F-Bomb

by Lauren McKeon

  But it’s dangerous to let these victories fool us into thinking we’ve won. At the time of the Shriver Report’s release, one in three adult women in North America lived in poverty or on the brink of it. We made up roughly 47 percent of the labor force but more than 60 percent of minimum-wage jobs. As a result, we were likely to have poorer health and more stress than men. We continued to earn somewhere around seventy-five cents for every dollar a man earned, and some studies of the past decade showed that gap was growing, not shrinking. The average Black woman earned only sixty-four cents to a white man’s dollar, and Latinas earned fifty-five cents. Paid family leave was still a dream for close to 90 percent of women workers. And while there were close to three million more of us enrolled in post-secondary education than men, they still hugely outnumbered us in program majors that tended to pay more after graduation, including science, technology, engineering, and math, disciplines jointly known as STEM. The field, in fact, is overwhelmingly male. Despite a few high-profile women at the top, we comprised less than 20 percent of the industry’s employees. Considering STEM is widely acknowledged as the driver of our future economy, this portends bad things for working women.

  Beyond these hard numbers were hundreds of anecdotes that charted the ways women were still losing. Take, for instance, just a few of the things that happened during the week I wrote the sentence you’re reading right now: a woman was shot and killed in Detroit after refusing to give a man her phone number; three men in Atlanta gang raped and then set fire to a woman because she beat them in a freestyle rap battle at a house party; Microsoft’s CEO told a predominately female audience at a tech conference to never ask for a raise but instead “know and have faith that the system will give you the right raise”; American talk show host Wendy Williams told Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence that the hacked, leaked nude photos of her were not a “sex crime,” as Lawrence had told Vanity Fair, because, according to Williams, the hacking “has actually made your career even hotter”; and numerous rape scandals rocked the New York alt-lit scene, supposedly a bastion of progressive values. And that was just an average news week. I could have picked any week at random and found similar results, or worse.

  Also consider the moment in 2016 when most of us realized we were in trouble—the Trump in the room, if you will. First came the Hillary Clinton effigies hung in front of houses. Then Donald Trump called Clinton a “nasty woman” during a live televised presidential debate. Perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a shock. That same month, October 2016, a 2005 recording was leaked of Trump bragging about his treatment of women to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush. “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful [women]. I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything,” Trump boasted. “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

  Trump’s resurrected words, and his response to the leak, launched many “This pussy grabs back” T-shirts, memes, and rallying cries—and prompted many women to come forward with sexual assault allegations against Trump. By the end of the month at least seventeen women had shared their experiences, alleging unwanted sexual advances that included touching, groping, and kissing. Among the women who spoke out against Trump’s behavior were former Miss Teen USA contestants who accused Trump of entering their changing room when they were undressing or, in some cases, already nude. The teens were as young as fifteen. Trump had previously gloated about this, too, on Howard Stern’s show, also in 2005, saying that because he was the owner of the pageant, he could “sort of get away with things like this.” When not calling his accusers liars, Trump and his supporters dismissed his talk as harmless locker room banter.

  People either believed the Trump team spin or didn’t care about his behavior, because he won the election. I was less surprised than most to learn that 53 percent of white women voted for Trump. Their ballot marks disproved conventional wisdom that his gross actions and comments toward women would make him about as appealing as a dirty gym sock. Many women resented the presumption that they’d vote for Clinton based on her gender. Even supposedly diehard Democrats had piled on the misogyny, claiming they simply preferred Bernie Sanders for the job while also calling Clinton supporters “Hillary bots” and Clinton herself other, worse things. They earned their own nickname, “Bernie Bros,” which, in turn, spawned several think pieces and much online chatter about whether feminists were making up the misogyny. Never mind the death threats.

