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Do you hear that solemn clang? People on the internet seem to be taking Lindy West’s memoir as millennial feminism’s final death knell.

The extremely online 2010s movement—which brought us #MeToo, body positivity, the mainstreaming of intersectionality, and the Girl Boss—was already on death watch with the reelection of accused sexual assailant Donald Trump, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the absolutely enormous antifeminist backlash within which we are all living. And there’s a certain irony to the idea that the final tolling of the bell, as detractors tell it, came via the medium so carefully honed by millennial feminists: a personal essay, in this case at book length.

West, one of the grande dames of the movement, got her start at Seattle alt-weekly the Stranger and spent years excoriating fatphobia, online misogyny, and male entitlement for the ur-millennial-feminist site Jezebel. Her new memoir, Adult Braces, is about how her on-its-face happy marriage was actually much more complicated, culminating in West winding up in a polycule she desperately did not want with her husband and one of his several girlfriends—but, plot twist, she has chosen her choice, and she’s happy!

News of millennial feminism’s demise has been met with much applause. It was too censorious. Too glib. Too radical, or perhaps not radical enough. West’s marriage is its microcosm. Millennial feminism, Helen Lewis writes in the Atlantic, eventually revealed “the gap between what its high priestesses demanded and what they were able to endure themselves.” So did West’s memoir. This woman who stood so strongly against male power seems to have been, in the end, felled by it—and now claims that accepting her husband’s demand to open their marriage against her will was progressive, actually.

Feminism is one of history’s most successful social movements, and it is now a century and a half old. Of course millennial feminism was not going to be its permanent state—and that feminism is currently evolving doesn’t mean, as detractors suggest, that the 2010s variety of it was some sort of colossal con or mistake. In fact, most of millennial feminism was pretty great. And when we see what it’s being replaced with, we should be grieving its loss.

When I started writing, around 2003, at a small self-published feminist blog, I had just barely declared myself a feminist. In 2001, during my freshman year of college, a professor asked our Intro to Women’s Studies class—a course I was forced into because I registered late and there was nothing else left—whether we identified as feminists, and I checked the no box. Feminist voices in media were incredibly rare. Katha Pollitt, who wrote a column for the Nation, is honestly........

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