Hollywood blockbusters of that year (in the U.S. anyway) had female lead characters for the first and so far only time since 1958. An elevated scale of women's protest continued in subsequent years, but with dropping attendance. The start of the second Trump term this year was marked by a renaming of the Women's March event to "People's March", i.e. no longer women-centric, and drew just 25,000 or so attendees, in comparison to the several million of the original version from '17.
Definition 3. A perhaps still more aesthetic and clarifying definition might be according to political cycles though. Frankly, I think you'll find that political culture has a way of being reset, and therefore shaped to some considerable degree, by elections. When one party wins the presidency, for example, suddenly the opposition party tends to see a surge of public interest and popularity, along with the ideas that are viewed as corresponding to those parties. For example, left wing political opinions, vaguely and broadly defined, are seeing an upswing in popularity right now here in the U.S. since Trump's election. But while history may rhyme with itself, it doesn't repeat, and so no two periods are totally alike; not even two periods of liberal upsurge. The current one doesn't seem to be benefiting the women's movement much, for example, as feminists are commonly blamed for Trump's victory last year and there is seen to be a need for a greater focus on economic populism to better reach the working class. Anyway, by this metric we could define the fourth feminist wave as beginning back at the start of 2007 with the election of Nancy Pelosi to the position of Speaker of the House (a genuinely monumental and unprecedented historical advancement for female representation in the government at the time) and concluding with the defeat of Kamala Harris by Donald Trump last year, with arguably peak period of 2016. In 2016, for example, the Democrats had a female party chair (Debbie Wasserman Schultz), a female presidential nominee for the first time ever (Hillary Clinton), and a female party leader in the House of Representatives (the aforementioned Nancy Pelosi). Since that time, all of that has been reversed and we are now back to all men all the time, at least at the top. Essentially, after Pelosi was first chosen as Speaker of the House, it became more common for women to run for president, yet today it feels inescapably unlikely that we will see another female nominee for the highest office in the land in the foreseeable future after back-to-back defeats, let alone the election of an actual female president. While this definition can be symbolically useful in a lot ways though, it's obviously ultimately a bit superficial.
Definition 4. My personally preferred definition of a feminist wave though is an uptick in intellectual ferment around women's advancement. By this broadest definition of all, the fourth feminist wave could be thought of as beginning as far back as 2004 with the launch of Jessica and Vanessa Valenti's Feministing blog (which you may remember for popularizing the term "sl*t-shaming", among other things); an event that served as the dawn of the feminist blogosphere that eventually (from 2012) included the radfem-adjacent Feminist Current blog I became absorbed with for a time myself, along with many others (the most prominent, of course, being the well-known Jezebel blog (founded in 2007, during the time of Hillary Clinton's first presidential run, for historical perspective) that's now on life support after a couple of sales, but still survives today). Online musing, engagement, and activism has been a defining feature of the feminist fourth wave that has distinguished the whole of it from earlier ones and significantly impacted the course of its development. By this final possible definition, the fourth feminist wave could be said to have peaked roughly around 2017-22, beginning with the #MeToo movement and running through the glory days of r/FemaleDatingStrategy (one of my favorite chapters of the recent wave) before slowly starting to recede more into the background amid emerging birth rate panic. Oh yeah, there were also influential books and papers corresponding to this wave, but I find that their significance pales in comparison to the online stuff overall.
Hmm, I've actually run out of spare time to complete my thoughts this evening. Well, I'll have to update this another time then. Sorry for the incompleteness! But to give you an extremely brief snapshot of where I plan to go with this analysis, here are the period chapters I intend to (lightly!) sketch in the future here on this thread:
Chapter 1: Sexy and Woke (beginning-2015)
Chapter 2: High-Value Dating (2015-22)
Chapter 3: Anti-Natalism (2022-...arguably present, but kinda more like 2024)
Chapter 4??? Replacement of Liberal Feminism With Liberal Masculinism/Universal Pro-Natalism??? <-- Might not do this "chapter", as it's tough to sketch and I may be wrong.
Thanks for reading! See you when I get around to adding more!
EDIT 1
(I make no promises about when I'll finish this project, as it's just something I'm doing for my idea of fun, but I'm adding a bit more this evening.)
