The women and men writing here are activists, teachers, cultural critics, artists, and journalists. They distinguish themselves from a group of young, conservative feminists, including Naomi Wolf and Katie Roiphe, who criticize second wave feminists and are regularly called on to speak for the "next generation" of feminism.

In contrast, Third Wave Agenda seeks to complicate our understanding of feminism by not only embracing the second wave critique of beauty culture, sexual abuse, and power structures but also emphasizing how desires and pleasures such as beauty and power can be used to enliven activist work, even while maintaining a critique of them.