How Feminism Made Men The Villains
On rage, reason, fanaticism, and remembering that liberation isn’t a performance – how feminism lost the plot, and why I’m still here for the mess
I’ve always thought of extreme feminists as very anxious women with an above-average need for dominance, like corporate CEOs, but with tote bags that say Smash the Patriarchy and an existential crisis about who should pay for dinner. They claim to fight for equality, yet somehow always sound like they are drafting a hostage negotiation letter to humanity, where the ransom is never quite clear but definitely involves boycotting The Lord of the Rings for its suspicious lack of female orcs in leadership positions.
It’s not that I’m anti-feminist. Quite the opposite. I’m the woman who read Simone de Beauvoir at sixteen, rolled her eyes at being told to cross her legs “like a lady”, and still keeps a mental tally of every time a man repeated something I said in a meeting only to be praised for it as if my words only became credible once laundered through a deeper voice. But here’s where I risk losing both camps: I don’t think men are the enemy. In fact, I wrote this essay with them in mind, too. Not the cartoon villains, not the trolls… the real men. The ones who are trying, failing, adjusting, confused, exhausted, curious. The ones who want to engage but don’t know how anymore. Because feminism, at least the version I believed in, was never supposed to be a closed system. It was supposed to be oxygen. A space where women could breathe fully, yes, but also where men didn’t have to hold their breath just to stay in the room. And somewhere along the way, that changed. The air got thicker. The rules got stranger. And the conversation stopped sounding like a dialogue and started sounding like an accusation.
But here’s where it started to unravel for me, not the ideals, but the atmosphere. At some point, breathing wasn’t enough. I was expected to yell. And not just speak up, but perform the proper rage… loudly, relentlessly, on cue. Silence was suddenly complicity. Uncertainty was betrayal. Ambivalence? Treason in heels. Feminism, once expansive and oxygen-rich, began to feel like an audition. The role: Most Righteously Furious. The lines: memorised. The tone: unwavering. There were days I couldn’t tell if we were liberating ourselves or competing in a kind of ideological talent show – who could be the most offended, the most fluent in buzzwords, the least forgiving of nuance. Rage became the main character, and if you didn’t feed it daily, you were cast as the villain. Even, or especially, if you were a man simply trying to say the right thing in a language that kept changing. Or a woman wondering when we stopped having room for doubt.
Here’s the twist, I like men. Not as ideas, not as metaphors, not even as teaching moments but as actual people. Fallible, flawed, occasionally glorious, sometimes ridiculous. Men who fumble with their feelings, say the wrong thing at the worst time, get awkward when you cry, and still try to fix the unfixable just to feel useful. Men who hold their breath before asking if you are mad, because they don’t have the emotional agility to guess. Men who send you articles about things you already know, because it’s their nervous way of saying “I want to connect”. Men who touch your lower back in a crowd not to claim you, but to make sure you are safe. I’ve loved them, argued with them, laughed until it hurt with them, slept next to them. I’ve feared some. Forgiven others. I’ve asked them to open jars, yes, but also to listen when I unravel, to stay when I push away, to take the damn call even when it’s hard.
Apparently, this last bit, asking for help, needing a man, trusting one, is a betrayal of feminist principles now. A silent scandal. Admitting that I enjoy the solidity of a man’s arm across my back when I’ve had a bad day, or that I like the way some men take charge in a crisis without turning it into theatre, these things are now read as weak, regressive, problematic. Asking a man to carry a suitcase or walk you home isn’t only a gesture anymore; it’s a political dilemma. Being attracted to masculinity? Stockholm syndrome. Wanting to be protected? Internalised patriarchal conditioning. Heaven forbid I say that I like the way some men smell… that specific alchemy of leather, cognac, and cedarwood, with a trace of late-night city air and whatever perfume was gifted to them five Christmases ago but still works. A scent not curated, but lived in. The quiet confidence of aged paper and worn denim. It’s not polished or perfumed, but it’s familiar, like the seat of an old car that knows where you’ve been. That scent says: I’ve made mistakes, but I’ll carry the heavy thing and not complain. And to pretend that doesn’t move me, or that it shouldn’t, feels less like progress and more like pretending to be a species I’m not. We have reached a point where some corners of feminism mistake vulnerability for treason, and interdependence for oppression. As if the goal was to become invulnerable, not human.
