F-Bomb

by Lauren McKeon

  The shift, so far, only seems to exacerbate the movement’s ageism. “The two issues that are bound to divide a room of feminists are sex work and transgender inclusion,” Lalonde told me. “And I think the controversy around those two issues is born from the generational divide within the feminist movement.” Some women, in other words, believe sex worker and transgender inclusion belong in the movement and are central issues going forward; others do not. As I see it, Lalonde could have added any number of uncomfortable issues around privilege to the list of room separators. For all our careful tiptoeing around generational stereotyping, it seems clear that one subset of women close their eyes and see white, straight, middle-aged, middle-class, able-bodied women as the feminist movement, and others close their eyes and see a complex rainbow.

  Yes, the feminist movement can thrive on difference—a whole mass of women working apart but also together toward the ultimate goal of, as writer bell hooks put it, gender justice. But for many young women I’ve interviewed, it doesn’t feel like we are united at all. Instead, it’s more like we are building our own generational islands, erecting fortresses, and then catapulting stones. Those who happen to wander onto our islands are often treated with hostility, like they are bumbling tourists, if not outright enemies. We’ve become distracted with fighting each other. We hurl questions, insults, and harassment at dinner parties, on Twitter, and at women’s conferences and committee meetings.

  “It isn’t doing us any good,” Lalonde told me. “It’s only perpetuating the idea that we can’t get along.”

  And the anti-feminists love us for it.

  I once attended a panel on feminism during which one of the speakers, a white, sixtyish feminist, with a luminous moon-white bob and graceful hands, expressed her bewilderment over the movement’s current divisiveness. She was clearly brilliant and dedicated, a grandmother of the movement who had spent much of her life researching the law as it pertained to gender, race, and the uneven application of justice. And yet she felt that the movement was much better at diversity in the 1960s and ’70s. Women of all colors were at those early modern rallies, she said, all working together. They were there, she emphasized, as if that were enough.

  Though she sat poised and not at all gawky, she reminded me of my high school self—the one that buffed over differences, sanding them down to a dull uniformity. I couldn’t help but wonder if, all those years ago, she’d ever asked those women how they felt; if those “others,” those women of color, were ever given the opportunity to speak, to lead; if even then she wondered who wasn’t there at all. Mostly, I wondered why she thought that simply being at a place meant meaningful involvement, and for all women, not just for those who were, in fact, present.

  Any woman who has existed in the world should know better than that. Just think of the times you were in a room of men, maybe at work or at school, or even in your own home, and they all talked over you. Think about the times men explained your own experiences to you, the times they confidently stole the spotlight, the times you felt the smallest even when you had the biggest things to say. That’s what feminists like Lalonde mean when they criticize feminism for its exclusivity. It doesn’t matter that girls and women are there; it matters that we let all women speak and then make the room to listen to them. And right now, we’re unequivocally failing.

  None of this is easy. For many women—even white ones, even rich ones, even ones in happy homes—grappling with the idea of privilege is difficult. It can seem exceedingly difficult to define, let alone acknowledge. Few would argue against the statement that the women of Hollywood’s elite have more money/opportunities/private islands/jets/beauty/everything than the average Jane. And yet even female film actors face overt sexism and are paid less than their male counterparts, proving, perhaps, that creeps and the wage gap both find all of us in the end.

  I can hear the chorus now: So, then, aren’t we all in it together? Don’t we all have it bad? That’s not the point. It’s as if admitting privilege simultaneously erases both a woman’s pain and the inherent unfairness she faces daily. Certainly, it’s a very scary prospect for any woman still bearing the weight of her gender, as we all do, in one way or another. But this rabbiting fear has driven us to reinforce the same power structures feminism is meant to abolish. Instead of moving forward all together, as capital-F feminism claims to be doing, we’ve swiped sideways, an undulating wave of fallen dominoes.

