Over at The Wooden Spoon, lit blogger Daniel E Pritchard considers Ariel Levy in The New Yorker and Marni Soupcoff in the National Post, on the “feminist conundrum”: why and how the word continues to be used pejoratively:

What the movement has become, in some sense, is a movement framed entirely by the politics of the wealthy: you can have a rich liberal woman empowered, or a rich conservative woman empowered, and you are to live vicariously by their success. Practical equality between men and women is no longer the goal of feminism. We also very often frame the role of the wife / mother and husband / father in entirely traditional ways, even when describing the goals of feminism: the woman ‘has the choice’ now, the implication being that the man’s role of financial support is still mandatory while the woman’s role is newly flexible. (Realistically, neither partner probably has a choice at all. Times are tough.)