Shrewed

by Elizabeth Renzetti

  When you’ve been at the paper for four years, a Men’s column will be introduced. Seriously. A column about men, as if the whole paper were not already run by men, its pictures taken by male photographers, its stories sourced with male voices. You will be filled with rage, which is pretty much your default mood anyway.

  You will propose a rebuttal, and will be surprised when they agree to publish it. You will write about systemic discrimination against women, about violence, about the inevitable backlash “when women show the audacity to reach for men’s privilege pie.” Astoundingly, the newspaper will decide to give you your own column, which won’t run for very long but will increase the size of your own privilege pie. Unfortunately, you’ll still be a little bit too dim-witted and self-absorbed to see it that way. You will continue to operate from a position of grievance, and fail to recognize those whose list of reckonings is much longer than yours. It’s hard to give up the position of most-trod-upon.

  Fast forward a couple of decades, and picture how your life has changed. The scales have started to fall from your eyes — slowly, again, but you’re middle-aged. Nothing on your body moves as fast as it used to. The concept of “white feminism” as a discriminatory dynamic has surfaced over the years and caused a defensive backlash among — not surprisingly — white feminists. The work of self-examination is tricky and fraught, and you are perhaps too enamoured with your own oppression to carry out the necessary repairs.

  Your newspaper will start to post videos in an effort to expand its audience, and one in particular will catch your attention: A young Canadian political activist, Brittany Amofah, speaks on the issue of white feminism, which she defines as “a feminism that is exclusionary and discriminates against women of colour.” She says that, as a Black woman, she had been reluctant to call herself a feminist, because the movement pushed away people like her — as well as women of different sexualities and classes. But now she’s decided she can effect change from within: “I want to showcase that feminism looks very different to different people, and that it’s important to hear and understand the voices of women of colour.”

  One hot summer evening you’ll be sitting with a friend and colleague, Hannah Sung, listening to the brilliant American writer Roxane Gay talk about Hunger, her new memoir about the aftermath of trauma. It is an intimate and raw book that pulls you under like the sea.

  You can only imagine how difficult it is for Gay, a self-admittedly shy person, to speak about the book every night. But she does, gamely and hilariously. At the end of the evening there is a question-and-answer session. The crowd is made largely of young women, and they hurry toward the microphones. There are questions about the writing process, Gay’s family, pop culture. One woman comes forward — you can’t see her, you’re up in the balcony — and asks Gay, in essence, what feminism must do to be more responsive to women of colour.

  Gay shifts on the sofa on stage. She has thought about this question a lot, to put it mildly. She says: “In the past, white Feminism — feminism with a capital F — tended to ignore any woman who is not white, heterosexual, able, and middle class. That’s frustrating. In my experience, the only way to be intersectional is to be intersectional. If people won’t get on board, they aren’t part of your world, or your feminism. They get left behind.

  “It’s frustrating that we still have to start at A, and we never seem to move past B, and we need to be at E. I wish I had a better answer. But honestly, we don’t have to do anything. White women have to do something.”

  That statement will be greeted with thunderous applause. You will look over at Hannah as the applause subsides, and you’ll want to talk about it, but then it will occur to you with something like a slap: Hannah has already done the work. She has produced a terrific, award-winning podcast about race called Colour Code along with another talented colleague, Denise Balkissoon. They have done the challenging work of trying to sort out Canada’s complex attitudes toward race. I’m not sure either of them needs more hand-wringing questions about where we go from here.

  A couple of months later, you’ll be at the Women in the World Summit in Toronto, a kind of Femapalooza organized by editor Tina Brown. On stage there is a procession of women telling important stories from around the world — from Iran, Cambodia, the Middle East, and the United States, where racial wounds are as raw as ever. The women are Black, Brown, Asian, Indigenous, queer. The audience is almost all white. It does not escape your attention that, once again, you’re sitting and listening while someone else does the work.

