Innocent men now can be ordered to inform police of sex they have 24 hours before it happens or face 5 years in jail (UK)

Hey, this turned out a little long and isn't really related to the original post. I just wanted to respond to your observation that: "Essentially we all fulfill our roles, or there's no longer any roles to be had.", and got carried away. Let me know what you think.

The division of labour that existed in the past is no longer as advantageous as it once was. Old roles no longer make economic sense. Advances in medical technology and automation have made it possible for cultures (by cultures I mean the category including countries / nations / states / races / religions) to be successful with lower fertility rates. This means that children are not as valued for their labour (present and future) as they once were. In the farming economy one or two generations past, children were valued for farm work. As adults, they might be needed for factory work. They were expected to support their parents in old age. Now fewer pregnancies are needed to generate the same number of children. It is illegal to use them as a source of labour. Automation and outsourcing have eliminated much of the need for factory workers, and dividends from stock market investments can provide support in old age. Where once thousands of infantrymen would die taking a beach, now much fewer can do the same with the help of sophisticated robotic weaponry. The result is that the expected value of a pregnancy to the culture has decreased significantly. The expected payoff to parents of having children is now negative. It's more economical to import people from developing countries than to raise and educate them in the rich western world.

The dramatic decrease in the value of children from agrarian to industrial and post-industrial cultures diminished the value of women and mothers, forcing women to take on new roles and compete with men in traditionally male occupations. Essentially, gender roles that were advantageous to all for generations became primarily advantageous to men with the industrial revolution, and have become even more advantageous to men since then. Essential goods-producing industries like oil, agriculture, mining, and manufacturing are dominated by men. Men are the vast majority of engineers and non-biologist scientists. The pay-gap between the average man and average woman shows that the average male worker is more valuable than the average female worker. It's PC to say that these differences are the result of culture and socialization, but to anyone on TRP they're obviously the result of physiological differences between men and women. Men's physical strength gives them an advantage in the trades, and differences in cognition between men (search "testosterone cognition" on Google for papers) and women give men an advantage in engineering. I believe feminism is a response to the growing gender inequality and competitive gender roles created by industrialization.

Where women could once best contribute to the material success of the culture by having children, they now primarily do so by working. Without the ability to work, 21st century women (unlike their grandmothers) would be almost completely useless. Unfortunately for female workers, they're not as valuable on average as male workers. If we imagine (don't laugh) that women want to be equal to men in social standing and respectability, then they have to find either some other means of contributing to the culture's prosperity besides labour (such an alternate means doesn't exist, as far as I can tell) to make up for their handicapped productivity, or they need to handicap men through the creation and perpetuation of sexist stereotypes, drive them out of universities, and skew the legal system against them. It seems to me that this some of what feminists have achieved in the last generation or so.

tl;dr: old (co-operative) roles don't make sense any more because technology. Feminism is a response to new (competitive) roles. The only way for women (on average) to compete with men (on average) is to handicap them, which is what feminism has managed to do.