Feminism used to mean a transformed society, a challenge to romance, a new way to live. Now, Crispin argues, it has been rebranded into banality

Jessa Crispin has a problem with feminism. It has become so toothless that she can barely identify with it. For Crispin has teeth and is not afraid to bare them. She does not, as some people do, reject the label “feminist” because it is somehow off-putting and conjures up hairy man-haters. Quite the opposite: feminism, she argues, has been rebranded into banality. The universalising of feminism has been a kind of declawing. It has made it pointless.

The reassurance feminists have to give, that women are reasonable and approachable, is for Crispin problematic: “That pose – I am harmless, I am toothless, you can fuck me – is why I find myself rejecting the feminist label.”

Crispin, an American editor and critic, rails against feminism as self-empowerment, and is determined to rediscover its true and radical potential. She counters the “spoil yourself stupid” feminism beloved of women’s magazines and lifestyle supplements. There is also an important argument here about what radicalism actually is. Lately a lot of the “sex positive” divas look simply like man-pleasers. So much of this on-the-edge feminism actually has nothing to say about the infrastructure of women’s lives. Why talk about pensions when we can talk about polygamy?

What matters, at a time when popular culture is full of celebrities who identify themselves as feminist, is – as Crispin argues – the very relationship between the mainstream and the margin. “The mainstream wants to claim the radical space for itself while simultaneously denying the work radicals do.” In order for this to happen, there has been a disavowal of such radicals as Andrea Dworkin, Shulamith Firestone and Germaine Greer. The matricidal impulse of young women to denounce these “feminazis” often centres around Dworkin, who remains a discomforting figure. Why is that exactly? Crispin cites Laurie Penny writing about Dworkin’s belief system having “no place in any feminism I subscribe to”.

What does this even mean? Dworkin’s work is ultimately about power and what it means and it is deeply uncomfortable because even in our most intimate moments, power relationships exist. Radical change is terrifying. When personified by the likes of Dworkin, women queue up to say that they are not this kind of feminist. Those who say our revolutionaries went too far do so, I suppose, in order to make feminism more user-friendly. But for which users?

This book’s real bite comes when Crispin talks about power and how women use it

The journey from radicalism to self-help is surely a depoliticisation. A movement that once imagined new ways to live has become a self-improvement course with empowerment as a personal goal. Crispin is unafraid to say that if feminism did actually make women happier, giving us better jobs, marriages and orgasms, “the proselytising would be unnecessary”. This book’s real bite comes when she talks about power and how women use it. The more money we have, the more we are able to buy our way out of patriarchy. The notion that equality is about living the way men live is not radical – we have to reset the values and dismantle the whole shebang.

This raises awkward questions about women’s complicity in their own oppression. Such questions are timely now that we have seen the number of white women who voted for Trump. But what exactly is the incentive for women to leave nuclear families, to not identify with their men folk? It is not as if any alternative structures have been set up by feminism. What is there for women who want to live outside the dominant romantic culture? This is what the work is – to make new collective ways of being. What men think of this is of no concern to Crispin. If they object: “Take that shit somewhere else … you as a man are not my problem.”

Actually, though, Crispin also disavows the dehumanisation of men. She asks, for instance, if the invocation of women’s safety is reason enough to put so many men, especially black men, in prison.

Some of these ideas are just floated in the book, and they need more work. But she is always sharp. Her discussion of “outrage feminism”, which exists primarily online, is a breath of fresh air. What does all the outrage achieve? What time and energy we waste on the “twitter bros”! Misogyny can’t be fought individual by individual.

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Everywhere she ventures, she exposes the cliches and tries to take us back to what is really at stake – which is of course liberation not equality per se. It is not enough to have more women in positions of power if they are not challenging the system. Expanding the definition of what is beautiful or acceptable is not enough. Rather, romance has to be demoted from being the central feature of our lives.

Crispin is telling us that we have to imagine something better in order to build it. Feminism as self-absorption, as an add-on label to a new lifestyle, has got us … where exactly? Where we are now. Stalled. Look how quickly we can go backwards. When did feminism get so small? When it became polite, unthreatening and marketable. Crispin blasts through all this by asking us to think big, properly scarily big.

• Why I Am Not a Feminist is published by Melville House. To order a copy for £11.99 (RRP £12.04) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.