Joanna Biggs’  Observer  article got a lot of good press on Twitter over the weekend. Headlined ‘Feminism is on a high – but it needs a strong intellectual voice’, Biggs’ article takes as its starting point the two epigraphs of Simone De Beauvoir’s  The Second Sex . The first is a quotation from Kirkegaard: ‘What a misfortune to be a woman! And yet the worst misfortune of all for a woman is not to understand she is one’. According to Biggs, this ‘weary sentiment is not one [she's] heard very often in 2013′. Perhaps a related gobbet from Jane Austen, whose imminent appearance on currency is one of Biggs’ feminist highlights of the year, would be more of-the-moment:  ‘A  woman , especially if she have the  misfortune  of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can’.

According to the  Observer  article, feminism has been ‘high on its own successes’ this year. We’ve had the Austen bills; the student unions’ banning of Robin Thicke (or ‘creepy Robin Thicke’, as I was childishly pleased to see him dubbed on Channel 4′s  Big Fat Quiz of the Year  the other night); Ed Milliband in a Fawcett Society t-shirt (grim, but a victory of sorts if one is willing to suspend disbelief). Happily, Biggs ignores Beyoncé entirely. (More on this in a moment.)

The second epigraph shows us the other side of the bank note. Taken by De Beauvoir from her partner – romantic and intellectual – Jean-Paul Sartre, it reads: ‘Half victims, half accomplices, like everyone else’.

For Biggs, this is the rub. Popular victories aside, this has been a year where ‘feminism [has] been complicit’ in many things. Our victories have been, in many ways, empty ones. The fourth wave is a young one; it is a fragmented one. Feminism of 2013 was not unified in the way, Biggs suggests, it must be. What we need is an intellectual like De Beauvoir, who ‘served as a still centre around which to meet and campaign’ – who ‘wasn’t afraid to borrow from Kierkegaard or challenge Freud’. Who reminded us that ‘women are responsible’. We lack such a figure today. In two weary sentences, Biggs surveys the ground:

The British fourth wave, intellectual-less for now, is at least in a better state than the American one, who seem to think they’ve found theirs. This year’s other strain of activism has been Harvard-educated Sheryl Sandberg’s own tech-inflected brand of “Lean In” feminism.

There is no doubt that Biggs has stumbled on a crucial problem here – but reading her solution, one wonders if the article is asking the right question, making the right diagnosis. There are, last I checked, plenty of living feminist intellectuals around; some of quite prominent stature, even. None of them get a mention from Biggs. Why cite  Lean In  and not the eloquent criticisms of it published by Susan Faludi and bell hooks ? Why not mention Lisa Appignanesi, Rachel Holmes and Susie Orbach’s edited collection  Fifty Shades of Feminism which appeared this year? These voices may not be heard as widely, but they are out there. Which means the question is not ‘why are we intellectual-less’ (we’re not), but ‘why does nobody in the media, Biggs included, talk about feminist intellectuals?’

Returning to the navel-gazing sinkhole of Twitter makes the answer all too apparent. It is an old answer (to, I suppose, an old question). When Beyoncé Knowles released her album this month without prior press coverage Twitter was jubilant.  The Huffington Post  named it one of the key moments in their awkward ‘ ‘. It’s easy to snigger but more important to be worried at this empty re-capitulation of tropes from online social justice, which in one breath says ‘women can critique each other’ and in the next acts as if an artist hollowly wielding the term ‘feminist’ – if 2013 was the year of anything in feminism, it was the year of this – leaves them somehow beyond reproach, even as their product trades entirely on the approval of the same-old capitalist media. Beyoncé  is seductive because its rhetoric is popular. Am I glad to see a woman of colour dominating the music industry? Yes, of course. Do I think her work is radical? No.

And it doesn’t need to be. But other things are; and we must hear them. I suspect when Biggs calls for a celebrity intellectual – which is, if we are honest with our terminology, what De Beauvoir was – she is really just asking us to think. Asking us to be dissatisfied with bank notes and Milliband; asking us to talk about money and ideology, abortion and medical care. We cannot be sated by the scraps feminism has scavenged this year, pleased as we are to receive them. A that encourages people to their first ‘feminist tenner’ to a women’s charity has been received favourably. If I could task women with one thing more, I would want every woman to look at their first feminist tenner and, using the undoubtedly financially-minded Austen as a prompt, ask some serious questions about their place in the economy. It is far more pleasant to listen to a pop album than it is to study economics, but you must. To misquote and co-opt from Alice Sebold (apologies): you liberate yourself or you remain unliberated.

And you must read feminist intellectuals. Neither Britain nor America lacks them. You must learn their names like a litany: Judith Butler, Angela Davis, Nikki Giovanni, Andrea Dworkin, Susan Faludi, Nina Power, bell hooks, Ariel Levy, Kate Bornstein, Tracey Moberly, Jacqueline Rose, Alice Walker, Leslie Feinberg, Hilary Wainwright, Maxine Molyneux, Gloria Steinem, Barbara Ehrenreich, Susie Orbach. They are not a still centre (but then, was De Beauvoir?). They will make you think. They will not allow victimhood or complicity. In 2014, we must vow to talk about them.