The piles of makeup and the insistence on frills and ribbons and bows was not at all attuned to my feminist views.

Hungary is now on the brink of becoming a neo-fascist state.

The 'feminine' woman is forever static and childlike. She is like the ballerina in an old-fashioned music box, her unchanging features tiny and girlish, her voice tinkly, her body stuck on a pin, rotating in a spiral that will never grow.

In the '30s and '40s, the search for Hungarian national identity led famously to an alliance with Hitler and the destruction of more than a half million of the nation's Jews. And here we are now, more than 70 years later, witnessing a resurgence of xenophobia and authoritarianism, and not just in Eastern Europe.

the central argument of the backlash - that women's equality is responsible for women's unhappiness.

My feminist view - that gender is on a continuum and we are all better off dropping a lot of those binary notions - is one that is shared by the more recent generation of trans activists and theorists.

Self-esteem is the basis for feminism because self-esteem is based on defining yourself and believing in that definition. Self-esteem is regarding yourself as a grown-up.