And yet, here’s the part I say “quietly” (on Substack), because I don’t want to be burned alive in the group chat, I understand why it got this way. When you have spent centuries being property, then punchline, then politely ignored, it makes sense to swing too far the other way. The trouble is, once you start building ideology out of overcorrection, you don’t end up with justice. You end up with dogma in drag.
Feminism, at its root, is radical only in the sense that it insists women are people. That’s it! Not goddesses, not perpetual victims, not vengeful Furies, not pocket-sized political statements designed to make brands feel relevant during Women’s History Month. Just… people. Capable of being brilliant and petty, nurturing and cruel, tender and manipulative, fierce and boring… all within the span of a Tuesday. It’s about equal rights, equal agency, equal weight in the decisions that shape our lives, our bodies, our freedoms. But when feminism becomes a kind of ideological purity cult where disagreement is framed as betrayal, nuance is treated as cowardice, and complexity is dismissed as internalised misogyny, then we have left the terrain of liberation and wandered into something far more brittle. Something fundamentalist.
And extremism, even in stilettos, is still extremism. The mistake we often make is believing that only hateful ideas can become dangerous when taken to the extreme. But even good ideas – justice, equality, dignity – can rot if forced into the rigidity of fanaticism. Because extremism always requires simplification. It feeds on a flattened world, one where context is irrelevant, motives are always suspect, and any deviation from orthodoxy is met with social excommunication. I’ve seen it happen… intelligent, thoughtful women too afraid to admit they still want to be loved by men. Or that they don’t want to lead the charge, that they are tired, that they don’t have the energy to rage today. I’ve seen men with feminist values tiptoe around conversation like a hostage negotiator in a minefield, terrified that a poorly phrased question will be read as evidence of a hidden agenda.
Extremism doesn’t build movements. It builds walls. And in the name of protecting women, some of the more militant strains of feminism have started to isolate us instead - from men, from each other, from the very messiness that makes us human. It becomes less about expanding freedom and more about gatekeeping it. Less about trust and more about ideological surveillance. And that, ironically, begins to resemble the very power structures feminism set out to dismantle. When we trade curiosity for compliance, we don’t get progress, we get performance. And performance, as every woman knows, is exhausting.
To be clear: I know why some women get there. I have felt the incandescent rage. The way your blood turns to fire when a man interrupts you mid-sentence for the fourth time, or when you are told you are “too emotional” in the same breath that someone else’s tantrum gets labelled “assertive leadership”. I know what it’s like to sit across from a man who thinks he’s being generous by explaining your own field to you. I know what it’s like to shrink yourself just to stay safe. But I also know this: rage is a tool, not a home. You don’t build a future from an emotional bunker.
Somewhere along the way, “believing women” turned into “believing only women”, and every critique from a man, or even a woman who dated one, was suspect. It didn’t matter how gently it was worded, how thoughtful, how grounded in lived experience or concern, if it didn’t align with the current doctrine, it was dismissed as complicity at best, violence at worst. We created a feminism so allergic to contradiction, so suspicious of context, that it began to mirror the very systems it claimed to dismantle: hierarchical, punitive, puritanical. Ironically, the louder the rage machine gets, the more quietly real women disappear into its static, the women who hesitate, who doubt, who say “I’m not sure” or “Maybe I want both”. They are muted by slogans. Drowned out by the performance.
I have watched intelligent, caring, emotionally literate men freeze, and not because they are fragile, but because they no longer know what’s safe. Afraid to flirt because a compliment could be read as coercion. Afraid to joke, even clumsily, because irony has no protection under ideological absolutism. Afraid to say, “I don’t agree” because disagreement is now conflated with harm. I’ve seen men apologise for opinions they hadn’t even expressed yet. Men who no longer touch anyone, even affectionately, because the line between kindness and misconduct has been drawn in chalk and redrawn in blood. One friend told me he no longer makes eye contact at work. Another said he hesitated to give feedback to a female colleague for fear it would be seen as “mansplaining”, even though it was, quite literally, his job. These aren’t predators. These aren’t power-hungry misogynists. These are the decent men, the ones feminism should want in the room. But we have made that room so charged, so booby-trapped with unspoken expectations and shifting social rules, that even the best of them are silently backing out. And who can blame them? At a certain point, silence starts to feel safer than participation.