Chapter 1: Sexy and Woke
Whether we define this wave as beginning in 2004 with the founding of the Feministing blog or in 2011 with the first SlutWalk or somewhere in-between, one thing about it is clear: the underlying mindset behind it started really right from where the feminist third wave (essentially late '80s/90s feminism) left off. It's choice of imagery, naming and focus, was sexually charged in a manner that proponents call "owning your sexuality" and the rest of us call engaging in self-objectification so men will like you better, and its ideals leaned heavily individualistic. The movement's focus was on reaching a new generation of young women where they were. A blogosphere that frequently revolved around fashion talk and celebrity gossip and other stereotypical feminine vanities emerged to accomplish this feat, with an order of pro-choice commentary and complaints about a narrowly-defined rape culture thrown in on the side, all presented with an air of wit and style befitting a hip young crowd. This was minimal feminism and maximal outreach, perhaps in a certain way appropriate to a moment in time when the women's movement was very unpopular. It was, after all, the age of Spike TV, Ignite Ministries, The Sopranos, Grand Theft Auto, being a P.I.M.P., the peak of Hooters' and Howard Stern's popularity, the age of Twilight and "suicide girls" (remember those?) etc. etc. etc. Christina Aguilera was getting "Stripped" and George W. Bush was a popular president for about half the decade. Epstein was doing his pedo island thing and nobody cared. Feminists were constantly lambasted in the video gaming publications that I consumed and on many popular television programs. That was the cultural backdrop. Just about anything was an improvement over that climate and it followed logically in a way that the up-and-coming feminists of the new scene felt compelled to be apologetic about feminism's angrier, more principled past (what with its unfashionably prudish concerns about the sexual objectification of women's bodies and whatnot) and to embrace aspects of the culture that surrounded them in order to be relevant. This was not for me.
The significance of this moment in time also overlapping with the dawn of the tube porn phenomenon really cannot be overstated. Before 2005 when YouTube came out, the internet was already increasing the volume and commonality of men's pornography consumption and to a far more limited degree women's as well, but contemporaneous surveys made it clear that it remained a small minority of both populations (some 25% of men and 5% of women as of 2002) regularly viewing porn (as in at least monthly) because the internet's main pornographic offerings were all pay sites, often owned by the traditional industry giants (Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler) and the free content that was available online was really all just ads for those pay sites. But once YouTube established a new streaming video concept, inevitably a new generation of pornographers seized upon the new format and ultimately this led to the de facto replacement of the traditional pornographers with today's free video streaming sites like PornHub and XVideos. Over the intervening decade or so that this transition was taking place, the commonality of at-least-monthly pornography consumption among American men and women alike more than doubled, reaching majority territory among men, and the median age of first exposure dropped to as low as 11 in the (deliberate) complete absence of age verification systems. These developments were contemporaneously dubbed a new sexual revolution by the press and celebrated with minimal criticism in most liberal publications. The larger media climate seemed to feel jealous and need of getting in on the action to stay connected to the mindset of the new generation. Media in general became noticeably more sexualized, particularly when it came to women's bodies.
EDIT 2
I highlight this backdrop to make some sense for you of what I liked to call the pornification of the feminist movement, which found expression in and around this time frame in many ways. The SlutWalk movement. "Free the Nipple". In France and eastern Europe, even an ostensibly radical feminist group was getting attention by using female public nudity as protest tactic. (Spoiler: Femen was created by a man. I'll be you couldn't have guessed that.) Theoretically these were women's advocacy movements, but I think few people remember any such content. For example, the SlutWalks began in April of 2011 in Toronto after a local cop officer suggested that that if they wish to avoid sexual violence then "women should avoid dressing like sluts", so in theory these were anti-rape protests. Predictably though, the main thing I remember from it all was scenes of men ogling, laughing at, and photographing scantly-clad marchers, perhaps for future masturbatory purposes or other humiliation. Free the Nipple, meanwhile, was a campaign created in 2012 during pre-production of a film of the same name with the goal of legalizing public toplessness for women of the kind New York authorized around 1990. Of course, so far zero New York women, to my knowledge, have been stupid enough to take advantage of this right and just can't imagine why. And Femen...sighs...well it was just sad to see even the supposedly radical feminist movement transparently being used as a parasitic, immensely hypocritical vehicle of male sexual exploitation of women.
