Earlier this week, Vocativ published a story entitled “Here’s How Men’s Rights Activists Saved A Feminist’s Film.”

The title is somewhat accurate, though some might take issue with referring to the subject as a feminist: identitarian-feminists will likely write off this story as another case of a woman trying to advance her career by agreeing with men, and write Cassie Jaye off as an inauthentic feminist.

But one quote from the article should be intriguing to those who are ideologically feminists:

“ For example, one told her, “How can you say that a woman misses twenty percent of her income versus a man missing seven years of his life because they die earlier on average?” She hadn’t thought about shorter life expectancies in this way, or known about the higher rates of homelessness, suicide and workplace deaths among men. Jaye was swayed by arguments about the tendency to not take male victims of sexual assault as seriously and the ways that men are discouraged from being caretakers.”

What’s intriguing here is that these very commonly-known facts — that men have lower life expectancies, are encouraged to take life-threatening jobs, and are under-valued as caretakers by a society that expects them to provide material goods for their families— were actually new and surprising to a self-described feminist such as Jaye.

And it’s not just that these facts are well-known. It’s that the legacy of feminism is why men’s issues have been studied in the first place.

Feminism is, in theory anyway, about the relationships between women and other genders. It should be surprising that a self-described feminist could know so little about men.

But in the contemporary climate of pop feminism, it’s not surprising at all.

Feminism is an amorphous term these days. While it’s common for feminists to argue with, and attack one another, it’s uncommon for a self-described feminist to say to another woman, “You are not a feminist.” Self-described feminists who oppose the right of trans women to use women’s restrooms are called “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” (TERFs).

It is notable that the acronym TERF still contains the word “feminist,” as if to say that even anti-trans sexists deserve to be included.

So how, in a world where even TERFs can be called feminists, did Jaye get the idea that understanding the plight of men makes her not-a-feminist?

She got that idea from the MRAs, with their view of the world as a place that is being disrupted by man-hating feminists. But she also got it from other self-described feminists, who also have a blind spot (and sometimes even a willful ignorance) regarding men.

MRAs often take common male gender issues and reframe them as a sign that men are somehow beating women in the Oppression Olympics. But the issues they point to — that men are expected to sacrifice their time and often their lives in order to support women and children, societal pressure to be a financial provider, less concern about men’s workplace safety, expectation that men will make the first move in a sexual relationship while also risking being called a harrasser, etc.— are indeed acknowledged by many feminists.

It’s just that intelligent people who take the study of gender seriously are above the Oppression Olympics. They don’t obsess over the idea that women win it, and they think it’s even sillier to say that men win it.

But many self-described feminists actually ignore the gendered issues faced by men. Rather than saying “the Oppression Olympics is stupid, and men don’t win it,” they see any serious discussion of men’s issues as somehow a loss for women.

The Vocativ article frames Jaye’s story as the MRAs “gaining” a member. Bretbart probably saw it that way when they funded her film. But her own quotes suggest that she’s distinctly separate from them:

“I luckily moved recently,” she said toward the end of our nearly three-hour-long conversation, explaining that some of the men she interviewed had her home address.

Many will interpret her story as a tale of how the MRAs won over a woman. Women will pity her, feminist men will dismiss her, and misogynists will idealize her.

But the real story isn’t of how the MRAs gained a woman. It’s the story of how feminism lost one.

In a world where using your journalistic platform to write PR for a moderate female candidate and calling liberal men “brogressives,” passes for feminism, and paying lip service to men’s issues is often considered anti-feminist, it’s unsurprising that an intelligent young woman would turn to the dark side. She’s probably not the first or the last woman to identify more with the Manosphere than with the Amanda Marcottes , and that’s bad.

I hope that Jaye will stop being “the female MRA.” I hope she will recognize that, just because the money to finish her documentary came from reactionaries doesn’t mean she’s obligated to become one. Hopefully she will come to realize that, even though the “feminist” space is an amorphous space that can encompass a lot of not-so-good people, the Manosphere is even worse.

And hopefully, one day, she will come back to calling herself a feminist. It wouldn’t be surprising if she already has — all she has to do is google “men’s rights issues that feminism is already working on.”

But let’s hope she doesn’t go back to the brand of pop feminism that managed to include her just as easily as it lost her. Let’s hope she becomes the kind of feminist who shuts down ignorant abuses of the word, rather than the kind of feminist who facilitates the viral spread of the idea that feminism is whatever the most important woman in the room says it is.