And honestly, some of the worst misogyny I have ever witnessed came from women. Not trolls in comment sections, but women in leadership, women at brunch, women in whisper networks and boardrooms. Women who called each other sluts or try-hards or bad mothers, sometimes with a smile so thinly stretched it could slice skin. Women who rolled their eyes at other women’s softness – too feminine. Or ambition – too masculine. Or emotional intelligence – too manipulative. I’ve seen women sabotage one another not despite feminism, but while quoting it. They used it as a cover, a shield, a brand. The feminist-as-strategist, whose politics end where personal gain begins. The one who corrects everyone else’s language but throws another woman under the bus to get five minutes closer to a man in power. The one who gives you a compliment that leaves a bruise.
I once had a colleague who proudly declared, in the middle of a post-panel dinner, that she “didn’t trust women who didn’t hate men at least a little”. I remember nodding, more out of habit than agreement. What I wanted to say, what I should have said, was that bitterness isn’t a worldview, it’s a wound that thinks it’s philosophy. But she was already sipping her drink like it was communion, certain she was righteous. And I, tired of the purity games, let it slide. Not because I couldn’t walk in heels, but because I was already walking on eggshells.
Confusing your trauma with your politics can be faintly tragic, and deeply dangerous. Yes, the pain is real. Yes, your experiences matter. And yes, the world has done harm… structural, systemic, intimate, invisible. But there is a difference between integrating your past into your worldview and using it as a weaponised lens through which everything must be interpreted, judged, and condemned. Turning your wound into your compass, into your only compass, means you’ll keep finding enemies where there might have been nuance, and reading violence into places where there might have been care clumsily expressed. It doesn’t make you brave. It makes you brittle. And brittleness isn’t strength. It’s just a more eloquent kind of fragility, the kind that hides behind citations and footnotes and graduate seminars, cloaked in a theory you can recite but can no longer see yourself outside of.
I’ve seen it play out in a hundred subtle ways. The woman who insists that all sex with men is inherently coercive and says this while casually mentioning her latest Tinder date. The activist who declares that romantic love is a patriarchal myth designed to entrap women but posts sad quotes on Instagram every time her situationship ghosts her. The influencer who calls motherhood a capitalist trap but uses her child as a prop in every brand partnership. These aren’t hypocrisies, exactly. They are symptoms of a deeper wound, one that hasn’t been metabolised, only theorised. Because real healing is inconvenient. It’s slow, humbling, full of contradiction. But theory, especially when borrowed and decontextualised, offers something seductively clean. It lets you avoid the raw, terrifying ambiguity of being a human who wants, aches, confuses power with intimacy, and sometimes says “yes” when she means “maybe”.
When your politics require constant enemies to stay alive, you start policing not only the world but yourself, and then calling that self-surveillance liberation. You can quote bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Judith Butler. You can name-drop Foucault in arguments about your ex. But if every dissenting voice becomes a threat, and every disagreement is pathologised as misogyny, you haven’t escaped oppression, you have simply internalised its methods and repackaged them in a prettier font.
What’s worse, in our quest to empower women, we sometimes infantilise them. We treat them not as fully formed moral agents navigating a complex world, but as delicate pawns in an unrelenting game of patriarchal chess, perpetually acted upon, never acting. As if they are incapable of genuine choice, only ever complicit under duress. Their agency vanishes the moment sex, ambition, power, or contradiction enters the scene. A woman regrets a sexual encounter? Patriarchy – she must have been coerced, socially conditioned, or psychologically manipulated. A woman likes being dominated in bed, or confesses that rough sex turns her on? Patriarchy again – she’s been brainwashed by porn, or worse, she’s betraying the cause by desiring the very thing she’s supposed to resist. A woman disagrees with other women, especially on social media, especially with the right credentials? Internalised patriarchy, obviously. Because we have created a conceptual trapdoor: the only permissible answer is the one that fits the narrative. Everything else is error. Or worse, betrayal.
And what a perverse irony that is, using the very language of empowerment to strip women of autonomy the moment they act unpredictably.
What happened to the woman who chooses submission with her eyes wide open, not as a product of oppression but as a gesture of trust, erotic intelligence, or aesthetic preference?
What about the woman who marries a powerful man because she loves him, not because she was seduced by wealth or status or subconsciously replaying daddy issues in heels?
What about the woman who quits her job to raise children because she wants to, not because society whispered it in her ear while she was vulnerable in the baby aisle?
There’s no space for these women in the current script unless we rewrite them as tragic figures. Tricked. Duped. Lost in the fog of patriarchal propaganda. We can’t seem to let women be both informed and contradictory, conscious and complicit, subversive and conventional, without trying to edit them for ideological consistency.