  It’s so hard to know where to begin. As a white woman, even though I recognize and speak out about the root causes of feminism’s divisiveness, I am part of the problem. Even as I call for all of us with privilege to shut up and listen to those who don’t have as much, or any, I’m elevating my voice. As much as I do the hard work, I can also rationalize with the best of ’em. Sometimes I feel like saying, “You know what? I’ve done enough, I need a rest.” Sometimes it can feel like I’ve fought so hard for my voice to ring loudly, I don’t want to hush it. Sometimes it can feel like I have so much work to do in my own life—juggle several gigs to pay my bills, wash the leaning tower of plates in my sink, go to therapy—that no time is left for thinking about women’s rights, let alone my privilege. In those small, selfish moments it’s hard to remember that’s not what a better feminism demands.

  Confronting privilege means we need to open doors and cede platforms in thoughtful and consistent ways. We need to keep doing it, keep listening, keep stumbling, and keep trying to do better. That’s exhausting, trying, humiliating work that turns inward to ourselves and to the movement, instead of outward to the world, a far easier task. It’s uncomfortable. Trying to figure out what your privilege is and what you can do about it can feel like knotting yourself up into a roadside World’s Biggest Pretzel attraction—over and over and over again. But we have to do it anyway. Well, I mean, that’s one argument.

  The second decade of the millennium has ushered in a new wave of feminists who are ready to live in this discomfort. They believe wholeheartedly in “half Hispanic, half Eastern European” feminist blogger and writer Flavia Dzodan’s seminal and declarative 2011 essay: “My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit!” In typical salty language, Dzodan describes the importance of intersectionality by likening it to a “shit puff pastry.” “The shit puff pastry,” she wrote, “is every layer of fuck that goes on above me, below me, by my sides, all around me.” Other feminists have called it a shit sandwich. Still more have described it as moving through the world tethered to a set of weights. Add one if you’re a woman, another if you’re a woman of color, another if you have a disability, another if you land on the LGBTQ spectrum, another if you live in poverty. Intersectionality is, essentially, the belief that we cannot untie our oppressions from each other. It calls for a plurality of feminisms, and a movement that acknowledges that while we’re all fighting for equality, we’re not all standing on even ground while we do it.

  Some call this growing movement the fourth wave of feminism, sometimes rather derisively. Canadian conservative Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente penned an exploration of fourth-wave feminism after learning the “new” term intersectionality in March 2016. After giving a snarky but accurate definition of it in her column, she lamented that “these folks” had influence outside university halls and prayed for it all to go away. “When I grew up, kids were urged to be blind to differences. Now they’re urged to see nothing but,” she wrote. “Perhaps one day we’ll stop trying to identify ourselves by labels and just call ourselves human beings.” Even Antonia Zerbisias, former Toronto Star columnist and co-creator of the hashtag #beenrapedneverreported, has railed on fourth wavers. In the wake of Canada’s Jian Ghomeshi sexual assault trial, which cost the radio star his job at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and put him at the center of a national conversation about consent and privilege, she wrote in support of the system that acquitted him: “Memo to my sob-sister, fourth-wave feminists: get over it.”

  That’s not to say only younger women believe in inters
ectional feminism. While this rising sect of the movement was born in the current generation and certainly skews younger, it’s not solely age that divides us, but belief. There are those of all generations and so-called waves who think intersectional feminism is essential and vital in the push for women’s rights, and then there are firm feminists, like Wente, who’ve never heard of the word, or those, like Zerbisias, who have, and yet see it as a trivial, even petty, term. They are the feminists who want the club to look like how I saw my high school: a happy, Kumbaya-singing circle of diversity. To them, intersectionality breeds the in-fighting that’s become feminism’s Achilles’ heel. With a small shift, they’re right: the tension of those feminists who demand intersectionality and the others who don’t get it is like vinegar to baking soda. Fizz-bang-explode.

