The fourth wave of feminism: meet the rebel women

[redqueen]

2. When I first saw the title, the "fourth wave" part, I wanted to grumble.

What's this new method we'll be using to divide ourselves and form new circular firing squads with?, I thought.

Imagine my surprise to find it's a movement that's inclusive of many forms of feminist thought. Outstanding.

But uh oh! What's this?

They demonstrated outside the Sun headquarters, organised by Yas Necati, 17, in a protest against Page 3, the biggest image of a woman that appears each day in the country's biggest-selling newspaper – a teenager or twentysomething smiling sunnily in her pants. Necati, a student at sixth-form college, laughed shyly as she told me about the mocked-up pages she has sent Sun editor David Dinsmore, suggesting feminist comedians, artists and writers to appear on the page instead. One of her favourites showed a woman flashing bright blue armpit hair. The the No More Page 3 petition started by Lucy-Anne Holmes, 37, in August 2012,, has been signed by 128,000 people.

Ikamara Larasi, 24, started heading a campaign to address racist and sexist stereotypes in music videos, just as students began banning summer hit Blurred Lines on many UK campuses, in response to its sexist lyrics. Jinan Younis, 18, co-founded a feminist society at school, experienced online abuse from some boys in her peer group – "feminism and rape are both ridiculously tiring," they wrote – and wasn't deterred. Instead, she wrote an article about it that went viral. When I spoke to her in September, she was juggling shifts in a call centre, babysitting for neighbours, preparing for university, while helping out with a campaign to encourage feminist societies in schools countrywide. UK Feminista, an organisation set up in 2010 to support feminist activists, has had 100 people contact them this year, wanting to start their own school group. In late August, their national day of action against lads' mags included 19 protests across the UK.

Censorship? Bans? These women are fascists! No better than Hitler!

There are women and men of all ages involved in this movement – at a Lose the Lads' mags protest in York, for instance, I met an activist who had been at the women's liberation conference in 1978. But many of those at the forefront are in their teens and 20s, and had their outlook formed during decades in which attitudes to women were particularly confusing.

They grew up being told the world was post-feminist, that sexism and misogyny were over, and feminists should pack up their placards. At the same time, women in the public eye were often either sidelined or sexualised, represented in exactly the same way as they had been in the 70s, albeit beneath a thin veil of irony. Finn Mackay says when she started the London Feminist Network in 2004, the two main issues motivating those who joined were the massive growth of the beauty industry, and "pornification" – the infiltration of pornographic imagery into the mainstream via Playboy-branded pencil cases, for instance, and the trend for pubic waxes. Those concerns have continued, and help explain the focus of many current feminist campaigns, which address the wallpaper of women's lives, the everyday sexism – lads' mags, Page 3, rape pages on Facebook, cosmetic surgery advertising – and calls for positive representation on bank notes and in broadcasting.

I wish I could hug all these brilliant young women.