And the term patriarchy, which once had sharp, necessary teeth, has now been declawed through misuse. It’s been turned into a kind of ambient blame, like background radiation that explains everything and therefore nothing. Patriarchy isn’t your bad date. It’s not your boss being a jerk. It’s not your boyfriend not wanting to go to therapy this week. It’s a deeply entrenched socio-political structure built over millennia, one that deserves precise critique, not lazy invocation. When everything becomes patriarchy, we lose the ability to name the real thing. And worse, we replace accountability with fatalism. If all is patriarchy, then nothing can be changed… we are just characters doomed to repeat the script. But that is not empowerment. That is ideological gaslighting, dressed up as clarity.
Meanwhile, men, the supposed enemies, are sitting on the sidelines, baffled. Not because they are too dim to understand, but because the rules keep shifting like a game no one admits is being played. Some nod along politely to avoid conflict, afraid that one wrong word will get screen-grabbed and sentenced to viral purgatory. Others lean into the backlash, the red-pilled, hypermasculine, podcast-peddling types, not necessarily out of conviction, but because swagger is easier to perform than confusion. Let’s be honest: in a culture where asking a question is read as a microaggression and expressing uncertainty gets labelled as fragility, stoicism starts to look like the only posture left. Silence, deflection, irony… the fallback gestures of men who are terrified of saying “I don’t know” in the wrong tone.
And yet, some, the ones I still root for, stay in the room. They stumble, they interrupt, they say “sorry” too much or not enough. They ask clumsy questions and sometimes confuse confidence for arrogance or care for condescension. But they are trying. They listen. They learn. And we make it nearly impossible for them. We create a social atmosphere full of contradictory demands that even we can’t keep straight. We want them to lead, but only with deference. To be strong, but never commanding. To be dominant in bed, but never before asking for verbal consent in triplicate. To pay for dinner, but not because they think we can’t afford it, only because they “respect us”. We want them to desire us fiercely, but only in a way that’s completely divested of the male gaze, whatever that even means on a Friday night.
We tell them: be vulnerable, but never needy. Be emotionally open, but not so open that you process in real time. Be feminist, but don’t perform feminism. Be an ally, but know when to shut up, and when not shutting up is proof that you care. One man told me he once delayed kissing a woman for six dates because he wasn’t sure if it would be interpreted as pressure. She thought he wasn’t interested. Another said he felt nervous complimenting a woman’s dress, even though he meant it platonically, because “I don’t want HR to get involved over a hemline”. We have turned basic human connection into a social landmine field, then sneer when men step on the wrong one.
The worst part is most men aren’t refusing to engage, they are simply exhausted by the terms. Not by feminism itself, but by the tightrope walk it has become. They are told to “do the work”, but not offered the grace to fail while doing it. We have mistaken defensiveness for guilt, but maybe sometimes it’s just panic, the panic of someone who cares enough to want to get it right but keeps being told he already got it wrong by existing.
Once, I went out for dinner with a man who opened the door for me and then apologised. “I hope that’s not offensive”, he stammered, “I just… I don’t know what to do anymore”. I laughed. Not at him, but at the absurdity of it all. The poor man looked like he had just committed a minor war crime by being courteous. And I understood. He wasn’t posturing, he was navigating. Trying. That used to count for something. Now, trying is suspicious. It reeks of ulterior motives, patriarchal residues, performative chivalry, and heaven forbid, benevolent sexism. I wanted to take his hand and say, gently but firmly: it’s okay. I don’t want a saviour. I just want someone who knows what a hinge is. And who’s not afraid to hold the door.
Yes, maybe I’m a 19th-century kind of woman – a little anachronistic, a little prone to romanticism, someone who still thinks there is poetry in good posture and charm in practiced manners. But it’s not about submission, or some regressive fantasy of male authority. It’s about beauty. About rhythm. About knowing that courtship, when stripped of fear and cynicism, can still be a graceful thing. There’s a ritual to it, not because I’m incapable of opening my own door, but because I love when a man chooses to. When he notices, when he offers. It’s not servitude, it’s attentiveness. And no, it doesn’t cancel out gender inequality or excuse misogyny or pay the rent. But it does say: I see you. I’m paying attention. I’m taking a moment to honour this interaction, to bring something human and slightly theatrical to the everyday.