The development that most epitomized all of this to me occurred in 2013 after Robin Thicke released a song called Blurred Lines about how no doesn't really mean no, which became the pop hit of the year and featured a straight-up softcore porn online music video featuring an abundance of lady nipples, skin-tones panties, and degrading positioning. (Spoiler: All the men were fully dressed.) One Miley Cyrus helped him perform the rapist international anthem, appropriately attired, at that year's MTV Video Music Awards, whereupon she, and she alone, became the subject of the predictable public backlash. In response, Cyrus defended herself by suddenly proclaiming herself "one of the biggest feminists" and joined Free the Nipple to prove it. This entire dynamic exemplifies the sheer stupidity and rarely-concealed misogyny of this whole era in American culture.
NOTE: Much more to follow! Stay tuned for more edits!
Impress Polly
Jul 7 2025, 6:32 PM #1I regard this as a past-tense phenomenon anyway. Being a certifiable nerd who enjoys doing things like this, I just felt like providing a broad and general overview of, and hopefully some perspective on, the major goings on in and around the women's movement over the last couple decades or so, which mostly overlaps with the time that I've been involved. Consider this a loose outline of the history that's taken simply from my own viewpoint and experience, and feel free to share your own perspectives, experiences, disagreements, all of that!
Where to begin? Well I guess the best place is to define what we mean by a "feminist wave". What is a wave? Well for my purposes here, this will be about goings on in my country, the United States, though many of the events overlap with related happenings in many other countries in and around the same time frame. With that established though, it's common to see the term "third wave" used more to describe what's seen as an ongoing period of liberal consensus in the feminist movement that began sometime in the 1980s and is argued to persist today, so it's all one continuous thing, defined by perceived ideology, in this way of thinking. I think this perspective is narrow and fails to account for some highly important developments over the last decade specifically. I also think it more common for people to define a feminist wave in other ways that correspond to surges of activity of some kind more than ideology. Taking both of those things into account, what's really the best way to define a wave of women's advocacy?
Definition 1. Is a wave best defined as a period wherein it's more common than usual for women (or men) to identify as feminists? Well the common historical rates of that hover around 20 to 35% of the American female population, but those can be contrasted with sudden yet short-lived drastic surges in popularity that occurred in the late 1980s (corresponding to the launch of the then-aptly-named Feminist Majority) and once again beginning by roughly early 2016 and lasting through 2023. Throughout that period, surveys on the subject found feminist identification among women generally hovering well above 40% and most often in majority territory, peaking at 61% in the summer of 2020 at the zenith of the George Floyd protests. These surge periods could be considered feminist waves, although I think it's the most narrow possible definition. (See: Gallup's historical tracking poll, 2013 Huffington Post/YouGov poll, 2015 Vox poll, 2016 Washington Post poll <-- surge begins here, 2020 Pew Research survey, 2023 American Enterprise Institute survey, 2024 YouGov poll <-- back to normal.) The surge period, which was clearly underway by early 2016, corresponds to the launch of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and to a wide swath of prominent celebrities ranging from Beyonce Knowles and Taylor Swift to Emma Watson and beyond near-simultaneously proclaiming themselves feminists and defining the term for the public as "equality of the sexes" or "gender equality", belief in that. Suddenly, most of the female population discovered that "I've been a feminist all along and didn't know it!" because equality in the abstract is always popular whether feminist identification is or not. Feminist identification fades from popularity, by contrast, when it becomes more common for the public to perceive it as non-egalitarian.
Definition 2. A more common definition of a feminist wave though would be a period of measurable uptick in street and (these days) online activism. This definition traces the beginning of the most recent North American wave roughly to the infamous SlutWalks of 2011 and its zenith by this metric could be surmised as 2017: a year that began with the first Women's March becoming the most-attended single-day protest action in American history up to that point and ended with Time magazine naming the Me Too movement their Person of the Year. "Feminism" was also the most-searched term in Webster's Dictionary that year. Other arguably related 2017 trivia includes that, for example, all three of the highest-earning Hollywood blockbusters of that year (in the U.S. anyway) had female lead characters for the first and so far only time since 1958. An elevated scale of women's protest continued in subsequent years, but with dropping attendance. The start of the second Trump term this year was marked by a renaming of the Women's March event to "People's March", i.e. no longer women-centric, and drew just 25,000 or so attendees, in comparison to the several million of the original version from '17.
