There are some people in this world who make us irrationally angry. For me, Melinda Tankard Reist used to be one of them. Maybe it was her stance on abortion, or maybe it was the way her name always seemed to pop up in newspapers articles about primary school children getting bikini waxes and exchanging sexual favours in the playground.

Whatever it was, I didn’t like her. And it wasn’t just her ideas I didn’t like. I thought she was a fake and phony; someone who used the language of feminism to push her socially conservative agenda. That women I knew and respected heard what she had to say and thought she was a gutsy new vanguard for feminism? That bothered me.

I still don’t agree with much of what Melinda has to say, but she doesn’t bother me in the same way anymore. In fact, as a human being I quite like her. Miraculously enough, I am able to sustain two contradictory ideas about a person at the same time (think she’s a nice human being, don’t like her politics) without my head spontaneously combusting.

So I should probably tell you why I wrote that profile piece about her in Sunday Life this weekend. It’s pretty simple, really: I thought it would be interesting. Like many journalists, I spend too much time thinking about what goes on in other people’s heads, and Melinda was a public figure I found particularly perplexing. I’d moderated my “phoney feminist” stance by this point, but I still didn’t “get” her. And I wanted to.

I wanted to know what drove her, and how her various ideas fit together. I wanted to know why some people I liked and respected were drawn to her work, and why she made others so damn angry. What did it say about the state of the movement that she got more airtime than pretty much any other commentator on women’s issues in Australia? And what did all that airtime mean for the way the general public understood feminism?

I knew from the outset that I wasn’t going to write a hatchet job. Allowing yourself to be written up by another person is scary, especially when the person doing the writing has been vocally critical of your work. Melinda had never done a profile piece before, I respected that she was willing to hand herself over to my keyboard – if I were in her position, I would have been seriously tempted to say no. I wanted to write something critical (in the sense of making analytic judgments) but still human.

I was warned before this story was published that in writing it, I would only be granting her ideas credibility. They would have it that the only acceptable story to tell about Melinda Tankard Reist was one in which she was “outed” as a villain, one in which her brand of feminism was explicitly declared “not real”. But I don’t think Tankard Reist is a villain. And while I don’t subscribe to her world view, I also think she genuinely believes her work is, as she put it when we spoke, ”pro-woman and pro-girl”.

While the Sun Herald went the other way in their attempt to get people to buy the paper and open the magazine, I’d like to give people – or at least the people I was writing the article for – more credit than Tankard Reist’s detractors do. I didn’t want to explicitly say if Melinda was “good” or “bad”. I wanted to let people make up their own minds.

So, if you are “anti-raunch, anti-porn and pro-life”, you’ll probably think she’s pretty awesome. If you’re not (like me), you’ll probably think that’s not the kind of feminism you want to be involved in.

But hopefully you’ll also decide that the way to win that battle is to come up with better, more accurate and “stickier” ideas. As Eva Cox says: “Those who don’t want feminism to be co-opted … need to do some thinking about what direction they want to take it in instead.”

You can read the whole thing here.

Related: How to be a feminist intellectual (or a public thinker of any kind
The problem with pop feminism: why Emily Gould is right
My feminist agenda: what’s yours?

Elsewhere: Who’s afraid of Melinda Tankard Reist?