  I’m not advocating feminism totalitarianism, rows of identical, marching Feminazis (as we’re so terribly called) with Sharpied moustaches and shiny boots. Nor am I rooting for anarchy. What we need is a movement that recognizes, allows, and even celebrates its differences. In my feminist Shangri-La, we embrace the plurality of feminisms and can still work together and respect each other. We’re allies. We disagree without slinging mud; we don’t stage self-destructive shows for the anti-feminists’ entertainment. In other words, if feminism wants to survive and grow, not shrink, it’s vital that it learn how to communicate within itself.

  In April 2016 I attended the Saturday night headline event of Canada’s national Spur Festival, a celebration of politics, arts, and ideas. The one-hour event boasted a one-word title, “Feminism,” bestowing the movement with the singular power of God, or perhaps Madonna. The program booklet provided scant context: “Spur celebrates the accomplishments and contradictions of the feminist movement and explores feminism in practice.” In an hour? How ambitious. Sitting in the audience, my bottom already going Novocaine numb on the barely cushioned seat, I wondered whether the organizers simply couldn’t think of anything else to say, as if the idea of wading through the movement and drilling down past the omnipresent feminism was too daunting.

  As the minutes ticked closer to showtime, I watched as the downtown Toronto theater filled to three-quarters capacity. The number of men surprised me. Fifteen minutes late, the stage lights blinked on, tiny suns that revealed the speakers’ racial diversity: two white women (Constance Backhouse, a law professor, and Stacey May Fowles, a novelist and essayist); one Indigenous woman (Kim Anderson, a Cree/Métis writer and university professor); and two Black women (moderator Vicky Mochama and Lena Peters, a young activist and founding member of Toronto’s Black Lives Matter). The next hour unfolded with a humming energy as the women discussed everything from racism to colonialism and from the possibility of a feminist Magna Carta to Instagram.

  Mochama directed the conversation between women whose approach to their feminist practices often bore little resemblance—not necessarily a bad thing. The differences came to the forefront when Mochama asked the panelists to finish the sentence “We the feminist people, to form a more equal society . . .” As Fowles jokingly groaned “Oh, God” at the enormity of the question, the audience laughed and clapped. Anderson, who responded first, stated simply “respect all life” (though, when asked, she explained that the three-word concept must underscore all approaches to equality). Backhouse said any declaration must focus on changing the culture to dismantle discrimination. Peters emphasized that we shouldn’t even try for the unity an answer would suggest: “That’s the scariest version of feminism, right? The club. That’s why so many people shy away from the label.” She added that she doesn’t want her grandchildren’s feminism to resemble hers. If it did, “it would be yucky, and old,” she laughed. Fowles agreed, adding that if such a proclamation existed, “I certainly wouldn’t want to write it.” Feminism should not be set in stone. The tension made for a lively discussion, and an even livelier question period.

  But once given their own chance at the mic, audience members kept circling back to feminism’s apparent divisiveness. One asked how to better include men, another how to better include mothers, and a third how to quell the social media infighting. Midway through, a woman’s voice broke on the first word of her question. She was a young woman, close to my age, her winged glasses hitting the curls of her hair. “I’m biracial,” she told the audience. Her mom’s hand popped a self-conscious hello from the crowd. The young woman apologized for crying as her voice warbled. She was heartbroken, she told the panelists and everyone else in the room. “The saddest thing for me,” she said, “is the divisiveness between women.” Wasn’t there a way we could all work together? In response, Peters chided her. She doubted, she said, that white women ever sat around a table and wondered how to get other women involved. She doubted they asked themselves how they could give up a little of their power and work together instead. For Peters, and many others, the suggestion that feminists all play nice presents a certain danger: a forced Stepford-like homogeny.

  I later caught up with the young woman and her mother. It bothered her that nobody wanted to talk about the divisiveness. There had to be a way to work apart, but together. In doing so, we could acknowledge feminists’ many differences, she said, but also the common goal. She worried what would become of feminism if we couldn’t. It was like women were fighting over bread, she told me. That person had two slices. Maybe she had three. I could have had four. “But we all fucking don’t have enough bread.”

