About a week ago, I went to see a film called Still the Enemy Within. I recommend it – it’s bitter, and funny, and heart-breaking – but to be honest with you, the best part of the show was the audience.

The film is about the miners’ strikes of the 1980s, and more than half the audience were people who had been there on the picket lines. Some of them were just now seeing each other for the first time in 30 years. They were all still the best of friends.

You might be imagining that I sat in Screen Three surrounded by coal miners munching popcorn and spotting the screen with their head-lamps. But here’s the point: they weren’t all miners. There were trade unionists, teachers, somewhat weathered students, parents, nurses and more. They marched for solidarity, and they lived it, with every different person standing side by side. I sat there feeling very young and ignorant, and all the time I could hear the words of a friend echoing in my head: “I want to be a feminist, but I don’t think I’m allowed to be.”

Welcome to 2014, where we don’t have solidarity – we have alliances, and we keep our “allies” at a distance. During the miners’ strike, a group called ‘Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners’ collected funds to support entire communities (yes, yes, we’ve all seen Pride), and women ran soup kitchens, speaking tours and pickets. Today, we have a situation where the Women’s Campaign won’t even allow men to join their marches, let alone their meetings – although they can take part in the “allies’ march”, at a safe distance, on a different route. Thanks for your interest, but you’re not allowed to be a feminist. You can only be our “ally”, and here’s the list of terms, conditions, border zones and customs regulations. Solidarity, it seems, is out of date.

When any movement refuses to acknowledge that you can help, they’re saying, “We want you to stop hurting us – but we know you never will, so stay away.” It’s profoundly self-defeating. It’s offensive. It’s a smack in the face for solidarity. Of course it can be difficult to see things from another’s viewpoint, but that’s no reason not to try. You can work to empathise, and you have insights from another perspective – knowledge is power, after all. You have something to offer.

And there’s so much common ground to be found between different people and their different problems. An obvious example would be gender equality plus LGBT+ rights. Both movements are essentially invested in the idea that your gender is irrelevant – to what you do, and to who you do. Or how about the current protests in Mexico about teachers’ rights, and the disastrous state of British education? Or the people of Ukraine, who are having their identity signed away by an illegal referendum, and the people of Hong Kong, who are desperate for a democratic vote? What about people with more than one problem at once, that is, the entire global population? All of us should be working together and standing with others as they make their case for a better world.

While I’d understand if you’re hesitating to call yourself a feminist, since we certainly do have a few issues to sort out (at least in Cambridge), you can and should care about equal rights for all genders. And destroying racism, and ending LGBT+ discrimination, and containing Ebola, and fixing unemployment, and saving the whales, and democracy in Hong Kong, and the students who are still missing a month after protests in Mexico, and…

What I most dislike about the term “allies” is how it implies that you can – and you want to – go home at the end of the day, make a cup of tea, and spend some time ignoring any or all of these problems outside your door. It sneers: you care like it’s a hobby. The trouble with this is that those people whose “ally” you are don’t get a night off. You don’t get a holiday from being poor, or under a dictatorship, or a woman. The only way to support someone is to realise that their struggle is constant, and to be there for as long as they are. I think we’re all perfectly capable of taking each other’s struggles seriously; I think that makes us worth more than just “allies”.

I’m tired of the idea that we can only care about our own problems. I’m really tired of the odd, pseudo-academic extremism of organisations like the Women’s Campaign, which take a valid movement and then refuse to share, like a spoilt toddler, choking off any action and telling you that it’s too late for you to change, it’s too late for you to join them. I’m tired of “allies”, and I want some solidarity. If you care about something, you can be a part of it. Don’t be my ally – be my friend.

Rebranding the Women's Campaign