Pulling out a chair in a restaurant isn’t an act of dominance. It’s a small, elegant way of saying: you matter here. That this isn’t just a transaction, it’s an exchange. That we are not just two people scrolling through menus and checking our phones between courses. And when he holds my coat while I slip into it, I don’t feel disempowered, I feel seen. I feel like I’m part of a dance older than both of us, one that assumes interdependence doesn’t negate autonomy, and that gestures, when genuine, can still hold weight.
We have become so hyper-vigilant about symbolism that we have forgotten how to read context. A man holding the door isn’t trying to reinstate Victorian gender norms, he’s trying to connect. Or at least, he might be. But when every kind act is interrogated for hidden meaning, sincerity dies under the microscope. I don’t want to live in a world where affection requires a disclaimer. Where kindness feels like a liability. Where chivalry is mistaken for control, and intimacy for power play. Call me old-fashioned, but I’d rather be helped into a cab than handed a cold ideological treatise about gender performativity.
Feminism doesn’t need to be fixed. It needs to be freed from branding, from rage-as-aesthetic, from the echo chambers that reward performance over principle and punish nuance like it’s betrayal. It needs fewer hashtags and more actual thinking. Fewer perfectly filtered protest selfies, more late-night conversations that start with “I’m confused” or “I might be wrong, but…”. It needs more contradictions. More jokes. More room to breathe. More women who admit they don’t have it all figured out, who don’t wake up every day feeling empowered, who sometimes cry in office bathrooms, or fantasise about quitting everything and running away to open a bookstore in Portugal. More women who say, without shame, that they sometimes want to be held, and sometimes want to be left the hell alone. That desire isn’t a betrayal. That craving tenderness doesn’t mean forfeiting autonomy. That there’s no feminist bonus for pretending not to have needs.
It also needs more men, not just watching silently from the corners of our digital amphitheatres, but present, curious, and unafraid to get it wrong in public. Men who aren’t punished for not being clairvoyant. Who don’t have to perform sensitivity like it’s a personality. Who are allowed to ask questions without being accused of undermining the movement. Men who don’t disappear the moment the script becomes unfamiliar. We say we want partnership, yet we give them footnotes instead of maps. We talk about “holding space”, but sometimes what we mean is “hold your tongue”. If we want men to walk beside us, we have to stop treating them like they are always already one misstep away from cancellation. Some of them are trying. And trying should still count.
Above all, feminism needs more conversations that don’t begin with “As a woman” or “As an ally” but with something far riskier: “Here’s what I feel” or “Here’s what I think”. Because before we are categories, we are people. And people are contradictory, unfinished, often incoherent. But real change, the kind that outlives slogans, begins when we speak from that mess. Not from the script. Not from the algorithm. But from the uncertain, aching, maddening centre of being human.
The best feminists I know don’t advertise it. They are too busy living it. They are raising sons who cry and daughters who don’t apologise. They are mentoring women without turning it into a TED Talk. They are calling out bullshit from men, from women, from themselves. They know liberation isn’t a branding opportunity. It’s a process. Messy. Non-linear. Deeply unglamorous. The work of showing up, again and again, imperfectly.
And maybe that’s what this essay is too… imperfect. Incomplete. A work in progress that doesn’t pretend to have all the right citations in all the right places. One that refuses to end with a slogan or a neat takeaway, because real life doesn’t wrap itself in tweetable conclusions. What I really want, not just as a writer, but as a woman navigating this tangled mess of theory, feeling, and flesh, is a feminism that lets us be human again. Fully, inconveniently, gloriously human. That means getting it wrong sometimes. It means doubling back, revising, stumbling through conversations, crying in public, laughing at things you are not supposed to, wanting things that don’t always align with the doctrine. It means holding two thoughts, sometimes wildly contradictory, and staying in the room with them until they stop screaming and start whispering something true. It means learning to sit in discomfort without needing to exile someone over it. It means growing, not performing growth for applause, not signalling virtue to signal belonging, but actually growing. Slowly. Messily. With detours and relapses and those quietly humiliating moments when you realise the stance you mocked last year now speaks to you in a new language.
I don’t have a manifesto. I’m not here to declare a doctrine or carve new commandments into the ideological stone. What I have, what I keep circling back to, is a memory. A flicker of who I was before I started editing myself in feminist spaces. Before I learned which phrases were considered enlightened and which ones would make the oxygen leave the room. I miss her. She wasn’t fluent in feminist code-switching. She didn’t walk on rhetorical eggshells or preface her opinions with disclaimers. She just spoke. Thoughtfully, yes – but not fearfully. She wasn’t trying to be bulletproof. She didn’t confuse defensiveness for discernment. She didn’t believe the loudest person was always the bravest. She listened longer. Asked better questions. Sometimes she changed her mind in the middle of saying something and let it happen out loud. And I wonder, now, if maybe that version of me was more revolutionary than the one who learned to package her politics for safety. Maybe the revolution doesn’t need more volume. Maybe it needs more pause. More deep breath. More unscripted moments. Not polished righteousness, but the kind of humility that still makes room for wonder.
