If you’ve ever spent half an hour reading anything about feminism, you’ve already discovered one of its biggest flaws: it’s completely incoherent. There’s sex positive feminism and sex negative feminism, radical feminism and intersectional feminism, trans-inclusive feminism and TERFs, first wave and third wave, third world and first world, etc, etc.

There’s a simple reason for this: women don’t have that many major issues that they universally share.

Groups of women have interests in common, just like any groups. Women in Alaska have certain interest in common that are different from women in Arizona. Women in their 80s have interests in common that they don’t share with women in their 30s (yet). Single women, women married to men, and women married to women all have distinct interests. Women who don’t want to get pregnant have an interest in abortion, women who do want to get pregnant aren’t so interested in abortion, and female fetuses in countries where sex-selective abortion is rampant have an inverse interest in abortion.

The one thing we all have in common is that we’d like women to be treated decently. We have this in common with most men, too, and most of us would also like men to be treated decently. Conservatives want to treat women decently. Liberals want to treat women decently. Pretty much everyone who isn’t a sociopath thinks other people should be treated decently. This is not a philosophy, much less an overriding political position.

It makes as much sense to think that all women could have political interests in common as to think that all of the French could, and then be surprised to find that France has more than one political party fighting over what is in the best interests of the French.

Since “the interests of all women” can’t be a political position, we’re left instead with people using the motte and bailey trick to claim that their particular self-serving position is really in the interests of all women–rather like if all of the political parties in France decided to call themselves the French Party. (Note: all political positions are self-serving, of course.) Then if you don’t agree that some particular self-serving point in your interest, you get hit with the “What, you don’t support the interests of all women?”

Since no one on the left wants to admit to not supporting the universal interests of all women, we get instead a plethora of feminisms, each purporting to be the One True Feminism, and absolutely nothing coherent.