  Scott Goodson’s 2012 book, Uprising: How to Build a Brand—and Change the World—by Sparking Cultural Movements, offers surprising insight into anti-feminism’s growing popularity. To help explain the rise of social movements, Goodson turned to Bob Johansen, a director at the forward-looking think tank Institute for the Future. “In times of turbulence, anything that gives people a sense of meaning tends to grow,” Johansen explained. In a modern era of super-connectivity—and yet concurrent in-person disconnectivity—movements are the new gathering points, today’s Rotary Club or Tupperware party, if you will. While technology facilitates today’s lightning growth, Goodson argues, it’s really passion of belief that inspires people to move on an idea together.

  Goodson cites Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign as the start of today’s movement mania. While Obama offered hope, his campaign also sparked the Tea Party, one of the most successful recent countercultural movements. The Tea Party swiftly sprang up in opposition to Obama’s policies and positions, zeroing in on people’s anger. Like anti-feminism and men’s rights activism (MRA), it started out, as Goodson wrote, “unclear and chaotic and messy,” but as Obama’s popularity grew, so did the Tea Party’s ability to oppose his message. Their own message soon crystallized. (Fast-forward and we get Trump.) So it goes with feminism and anti-feminism. As feminism grows and stalls and fails and grows some more, like all major movements, anti-feminism responds, plucking at the restlessness and dissatisfaction that feminism misses, paving the way for a new vision of womanhood.

  According to Goodson, hundreds and thousands of movements are happening all around us—some commercial, some social, some big, some small—and together they’ve put us in a cultural moment of movements. We’re on a hunt for meaning, and technology has accelerated our ability to connect with others on that same hunt. In 2009, shortly after Barack Obama’s second election win, and way before @RealDonaldTrump broke the internet, Clay Shirky, the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, gave a TED talk on the power of social media. He called our current age “the largest increase in expressive capability in human history.” The internet, he explained, was the first-ever medium that allowed for a many-to-many communication pattern: it can facilitate the building of groups and mass conversation among those groups.

  Some researchers are beginning to argue that the relationships we form online can be as strong and as real as the ones we form offline. That’s how we get a Women Against Feminism Facebook group that, by early 2017, had grown to amass more than 42,000 likes, or a “Feminism is Evil” Facebook page that claims “Feminism is about female supremacy, not gender equality” with more than 52,000 likes. (For a chilling comparison, the pro-feminism campaign “Who Needs Feminism?” had earned just under 39,500 likes by 2017, despite massive media attention upon its 2012 founding.) These aren’t just idle conversations; people are building bonds and social groups, no matter how trollish they might seem to outsiders. Fizz. Bang. Explode. There is no recorking that champagne bottle. “The question we all face now,” Shirky told his audience, “is ‘How can we make best use of this media?’”

  If this were a different type of book, I might focus on the uplifting actions and the optimistic work of those who are forging new feminisms for the future, documenting how they are making best use of our moment of movements. We will meet more of those people soon—they do exist—but what I wanted to know first was: Why are women so hell-bent on throwing feminism in the historical trashcan? And if feminism is
not what they want, what do they want? What can we learn from those who oppose us?

  I knew that, in many ways, whatever I discovered would be inadequate. There is so much that feminism must pay attention to right now, so many life-or-death issues from which we can’t afford to turn away: the hugely disproportionate rates of discrimination and violence against Indigenous women, women of color, women with disabilities, transgender women, and so many more who do not fit the white, middle-class status quo. These are undeniably feminist issues, and they’re also ones wrapped up in painful, long histories of colonialism, racism, white supremacy, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia.