  One of the speakers, Tamika Mallory, is a lifelong activist for racial justice and one of the cofounders of the Women’s March on Washington. Mallory is speaking on the subject of “bro culture,” but she takes a moment to connect the dots for those who are too clueless, or unwilling, to see for themselves. She brings up the important and increasingly well-known research of UCLA law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw on the subject of intersecting power structures and exploitation:

  “Sexism, racism, Islamophobia, all the other isms that you can think of, they’re all happening at the same time and not in a vacuum,” Mallory says. “All of these issues are coming together and each one of us being impacted by all of them. We have to be willing to speak up on behalf of others that might be dealing with issues that we’re not concerned with. If you are concerned about racism because perhaps you have an interracial child, you also have to lend your voice to the issue as it relates to sexism.

  “We know across the world people are dealing with so many layers of isms that oppress them. We all have to be ready to add our voices, lend our dollars and our time and expertise to fighting back in intersectional ways, and to be our brother and sister’s keeper. Acting like we don’t know is not okay.”

  Roxane Gay and Tamika Mallory and Brittany Amofah have been doing the work, along with all the other women from marginalized communities. They live the reality of injustice every day, and then are expected to mop up our tears. We continue to ask them to do the work for us — to tell us what to read, how to be better, how to absolve our guilt. But that’s not their burden anymore; it’s ours.

  When you talk to young feminists, you’ll see that they understand this instinctively. Your middle-aged white friends, still annoyed by everyday battles with idiots, will find it a harder lesson to absorb: We never got to have our moment, and now we’re expected to give it up! The lessons will be dark and painful. One day, you’ll interview a young Canadian feminist, a journalist named Lauren McKeon who wrote an illuminating book called F-Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism. She understands the threat to the movement comes from outside — from the familiar forces of oppression — but also from within, as the movement fails to accommodate new voices and struggles to overcome its barriers of race and class. When you ask her what can be done, she has some simple answers:

  “It’s about elevating other voices, raising other people’s platforms. It can be as simple as turning down a guest spot on a panel in favour of somebody who hasn’t been elevated. Or saying, ‘I’ll do it as long as these other voices are also represented,’ so you don’t get another all-white panel of a certain age. It’s just listening more. We don’t need to be so scared of losing our own platforms. Making room for other voices doesn’t mean we won’t be heard.”

  And that will prove to be the most difficult lesson to absorb. It may be hard to imagine, as a twenty-two-year-old with a chip on your shoulder about being a penniless girl with a funny surname, but there will come a time when you have to pass over the grievance microphone. The thing you’ll realize, when you’re middle-aged and sprouting hair in odd places, is that this will be harder than you can imagine. It’s cathartic to stand in the spotlight and scream about injustice. You have fought for that place; why can’t someone else give up their place instead?

  But there are other women with different voices, different stories, different things to protest, and — this is the killer — their v
oices will be fresher and more interesting than yours. That’s a kick in the teeth. You’ll be required to question your assumptions. To search for new books and sources of information to fill in the gaps in your embarrassing lack of knowledge. And you’ll often fail, because you’re as much a loud-mouthed egomaniac as the next person. Possibly worse. But at least you will learn to try harder. Because if you don’t, this movement you love so much will fail — and it will collapse from within.

  Good luck with being twenty-two. One day, someone will show you the way to the washroom.

  Yours in solidarity,

  Older Liz

  THE LONG CRAWL TO DEFEAT, THE SLOW MARCH TO VICTORY

  IT WAS THE SIGHT OF the girl in the prisoner’s uniform that stopped me. At that point, I’d been wandering around the Donald Trump rally in Florida for an hour, past grown men yelling “Trump that bitch” and “Lock her up.” I’d paused to look at a miniature Hillary Clinton puppet, lovingly crafted to hideous effect, locked in a cage. I’d touched the cotton of a T-shirt that showed cartoon Trump urinating on the word “Hillary.”

  I’d been inoculated, in other words. After wading through the toxins of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, the venomous exhalations of a sick body politic, I thought nothing could surprise me. And then I saw the girl.

