Sometimes you get the feeling that there is no progress in the world. It has been more than seventy years since Simone de Beauvoir described patriarchal society in her classic “The opposite sex”: “The idea of ​​the world, like the world itself, is the product of men: they describe it from their point of view which they equate with that of absolute truth. ”If you read the feminist texts of more recent form, you might think that (almost) nothing has changed. It is still the men who shape the world and its description. There are still companies that to this day do not have a single woman in their top management. The gender pay gap has not been overcome, most of the family chores are left to women, and sexual harassment remains a major issue.What rights have been fought for (actually not just a few) is not a reality that is lived everywhere; there is still a long way to go before prejudice against women disappears from people's minds.

Hannah Bethke

Features correspondent in Berlin.

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    And so there is no end to the books that analyze, complain and (mostly) try to overcome gender inequality.

    This is the goal of the Viennese journalist Beate Hausbichler, born in 1978, who works for Standard and heads the women's policy department “dieStandard” there.

    “The sold feminism” is the name of her new book, which combines a critique of capitalism with an analysis of “true” feminism (which, of course, can never thrive in the wrong consciousness).

    That sounds like old wine in new bottles - and that's how it reads in many passages.

    The fact that consumer capitalism turns emotions into goods, as Hausbichler complains, shapes our understanding of love relationships and increases the disadvantage of women, has already been exhaustively analyzed in numerous books by the Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz.

    Amazingly, the same enemy image has still not had its day: capitalism.

    He is the root of all evil, he should be to blame.

    And that applies to everything: our alienation, a lack of participation, discrimination and oppression.

    He just manipulates everything, including feminism.

    The new "feminist washing"

    Hausbichler criticizes how popular it is today to stage yourself as a feminist; in social media, in advertising, in series and women's magazines. Women should be successful with the "new 'sexiness' of feminism", self-confidently and independently. According to “Body Positivity”, they should love their bodies as they are, with products from those companies “that have hammered us into completely otherworldly ideal ideas of women's bodies for decades”.