It's Not Feminism, It's Humanism

Today's Feminism

Introduction
Feminism today continues the work and builds on the theories of third-wave feminism. There is debate as to whether this is simply a continuation of third-wave feminism or whether, after a relatively quiet period during the 'noughties', growing public participation in the ideals of feminism indicates that this could be considered a fourth wave.
The aims of modern feminism are similar to those of the third wave: sex and body positivity, that old (yet elusive) workhorse of equal pay, a change in gender norms, and a greater focus on prevention of domestic abuse and sexual assault. However, today's campaigns reflect the unique problems faced by women in the new technology age, even as the root problems of sexism, misogyny, and inequality remain unchanged. Cyber-bullying and underrepresentation of women in video games are just two of these very modern issues.
The media also continues to act as a channel for feminists to campaign for improved rights in addition to being a problem in itself. Cartoonist Alison Bechdel's eponymous Bechdal-Wallace Test, crested in the mid-eighties, poses a seemingly easy challenge to pass in modern times; the only criteria are that a film has two or more female characters, they are named, they talk to each other, and that they discuss something other than a man. However, 2014 saw a massive drop in films passing the Bechdel test, from 67 percent in 2013 down to 55 percent. If women reach for the loftier heights of films featuring more women in the lead role, they find even more meagre offerings; only 29 percent of films of had female protagonists; pretty scanty representation of a group that represents unchangingly 50 percent of the world's population.
Today's feminism also continues the battle for better protection for victims of rape and sexual assault. Despite an ever-increasing number of studies into causes of rape, there still appears to be a worrying trend for male politicians to say stupid and frankly untrue things about sexual assault and the female victims of it. In 2011, Kenneth Clarke, worryingly the British Justice Secretary at the time, caused upset when he differentiated between 'date rape' and 'serous rape'. In 2012, in the US, Republican Senate candidate Todd Aikin asserted that women couldn't get pregnant as a result of rape , claiming that 'the female body has ways to shut the whole thing down'. Also in 2012, in India, after an internationally notorious crime where a young woman was gang-raped to death on a bus, spiritual guru Asaram Bapu claimed the victim was part responsible for her own attack, as she could of prevented it had she 'chanted God's name'. These perspectives are deeply worrying, especially as they were spoken by people in positions of power whose responsibility should be towards victims and the prevention of crimes, and are indicative of a culture that still assumes women provoke their own sexual attacks.

Boiling Point
The accelerated rate of technological development and the internet has led to specific feminist issues arising that hadn't been explored in previous waves. Feminists have gave highlighted the higher rates of abusive and threatening messages received by women in comparison to men, bringing attention to the poor infrastructure that's internet companies and policing institutions have at their disposal to tackle these problems. Cyber-bullying can take many forms, from insulting comments and 'trolling' in the comments section of a female journalist's online article, to sexually aggressive and offensive messages women receive on online dating sites and apps. While online culture has developed a certain element of unpleasant behaviour, such as 'trolling', succinctly defined by Urban Dictionary as 'being a prick on the internet just because you can', studies have found that men receive internet abuse for a variety of reasons but rarely simply for being men. Women, however, are often targeted by gender-specific and sexually aggressive slurs and threats.
The accelerated nature of technology means that law enforcement has struggled to keep up and fails to react effectively to problems that no one could have predicted, such as revenge porn, a particular nasty practice of placing photos of women, taken with the understanding that they were private, on the internet to shame and humiliate them, usually by an aggrieved ex-partner. The international nature of the online environment also means that it can be hard to prosecute crimes; in 2014, Apple's iCloud was hacked and hundreds of photos of famous women circulated. The speed at which the photos were disseminated around the world made it difficult for prosecutors to target any one particular criminal. Given the intangible nature of the crime of hacking, combined with the public profile of the women involved, many people viewed the photos with the assumption that it was an acceptable consequence of putting your photos on a cloud drive. The women themselves disputed this mindset, pleading with people not to look at their personal photos, stating it made them feel violated.