  She was standing on the green hillside of the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre, bathed in the rich glow of the late October Florida sun. All around her people were wearing Trump shirts, Trump hats, Trump socks. But the girl’s outfit trumped them all. She was dressed as an imprisoned Hillary Clinton. That is, she wore a striped prisoner’s uniform on her body and a rubber Hillary Clinton mask on her face. If there were any doubt about the message we were meant to take away, she also wore a button that said “Lock Her Up.”

  A small crowd surrounded the girl, laughing and pointing and taking pictures. At first, I thought, That can’t be a child in there. It has to be a very tiny, very angry adult. Although I’d just spent the past few days interviewing Floridians, many of them women, who told me that Hillary Clinton was a liar, a murderer, and a literal demon, I couldn’t wrap my neurons around this level of hostility. Who would suggest to their daughter that the first female candidate with an actual chance to win the presidency was not only unqualified for the job, but deserved to be imprisoned for having the gall to run?

  There was a woman standing by the girl’s side, smiling at the attention. This must be mom. Mom, and likely Dad, too, would have arranged this spectacle. Let’s be generous to them and say that this Imprisoned Hillary idea was all the child’s. She woke up one morning, put down her Baby-Sitters Club book and turned off Snapchat, and decided: Hell, I’m going to the Trump rally tonight dressed as Lock Her Up!

  Even so, someone gave her the idea that Hillary Clinton — former Secretary of State, lawyer, feminist, advocate for children of this girl’s age — was not a person qualified to run for president, or in fact a person at all but rather an object of hatred and contempt.

  I looked at her beaming mother and made a vague gesture with my phone. Sure, the mother nodded. Go ahead and take a picture of my daughter in her grotesque rubber mask, her two small thumbs held cheerily aloft. I took a couple of pictures, the little girl framed against the green grass and the piercing blue of Florida’s sky.

  “It looks like a Diane Arbus photo,” a friend would later say.

  My journalistic instincts abandoned me. I should have interviewed the mother and the daughter, asked them why they were there, who had poisoned the well they drink from. But I didn’t. I felt sick to my stomach, for the first time since I started following the campaign closely at its beginning. I felt like I was witnessing the mistrust and fear that women are taught about other women, and keep stored in their bones and their muscles, and deny even to themselves and pass on to their daughters.

  The girl hugged her mother, turned away, and peeled off her rubber mask. It must have been stifling in there. Her long blonde hair tumbled out, and she immediately began to turn cartwheels on the grass, her prisoner’s stripes a pinwheeled blur. I imagined Hillary herself peeling off her mask at the end of the day, putting it in a drawer marked Campaign Bullshit, and sitting down for a stiff Scotch and a Louise Penny novel.

  I imagined my daughter, who was eleven and looked like this girl, although her hair was long and dark, not blonde. She was back home in Toronto. I bought her a Clinton campaign T-shirt that said “I’m With Her,” but she would never end up wearing it because by the time I gave it to her the world had gone off a cliff. The T-shirt would sit folded on her shelf, a reminder of a wound too painful to revisit.

  My daughter kept the T-shirt, in the same way that I’d kept men’s shirts after they’d broken my heart, as a reminder of the way that life is torn and mended again. Maybe I’m just as bad as Prisoner Hillary’s mom, using my child as a billboard for my political beliefs. My daughter, too, absorbed the prevailing winds in our household: She echoed back my feminism. Did it come from within her, or was she just parroting what she knew I wanted to hear?

  The rally was about to begin. On stage, a wizened relic talked about God and, inevitably, making America great again. The crowd seemed equally divided between men and women.

  I was particularly interested in how women could bring themselves to vote for Trump, who, at this point, had been accused of sexual groping by twelve women. They had all come forward after the release of his infamous Access Hollywood tape, in which he bro’d down with TV presenter Billy Bush over the many benefits of stardom. According to the future president, a female target would allow a famous man to grab her “by the pussy.” Later, Trump dismissed this statement — which seemed tantamount to acknowledging sexual assault — as “locker room talk.”