  Jarrah Hodge’s voice strained with diplomacy, vibrating with the plucked tension of an elastic band about to snap. Underneath her careful words, Hodge was pissed. I’d called her because I admired her Canadian feminist blog Gender Focus, which she’d founded in 2009. Shortly before I spoke to her, she’d won the Best Politics Blog and the Best Activism and Social Justice Blog in the juried Canadian Weblog Awards. She was only twenty-eight and had already spent most of her life, online and IRL, in the feminist sphere, organizing events and rallies, sitting on boards, and advocating for her view of a more equal world. I’d just asked her about the sexism she experienced as a young woman online, but that wasn’t what she wanted to talk about. She thrummed with fake laughter: “Oh, I thought you were going to ask me about my experiences as a young woman in feminist spaces.”

  It had been on her mind throughout the interview, she confessed. “I’ll answer that first,” she told me, “and then the second question, if that’s cool,” the second question being the one I’d actually asked her. Of course it was cool. By now, I’d realized the frustration young women felt was always boiling in the background throughout even the most general of conversations about young feminism; it needed somewhere to erupt. Hodge was careful to say she knew other feminists meant well. But she was tired of arriving at events she’d organized, or whose committees she’d steered, and hearing older women sweetly remark that it was nice she’d made it to her first feminist event. Other times, women will tell her it’s nice to see a young person, then demand to know why she didn’t bring more youth with her. More than once other women have assumed her mother brought her to an event. It always makes her feel like she’s not valued as an equal participant within the movement.

  It’s not just a matter of hurt feelings. That kind of alienation can be devastating to a teenager or early twentysomething who’s just discovering women’s rights, stressed Anastasia Gaisenok, who, when I spoke to her, was just wrapping up her two-year tenure as the project coordinator for the Young Women Civic Leaders initiative in Vancouver (she went on to become executive director of the Youth Global Education Network). Gaisenok, who was born in Belarus and moved to British Columbia in 2003 to attend Simon Fraser University, also landed in the “pissed” category and she was not careful, or polite, in her criticism. As she spoke about the damaging effects of “pushing out” potential feminists, her Russian accent muddied her vowels in direct relation to how irked she felt, which was very. “This is a way to turn people off the whole thing, really,” she told me.

  Many of the young women th
at she worked with, women who were interested in politics and wanted to change the world, were afraid of feminist spaces, Gaisenok noted. Once, when she suggested meeting at a local university’s women’s center, a place she thought was a natural fit, especially since five of the women in the group were students at the school—she was shocked to discover none of them had been to the center and balked at going. They felt they weren’t feminist enough and that they’d be chastised, she told me, proving the age gap doesn’t have to be wide to be felt. Gaisenok found it especially heartbreaking, she said, because she remembered being that girl: the one who knew hardly anything about formal feminist theory but who desperately wanted to be part of the movement advocating for change. Feminism needs to figure out how to bring women in who are currently on the periphery lest it turn away even more.

  “It’s a minefield,” Gaisenok fumed, the crescents of her cheekbones tightening in anger. “You are afraid to open your mouth in one of those discussions. If you say something that is perceived as not feminist enough, or not fully thought out, or a position that this particular person doesn’t agree with, then you’re immediately ostracized and made to feel so horrible.” She emphasized women need to be gentler and more understanding when it comes to young women discovering the movement. Instead, we’ve thrown up all sorts of barriers. The language of feminism can be inaccessible, said Gaisenok. At a recent panel on rape culture she wondered whether someone completely new to feminism would get lost in the maze of jargon; it took until the closing minutes of the panel to even define rape culture. If she was at entry-point level, she imagined, she’d feel so stupid listening without a clue about what was happening. She might, she surmised, even decide feminism wasn’t for her, or that it didn’t want her.