There's no diplomatic way to say this: contemporary feminism – especially in academia – has devolved into a misogynist's parody of itself.

I've known people to claim "feminism's just about women hating men, or finding new reasons to." That's completely spurious when directed toward the first-wave feminists, who fought for voting and property rights, or the second wave's subtler battles for social and workplace equality. But such critics have a valid point regarding the version of feminism filtered through the digestive tract of academia these days.

At best, it's wasted effort; and at worst, it hurts the cause. For all the gains women have made in western societies, we still have work here: witness the constant assaults on reproductive rights, the pervasive belief – even among police, judges and others in power – that rape victims are to blame if they "dress like sluts" or behave flirtatiously, and myriad milder matters qualifying individually as annoyances rather than outrages (not since age 12 could I walk any distance in public without at least one set of catcalls yowling out from a passing car). So many obstacles, big and small.

And academic feminists with the luxury to devote themselves full-time to the betterment of women instead produce navel-gazing papers – like this recent gem: Seeing the Unseen: Attention to Daily Encounters With Sexism as [a] Way to Reduce Sexist Beliefs, a joint effort by professors Julia Becker and Janet Swim in the current issue of Psychology of Women Quarterly. (Speaking of sexist beliefs, there is the idea that any questions about my psyche can be answered "Because hers is a woman's mind.") The abstract says:

"Three experiments were conducted in the United States and Germany to test whether women and men endorse sexist beliefs because they are unaware of the prevalence of different types of sexism in their personal lives. […] Results revealed that encouraging women to pay attention to sexism, in comparison to attention to other social interactions, led to a stronger rejection of Modern Sexist, Neosexist and Benevolent Sexist beliefs (Studies 1 and 2) and to negative evaluations of Modern and Benevolent Sexist men described in profiles."

In other words, women told to look for sexist behaviour in social interactions are more likely to find it, and disapprove.

Becker and Swim specifically mention "benevolent sexism", which might sound oxymoronic but is a real phenomenon. Consider the men opposed to women in military combat roles, not from dislike of us or disdain for our abilities, but the sincere belief that our lives must not be endangered. The desire to prevent battlefield death is undeniably benevolent, and by being directed at only one sex is sexist by definition.

Becker and Swim define benevolent sexism as:

"A particular type of sexism that might be disregarded because of its ostensibly positive qualities (Glick and Fiske, 1996). It portrays women as 'pure', the 'better' sex, and as idealised caregivers. Moreover, it reinforces the idea that women should be protected and financially provided for by men."

But the study didn't ask women to seek sexism in discussions about women's proper roles in marriage, combat or any other positions. Instead, it asked women to note:

"[If they] observed a man helping a woman with a task because he assumed that, as a woman, she should not have to grapple with it (eg, long drive, selection of a new laptop, carrying shopping bags)."

The word "assumed" is in the wrong place: it's not the man making assumptions about the woman's abilities here, but the observer assuming the man's motivation. How can anyone else know what he is thinking?

Confession: when my boyfriend and I carry groceries to our apartment we divide them by weight, with me hauling the lighter bags. My being a woman – and a small one at that – has much to do with the differential in our food-lugging capabilities, but is a difference based on sex inherently sexist? Would it be any different if my boyfriend hauled groceries for a male roommate with an equally light carrying capacity?

Other examples of sexist behaviour women were asked to note included:

"[If they] heard someone compliment a woman, because she exhibited behaviour he or she assumed was an ability particularly well suited and appropriate for women (eg, compliment how skillful [sic] she cared for her child as a woman or how well she cooked dinner for her family as a woman)."

So the way to achieve enlightenment is to never compliment a woman's cooking? Or at least to specify, "This food tastes great in a way that has nothing to do with your gender." Sometimes I cook at home; sometimes my partner does. And if you're a guest, it doesn't matter who did the cooking: if you don't say something nice about it, that's just rude.

I don't know how much gender's an issue in my kitchen, but let's suppose there's a sexist dynamic at play there. Certainly, my interactions with people outside my home would change in many ways if I were male rather than female; maybe, if my partner and I switched genders, our cooking styles would change, along with our sex lives. Even so, is this a battle feminism needs to fight? Should it be a battle at all?

Too much of modern feminism seems focused on goals I can't possibly share: the idea that acknowledgment of sexual differentiation is inherently sexist, the Harrison Bergeron notion that "equality" means "no differences at all" (Psychology of Women notwithstanding).

Even if humanity builds the feminist utopia of my dreams, there will still be certain traits more common in one sex than the other. I suspect, for example, people who choose careers working with young children will always skew overwhelmingly towards females. And that's fine, so long as individual men are still free to pursue such careers if they wish, and individual women like me are still free to avoid young children whenever we can. In my utopia, equality of opportunity is guaranteed, but equality of outcome is not.

Meanwhile, we're still a long way from utopia. But we'll never get there so long as the feminist movement continues to be hijacked by fundamentalists.