  The statistics on violence against women are both depressing and alarming. In 2016, for instance, twenty-seven transgender people were murdered in the US, nearly all of them transgender women of color; in the first five months of 2017, that tragic number had already hit eleven, and all of the victims were transgender women of color. Sixty percent of women with disabilities experience some form of violence. Indigenous women, including First Nations women, Inuit women, and Métis women, are six times more likely to be killed than non-Indigenous women and more than 2.5 times more likely to be survivors of violence. In Canada, the number of murdered and missing Indigenous women is staggering—a national crisis that our federal government took an unforgivably long time to acknowledge, let alone act upon. The two-year, $53.86-million independent national inquiry launched in September 2016 has been soundly and rightly criticized by activists, leaders, and family members for its inadequate communication with families. Those same critics demanded an extended timeline to allow proper hearings for those families, and to demand more care and awareness so that families are not re-traumatized by the process. What’s more, the commission put the onus on families to reach out to participate; as of May 2017, less than three hundred had done so. Numerous studies show that when women of color report violence, they’re taken less seriously and their perpetrators receive more lenient sentences. No woman should ever have to experience violence; that society seems to judge some women more worthy of our sorrow than others is inexcusable.

  We need to write a hundred, a thousand, books about this. We must shine a ceaseless spotlight on these issues, and so many others. Investigating the rise of anti-feminism and post-feminism and its allure among today’s girls and women is only one small part of all the feminist work that needs to be done. In choosing to focus on the areas in which the anti-feminist movement has gained the most ground, particularly among women, I know I’m missing so many other feminist issues, including those that are dear to me. The onslaught against women is broad, and the scope of my book is narrow. It is impossible for one book to cover it all. I set out on this project with the hope that if I could understand women’s anti-feminist discourse, it would help me—and others—to understand more, and in that understanding we would wake up: we would investigate more, make more connections, become thunderous in our feminist fights.

  Many women seem convinced that the gains we’ve made are enough. The US presidential election felt like proof that we were willing to settle for almost there, not realizing, or unwilling to admit, it would mean never there. And somehow, in the process, both what we’d achieved, and our unattained goals, were being turned into tinder for the anti-feminist fire.

  How did this happen? If I refused to dismiss women who didn’t believe in feminism or rejected the label, then it followed they must have been responding to something. What was it about feminism that women weren’t connecting with? To find out, I knew I had to go deep inside the anti-feminist movement; I needed to keep meeting the people who had decided women’s rights were achieved, or had at least been realized enough for us to stop fighting for them. I needed to not look away. But before I could go forward into the fire to see what the wholesale rejection was costing us now and what it might cost us in the future, I knew I needed to take a step back and focus that same critical eye on today’s feminist movement and our fractured sisterhood. Because if I was scared of what all the female anti-feminist sentiment was doing to us, I was even more worried these women may have a point.

  2

  Feminists eat their young: The fourth wave, a fractured sisterhood, and the cataclysmic divide between feminist generations

  Feminism is a movement that is at once feared and loved, sometimes by the same people. I stepped into this project to find out why women were abandoning the f-word and the consequences of that. I’d guessed the reasons were complex, but I wasn’t quite prepared for just how muddled our thinking had become.

  The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation Survey Project have been asking Americans what they think about feminism and women’s issues since 1995. The results are both broad and enlightening. As I expected, the 2016 poll showed that women were feeling lukewarm about feminism. Only 60 percent saw the movement favorably and just more than half thought the movement had, à la Joan Jett, a “bad reputation,” and that it should definitely give a damn. A smidge less than 40 percent of women thought the movement was angry, and another 30 percent thought it was outdated. Just about half the women felt the movement focused on changes they wanted (younger women were, on the whole, slightly more inclined to believe feminism cared about the same issues they did, while older women were more likely to give it the thumbs down). Only half, again, felt it reflected the views of all women, a number that hasn’t seemed to budge since 1989. And 40 percent of women felt it unfairly blamed men for their challenges, suggesting the man-hating stereotype has more pop-culture staying power than even Oprah.