  The female Trump supporters I talked to were on his side: They repeated his excuse, using the phrase “locker room talk.” They said it all happened long in the past. Astonishingly, many of them also echoed Trump’s insinuation that the women making the allegations were too unattractive to warrant his attention. “Have you seen Melania?” one of them asked, eyebrow raised meaningfully. I felt like I was trapped in a surreal dimension where we’d all been given the same puzzle pieces, but my jigsaw showed a giraffe while theirs showed a crocodile.

  The crocodile, to these women, was Hillary Clinton. I was unprepared for the depth of hatred and vitriol among a certain segment of the population. I thought I’d find it among men, but they were actually smart enough to cloak their misogyny in a bland layer of inoffensive language. Before the rally in Tampa, I approached one elderly lady, her snowy hair piled on her head, to ask her opinion of Clinton. I’d barely opened my mouth when she leaned in and said, “She’s a liar, liar, liar, liar, liar.” Her cheery old face contorted with bitterness. Her friend turned to her, in an effort to lighten the mood, and whispered, “Remember you haven’t taken your blood pressure medication yet.”

  Another woman at the rally, a nurse and an immigrant from Central America herself — “But legal, okay?” — told me that Clinton was a murderer, and a demon. Oddly, this did not surprise me. What did surprise me was how little had changed since 1872, when Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to seek the American presidency, was known in the press as “Mrs. Satan.”

  It is one thing to recognize, on a theoretical level, the depth of hatred levelled at Clinton. It was quite another to experience it, in your ears and eyes, and on your skin. It was the difference between watching a slasher movie and being followed home yourself by a crazed killer. What shocked me the most, though it shouldn’t because I am a feminist who has been writing about this stuff for decades, is that some of the loudest voices around me were women’s. Internalized misogyny, I wanted to whisper to the women in front of me, sitting with her daughters, all wearing pink Women for Trump shirts: It’s called internalized misogyny, sisters.

  By the time Trump reached the stage, following a cavalcade of minor Floridian celeb
rities, the crowd was near the boil, the lid rattling on a stew of glee and resentment. It did not take long for him to turn the heat up: “The best evidence that the system is rigged is the fact that Hillary Clinton, despite her many crimes, was even allowed to run for president in the first place.” It was the crowd’s cue to begin the chant they’d heard at every Trump rally when they’d turn on the news: “Lock her up! Lock her up!” Trump prowled the stage, patting his soft, white hands together, beaming encouragement. “Lock her up!” I wondered if the little girl in the Hillary costume was chanting along, caught up in the wave, thrilled to be among the adults and their delicious hate.

  On the way out, the crowd was giddy and spent, collectively in need of a post-coital cigarette. I was reeling: I didn’t see Prisoner Hillary anywhere; perhaps her parents had taken her home. It was a school night, after all.

  ON ELECTION DAY, back home in Toronto, I phoned my mother. She was, to put it mildly, a Hillary superfan: I admired Clinton for her ambition and savvy, for her policy commitments that would improve women’s lives, but I also recognized her limitations. I had seen, first-hand, that there were Americans whose loathing of her was visceral, if not entirely rational. My mother’s affection existed on a whole other level. In Florida I bought her a pink Clinton cap that said “Stronger Together.” I imagined her asking to be buried in it.

  When Clinton won the presidential nomination, the first woman to secure the candidacy for a major political party, my mother wept. I jokingly told her that she hadn’t been that emotional at the births of her eight grandchildren; she didn’t correct me.

  My mother, a progressive to the core and a political junkie, was born twelve years after women in Canada won the right to vote. There was one woman sitting in Canada’s parliament in the year of her birth. Mildred remembered not being able to own her own credit card. She had seen me climb, and my sister. She had seen the world turn its face toward progress. And now there was a chance that Clinton would shatter “the highest and hardest glass ceiling.”