For the popular media to decry young feminism based on popular media depictions of it is truly a postmodern example of pop culture eating itself.
These writers, while not following any unified stance, define themselves as the third wave, an appellation that serves to distinguish them from the first and second waves of feminism while simultaneously marking them as a continuation thereof.
The “waves” metaphor is used to denote continuity of movement containing swells and troughs rather than discrete, isolated periods of political involvement.
The theoretical underpinnings of the third wave, therefore, come from three widely divergent streams of thought that coexisted during this time.
Many third-wave writers talk about how their feminist mothers or fathers gave them the sense of entitlement that made them feel feminist struggle might no longer be necessary.
A second predominant message of the time was that feminism had gone too far and, in fact, was to blame for the exhaustion of women trying to do double duty as career women and wives and mothers. Media stereotypes of the hairy-legged, bra-burning, anti-male, strident feminist permeated the culture. This led to the phenomenon of “I’m not a feminist, but…” syndrome.
These three books claimed that contemporary feminism had devolved into what they called victim feminism, in which women derived all of their rhetorical power from claiming to be victims, particularly of sexual violence.
Wolf, along with Roiphe and Paglia, argued for power feminism, a worldview in which women are still being oppressed simply because we are allowing it to happen.
The third stone in the bedrock of third-wave feminism is that, contrary to being unnecessary or having gone too far, the movement had not gone far enough, limiting itself to the narrow interests of its white, liberal majority.