Definition 3. A perhaps still more aesthetic and clarifying definition might be according to political cycles though. Frankly, I think you'll find that political culture has a way of being reset, and therefore shaped to some considerable degree, by elections. When one party wins the presidency, for example, suddenly the opposition party tends to see a surge of public interest and popularity, along with the ideas that are viewed as corresponding to those parties. For example, left wing political opinions, vaguely and broadly defined, are seeing an upswing in popularity right now here in the U.S. since Trump's election. But while history may rhyme with itself, it doesn't repeat, and so no two periods are totally alike; not even two periods of liberal upsurge. The current one doesn't seem to be benefiting the women's movement much, for example, as feminists are commonly blamed for Trump's victory last year and there is seen to be a need for a greater focus on economic populism to better reach the working class. Anyway, by this metric we could define the fourth feminist wave as beginning back at the start of 2007 with the election of Nancy Pelosi to the position of Speaker of the House (a genuinely monumental and unprecedented historical advancement for female representation in the government at the time) and concluding with the defeat of Kamala Harris by Donald Trump last year, with arguably peak period of 2016. In 2016, for example, the Democrats had a female party chair (Debbie Wasserman Schultz), a female presidential nominee for the first time ever (Hillary Clinton), and a female party leader in the House of Representatives (the aforementioned Nancy Pelosi). Since that time, all of that has been reversed and we are now back to all men all the time, at least at the top. Essentially, after Pelosi was first chosen as Speaker of the House, it became more common for women to run for president, yet today it feels inescapably unlikely that we will see another female nominee for the highest office in the land in the foreseeable future after back-to-back defeats, let alone the election of an actual female president. While this definition can be symbolically useful in a lot ways though, it's obviously ultimately a bit superficial.
Definition 4. My personally preferred definition of a feminist wave though is an uptick in intellectual ferment around women's advancement. By this broadest definition of all, the fourth feminist wave could be thought of as beginning as far back as 2004 with the launch of Jessica and Vanessa Valenti's Feministing blog (which you may remember for popularizing the term "sl*t-shaming", among other things); an event that served as the dawn of the feminist blogosphere that eventually (from 2012) included the radfem-adjacent Feminist Current blog I became absorbed with for a time myself, along with many others (the most prominent, of course, being the well-known Jezebel blog (founded in 2007, during the time of Hillary Clinton's first presidential run, for historical perspective) that's now on life support after a couple of sales, but still survives today). Online musing, engagement, and activism has been a defining feature of the feminist fourth wave that has distinguished the whole of it from earlier ones and significantly impacted the course of its development. By this final possible definition, the fourth feminist wave could be said to have peaked roughly around 2017-22, beginning with the #MeToo movement and running through the glory days of r/FemaleDatingStrategy (one of my favorite chapters of the recent wave) before slowly starting to recede more into the background amid emerging birth rate panic. Oh yeah, there were also influential books and papers corresponding to this wave, but I find that their significance pales in comparison to the online stuff overall.
Hmm, I've actually run out of spare time to complete my thoughts this evening. Well, I'll have to update this another time then. Sorry for the incompleteness! But to give you an extremely brief snapshot of where I plan to go with this analysis, here are the period chapters I intend to (lightly!) sketch in the future here on this thread:
Chapter 1: Sexy and Woke (beginning-2015)
Chapter 2: High-Value Dating (2015-22)
Chapter 3: Anti-Natalism (2022-...arguably present, but kinda more like 2024)
Chapter 4??? Replacement of Liberal Feminism With Liberal Masculinism/Universal Pro-Natalism??? <-- Might not do this "chapter", as it's tough to sketch and I may be wrong.
Thanks for reading! See you when I get around to adding more!
EDIT 1
(I make no promises about when I'll finish this project, as it's just something I'm doing for my idea of fun, but I'm adding a bit more this evening.)