  At the same time, the vast majority of women felt equal pay for equal work, affordable child care, and the reduction of sexual harassment should be “top priorities” when it comes to improving women’s lives—all things feminism has worked diligently toward for decades. Other feminist priorities women agreed with were reducing domestic violence and discrimination against women of color and increasing the number of women in STEM. More than two-thirds of women felt a strong need for a women’s movement (note that pollsters didn’t use that dirty word feminism), a number that had increased since 1989, when only 59 percent of women surveyed felt there was a strong need. This is what psychologists call cognitive dissonance: the discomfort of holding two competing beliefs, ideals, or values at once. Many women, it seems, believe that feminism is for angry old man haters, as outdated and unhelpful as shoulder pads. And they see a strong need for better social policy and political movement to help women, which suggests that women believe we may not have achieved equality yet. This, I think, more than anything else explains how we really arrived at that now infamous saying, “I’m not a feminist, but . . .” We’re afraid and maybe a little apathetic, and some days we think we made it, but deep down inside we also know better.

  And we’ve known better for a while. A 1996 research paper called “I Am Not a Feminist, But” published in the journal Political Psychology set out to explore the then new (but still totally baffling) trend of post-feminism in college-age women. The authors studied those who labelled themselves feminists, post-feminists, and anti-feminists, and their reasons for identifying as such. After they’d completed their research, they were forced to add a fourth label: precarious feminists. They slotted more than 40 percent of women into this category, more than any other (though the next highest, at 35 percent, was post-feminist). As a result, they concluded that precarious feminists are similar to post-feminists in that they see advancement resulting from individual abilities. Unlike the post-feminists, however, they are dissatisfied with women’s current status, but they are still lukewarm on the label “feminist.”

  In another study, “Feminists or ‘Postfeminists’?” published nearly ten years later in the journal Gender & Society, scholar Pamela Aronson noted that the majority of young women she interviewed about their views on feminism and gender relations “were, in the words of one woman, ‘fence-sitters.’ They embraced a number of feminist principles yet rejected others and failed to classify themselves
as either feminists or non-feminists . . . Despite this ambiguity, nearly all of the interviewees were supportive of feminist issues.” Fast-forward to today and it seems that equally musty adage “The more things change…” holds true.

  Part of this might be explained by the perception women have about how others view feminism. A 2013 YouGov poll showed that, regardless of their own views on feminism, only 27 percent of women respondents thought that the majority of other women considered themselves feminists. Only 5 percent of women thought that men considered themselves feminists. In a poll the following year, 24 percent of women said they considered calling someone a feminist an “insult.” Women may, in their hearts, believe in the movement, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to don a “feminist” T-shirt or sip from an ironic “male tears” mug (as in “I drink male tears,” an idea expertly explored in Amanda Hess’s 2014 Slate essay “The Rise of the Ironic Man-Hater,” in which she noted that “on its most basic level, ironic misandry functions like a stuck-out tongue pointed at a playground bully”). Or if they do, they might not broadcast it, particularly offline.

  Consider how this tension plays out for teen girls in the peer pressure cookers—i.e., the classrooms and hallways of high schools. “I have friends who believe in feminism but choose not to wear the feminist label because it comes with a lot of stigma, especially in school,” a young feminist named Majella Votta told me. “One day in school I heard a girl classmate say, ‘Ugh, feminism really annoys me,’ to try and impress these two guys in our class. Never in my life have I felt such pity for someone.”

  When I recounted a similar story to a group of thirty-and-over women academics at a dinner party, many of them expressed shock. “But Justin Trudeau says he’s a feminist!” one exclaimed. And it’s true: the Canadian prime minister won over women in Canada and elsewhere with an endearing combination of snuggly panda photo ops, shirtless selfies, and this retort to critics, after choosing a gender-balanced cabinet: “Because it’s 2015.” It all depends on who’s claiming the label and in what context, with race, class, and life experiences all coming into play. What does Trudeau risk by declaring himself feminist? Feminism is experiencing an odd moment right now, where it is at once completely marketable (if you believe in a feminism that is soft on critical analysis but big on empowerment, looking hot, and buying dope shit) and distinctly uncool, like granny panties (if you believe in the kind that requires political action, tough reflection, and constant work).