Daring, young and self-assured, feminists have reclaimed social discourse in Germany in a big way. But along with activists’ successes have come fresh ideological conflicts.

By Jan Fleischhauer and Wiebke Hollersen
Der Spiegel

Anna-Katharina Messmer likes to watch porn. That’s a problem for a feminist. She is also in favor of Germany’s childcare benefit, or Betreuungsgeld, which gives mothers who stay at home with their young children €150 ($190) a month, because, as she says, “reproductive work needs to be appropriately compensated.” That’s also not an easy position to defend. What’s more, she is writing her Ph.D. dissertation on the current trend toward cosmetic vaginal surgery. She doesn’t see anything wrong with it.

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Today’s feminism has become rebellious once again. It asks fundamental questions about the balance of power, and is thus right back where Schwarzer began — dealing with gender politics. Everything is on the agenda again: how men look at women, how they speak to them, and how they put down the opposite sex in jokes and silly comments to make themselves feel bigger and more important.

If one were to summarize what the movement is about, then it would be the notion that gender shouldn’t make any difference anymore. Along the way there, the idea is to shatter the images and clichés that assign women and men to different positions in society. The problem is that there are widely divergent notions about how to achieve this objective.