The comeback of misogyny of which the tradwife trend is an expression hasn’t occurred in a vacuum. The failures of popular girlboss feminism have left room for the nourishment of the alt-right response. A feminism that aimed to combat patriarchy via capitalism was always doomed to fail, and the misplacement of blame was always going to be the predictable response.

It’s time for mainstream feminism to understand the role that privacy plays in the societal and technological systems of power we wish to re-imagine, and for privacy advocates to benefit from the ways a feminist lens can enrich how we think about data and technology.

It’s 2020 and women’s events continue to have a sense of monotony attached to them: one- dimensional, dominated by middle-aged Karens and harping year-in and year-out on the same themes: self-love, self-empowerment and self-worth. All excellent conversations to have of course, if you need a morale boost, but ones that leave more difficult conversations on the wayside.

The production of a film with a predominant and overarching (but not controlling) female gaze takes us one step closer to making the male gaze strange, gendered and escapable.

All human bodies naturally grow hair pretty much everywhere in varying qualities of thickness and presumably for a brief glorious period between the evolution of the modern homo sapiens and the invention of the patriarchy we all accepted that and let women chill out with their fuzz out for five whole seconds.

Taking proselytising outside of the gym and into the public, marathon-running has become the ultimate way to signal patriarchal and capitalistic virtues that are otherwise difficult to measure. By simply choosing to run a marathon, mainstream feminism has allowed women to assume a morality that does not challenge the problematic structures it purportedly transcends.

The phrase toxic masculinity is reductive and deterministic, and struggles to emerge from its historic essentialist roots. It simplifies the complex contextualisation of decisions around the practices of men. It exempts the men who participate in the labeling from self-examination. And it has become an easy target for conservatives calling for ‘real men’ to ‘fight back’.

Marie Kondo is a quiet delight, a soothing television presence in what, presently, are some very stormy seas. But I love her more because she is not just an antidote to these times of crisis – she speaks to them, too.

At first blush, the phrase ‘gender critical feminist’ is essentially meaningless: all feminism is ‘gender critical’ by definition. What makes TERF ideology reactionary rather than radical is its dedication to binary gender essentialism.

After these events, women still went back to jobs where they aren’t paid, protected or promoted as much as their male counterparts, and they went back to their homes with just as many chores and threats of violence as before.

There’s an emphasis on self-empowerment within contemporary feminism which I think is hugely important. But I also think that the idea of self-empowerment can become tangled up in capitalism’s consumer culture, and social media-driven narcissism, in ways that can warp it into an aggressive individualism. The kind of thinking I’m referring to privileges the ‘right’ to do whatever one wants to do for themselves over anything resembling genuine and thoughtful care for other people.

The first women’s refuge in Melbourne opened in 1974. According to the Women’s Liberation Halfway House Collective (WLHHC), ‘the need for a Halfway House had been discussed for a long time in the Women’s Liberation Movement’, as the Women’s Liberation Centre ‘constantly received calls from women needing somewhere to stay for awhile, often in desperate circumstances.’ In April 1974, a meeting was called to ‘discuss the setting up of a halfway house… a halfway point for women between their old lives and new ones.’

Whether it be in terms of creators or fans, horror is not – nor has it ever been – the ‘boys club’ it is so commonly assumed to be. In Haifaa al-Mansour’s recently released biopic Mary Shelley, the author is told by her stepsister Claire Clairmont upon first reading her famous novel Frankenstein: ‘I’ve never read such a perfect encapsulation of what it feels to be abandoned.’ At its best, horror is all about outsiders, its focus emphatically upon the experience of otherness.

The most frequent criticism levelled at fanfiction is that because of its connection to source material, it is derivative and unimaginative. In the words of science fiction author Robin Hobb, ‘Fanfiction is to writing what a cake mix is to gourmet cooking.’ But where does this leave professional authors of bound-and-printed literary homage and pastiche who also draw upon someone else’s source material?

No-one should pretend such behaviour was anything other than vile. At the same time, it’s important to recognise just how much of the conceptual apparatus we now possess to understand sexual abuse owes to the liberation struggles that Devine, Power and co so loathe. Most obviously, the modern notion of consent emerged from a women’s movement that fought bitterly against male entitlement to female sexuality.

Friday 25–Sunday 27 May, Queen Victoria Women’s Centre Three days of feminist politics, feminist perspectives and collective solutions. Catch the editor of Overland Jacinda Woodhead, with fiction editor Jennifer Mills and writer Natalie Kon-yu in conversation on mentorship in the arts – then stick around for special event presented by Overland on writing and activism with Santilla Chingaipe, Tarneen Onus-Williams and Asher Wolf.