This is what a 21 year old friend posted on my wall, in response to "why is feminism a bad word in India?":
People have different ideas of what that label entails even if in its purest idealized form, it's no more and no less than a movement for women to be acknowledged in an egalitarian system and have full legal protections of human rights. However, that word has definitely been dirtied by many irresponsible people who self-identify as feminist and have a large social media platform that spans internationally.
Although I can't speak for what India is like, particularly in the first world, I've been put off by misguided and naive people who self-identify as feminist because I think sometimes people do falsely cry oppression and are quite bad at "checking their privilege" for people who throw those words around so much. I've been frustrated by misguided feminists who falsify information regarding rape statistics and wage gaps in the western world, and infantilize and patronize me as a woman by telling me that my life is miserable as a woman, that I am a perpetual victim at the mercy of some patriarchal conspiracy against me, that my successes and failures weren't a consequence of my choices, that things I enjoy are microaggressions against my existence, that there's nothing wrong with lowering the standards for me to be a firefighter or an academic and that it is necessary for women to be represented and "equal", that I am so lacking in emotional resilience that I need trigger warnings and media censorship, etc. I hope you can see why I think this is extremely regressive and that if anything it aggravates gender relations rather than improving them. Especially when as women in the first world we are acknowledged in an egalitarian system and even have legal rights and protections men don't have.
I feel like no one pays attention to my gender when assessing my character quite so much as a sexist or a tumblr feminist does.
I have rights most women in the world don't. So people who really care about the values of "pure feminism" should focus on those women even though it seems hard to help them. It pains me when Anita Sarkeesian of all people goes to the UN as an international figurehead of "feminism". When so many teenagers on the internet who have been coddled and pampered all their lives start talking about how rough it is to be them and project their insecurities onto society instead of taking personal responsibility, and self-righteously do so in the name of this movement, it inevitably gets tarnished, including through the eyes of adult women who had to work to earn what they have and have enjoyed and prospered from the meritocracy that was already in place. There will be the occasional sexist jerk, but the correct response is not to internalize them and thereby give them power they didn't have, and I feel like this defeatist attitude is being promoted on social media as an appropriate coping strategy to resist "oppression" and "institutionalized sexism". I can't get on board with something that seems so damaging to women and so poorly motivated to begin with.
I hope my personal observations and perspective were helpful in addressing some of your questions. And maybe I will warm up to the label when the representative voices become something that looks healthier to me. I think only a small minority of people are turned off by the label because they don't like the idea of women's rights, regardless of what country you are in. But, a movement championing those rights is necessary when this vocal minority has the power and the majority are bystanders. With the exception of issues regarding birth control, I don't think the USA is one of these countries. I don't know about India.
Thanks for your patience in reading this huge wall of text.