So maybe let’s start there, not with the next battle cry, not with a sharper slogan or another impossible purity test, but with a pause. A long, awkward, necessary pause. The kind that feels like forgetting your lines on stage, like silence in a conversation that used to be fluent. Let’s sit in that silence, not as failure, but as space. Space to unlearn the reflexes that made us mistake certainty for strength. Space to ask better questions. Like: What kind of power are we building? And who are we building it with, not just in theory, but in the mess of our daily lives, in the jokes we tell, the grace we offer, the doors we hold open or slam shut?
Maybe power isn’t something we win or seize or inherit. Maybe it’s something we practice? Together. With the people we don’t always agree with. Maybe it’s quieter than we imagined. Maybe it smells like cedarwood and cognac. Maybe it opens the door and doesn’t apologise for it. Maybe it isn’t finished yet.
And maybe neither are we…..
With contradiction, curiosity, and no need for a manifesto, in defiance, in dialogue, and always in progress, listening longer, doubting louder, faithfully imperfect, yours in nuance and unfinished sentences,
Tamara
This essay is, quite frankly, one of the most courageous and intellectually honest pieces I’ve read in years. As a man who supports feminism, real feminism, the kind that seeks dignity, equality, and freedom for everyone, I felt seen in a way I hadn’t realized I needed to be. And I suspect I’m not alone.
The brilliance of this piece lies not just in its rhetorical precision or poetic depth, but in its moral clarity. You didn’t hedge. You didn’t posture. You stepped into one of the most treacherous cultural minefields and lit a candle, not a torch. That takes guts. And I know you have it. But still… I am impressed.
Now, from a man’s perspective, most of us aren’t “checking out” because we’re anti-feminist. We’re exhausted from trying to pass a test whose grading rubric changes daily. We’re not rejecting equality, we’re rejecting the performance of moral perfection that some strains of feminism now seem to demand. And like you said so incisively, when the project of liberation starts resembling ideological surveillance, the door doesn’t swing open, it slams shut.
My cousin worked in diversity and inclusion training at some point. And she saw the same shift. What started as a necessary course correction turned into purity Olympics. “Inclusion” mutated into code enforcement. People stopped engaging because they cared and were terrified of getting it wrong. When the cost of curiosity is cancellation, people stay silent. And that silence is not progress. It’s retreat.
The fact that you gave space to doubt, to contradiction, to messy humanness, that is feminism. Not the branded kind. Not the punitive kind. But the kind that could actually teach us all how to be more whole. It’s the kind of writing that doesn’t weaponize trauma but transforms it into wisdom.
You spoke to the men like me who want to be in the room, who want to get better, who grew up thinking feminism meant we’d walk together, not walk on eggshells. And you did it without blaming, shaming, or diluting the pain that got us here. Take notes, other women who write!
Your essay models maturity. And in an era addicted to reaction, your restraint is radical.
Please keep writing, Tamara. You’re successfully changing the conversation and restoring its humanity.
I hope that the core of this fantastic essay never gets lost, because it extends way beyond the battle of the sexes or feminism specifically: you're calling out extremist ideology, not core feminism.
Broadly, all social movements, even those starting off out of a dire necessity created by injustice, inevitably become more extreme as they grow and achieve their ends. Grassroots become glass rooms, perched on high towers; activism becomes careerism; volunteers become stakeholders. All systems seek to reproduce themselves; to grow, and the objectives and core values have to morph and shape themselves in such a way as to facilitate expansion.
This creates perverse incentives, because the more you achieve, the less work there is to feed the machine or even justify its existence. So the goals become more abstract and unreasonable, attracting the type of "careerist" who has no qualms pushing the movement to its most extreme manifestation, all in service of powering the golem.
Again, to be clear, this is not a critique of feminism, but an observation about the nature of activism and collectivism. Extremism is simply the result of diminishing returns combined with unyielding demand and unreasonable expectations.
In all areas where extremism exists, we need voices like yours, Tamara. Brilliant work.