Chapter 1: Sexy and Woke
Whether we define this wave as beginning in 2004 with the founding of the Feministing blog or in 2011 with the first SlutWalk or somewhere in-between, one thing about it is clear: the underlying mindset behind it started really right from where the feminist third wave (essentially late '80s/90s feminism) left off. It's choice of imagery, naming and focus, was sexually charged in a manner that proponents call "owning your sexuality" and the rest of us call engaging in self-objectification so men will like you better, and its ideals leaned heavily individualistic. The movement's focus was on reaching a new generation of young women where they were. A blogosphere that frequently revolved around fashion talk and celebrity gossip and other stereotypical feminine vanities emerged to accomplish this feat, with an order of pro-choice commentary and complaints about a narrowly-defined rape culture thrown in on the side, all presented with an air of wit and style befitting a hip young crowd. This was minimal feminism and maximal outreach, perhaps in a certain way appropriate to a moment in time when the women's movement was very unpopular. It was, after all, the age of Spike TV, Ignite Ministries, The Sopranos, Grand Theft Auto, being a P.I.M.P., the peak of Hooters' and Howard Stern's popularity, the age of Twilight and "suicide girls" (remember those?) etc. etc. etc. Christina Aguilera was getting "Stripped" and George W. Bush was a popular president for about half the decade. Epstein was doing his pedo island thing and nobody cared. Feminists were constantly lambasted in the video gaming publications that I consumed and on many popular television programs. That was the cultural backdrop. Just about anything was an improvement over that climate and it followed logically in a way that the up-and-coming feminists of the new scene felt compelled to be apologetic about feminism's angrier, more principled past (what with its unfashionably prudish concerns about the sexual objectification of women's bodies and whatnot) and to embrace aspects of the culture that surrounded them in order to be relevant. This was not for me.
The significance of this moment in time also overlapping with the dawn of the tube porn phenomenon really cannot be overstated. Before 2005 when YouTube came out, the internet was already increasing the volume and commonality of men's pornography consumption and to a far more limited degree women's as well, but contemporaneous surveys made it clear that it remained a small minority of both populations (some 25% of men and 5% of women as of 2002) regularly viewing porn (as in at least monthly) because the internet's main pornographic offerings were all pay sites, often owned by the traditional industry giants (Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler) and the free content that was available online was really all just ads for those pay sites. But once YouTube established a new streaming video concept, inevitably a new generation of pornographers seized upon the new format and ultimately this led to the de facto replacement of the traditional pornographers with today's free video streaming sites like PornHub and XVideos. Over the intervening decade or so that this transition was taking place, the commonality of at-least-monthly pornography consumption among American men and women alike more than doubled, reaching majority territory among men, and the median age of first exposure dropped to as low as 11 in the (deliberate) complete absence of age verification systems. These developments were contemporaneously dubbed a new sexual revolution by the press and celebrated with minimal criticism in most liberal publications. The larger media climate seemed to feel jealous and need of getting in on the action to stay connected to the mindset of the new generation. Media in general became noticeably more sexualized, particularly when it came to women's bodies.
EDIT 2
I highlight this backdrop to make some sense for you of what I liked to call the pornification of the feminist movement, which found expression in and around this time frame in many ways. The SlutWalk movement. "Free the Nipple". In France and eastern Europe, even an ostensibly radical feminist group was getting attention by using female public nudity as protest tactic. (Spoiler: Femen was created by a man. I'll be you couldn't have guessed that.) Theoretically these were women's advocacy movements, but I think few people remember any such content. For example, the SlutWalks began in April of 2011 in Toronto after a local cop officer suggested that that if they wish to avoid sexual violence then "women should avoid dressing like sluts", so in theory these were anti-rape protests. Predictably though, the main thing I remember from it all was scenes of men ogling, laughing at, and photographing scantly-clad marchers, perhaps for future masturbatory purposes or other humiliation. Free the Nipple, meanwhile, was a campaign created in 2012 during pre-production of a film of the same name with the goal of legalizing public toplessness for women of the kind New York authorized around 1990. Of course, so far zero New York women, to my knowledge, have been stupid enough to take advantage of this right and just can't imagine why. And Femen...sighs...well it was just sad to see even the supposedly radical feminist movement transparently being used as a parasitic, immensely hypocritical vehicle of male sexual exploitation of women.
The development that most epitomized all of this to me occurred in 2013 after Robin Thicke released a song called Blurred Lines about how no doesn't really mean no, which became the pop hit of the year and featured a straight-up softcore porn online music video featuring an abundance of lady nipples, skin-tones panties, and degrading positioning. (Spoiler: All the men were fully dressed.) One Miley Cyrus helped him perform the rapist international anthem, appropriately attired, at that year's MTV Video Music Awards, whereupon she, and she alone, became the subject of the predictable public backlash. In response, Cyrus defended herself by suddenly proclaiming herself "one of the biggest feminists" and joined Free the Nipple to prove it. This entire dynamic exemplifies the sheer stupidity and rarely-concealed misogyny of this whole era in American culture.
NOTE: Much more to follow! Stay tuned for more edits!