The buses barreled down the highway toward RFK Stadium, the current home of major league soccer team D.C. United and also where we were permitted to park. It was just a few minutes after eight am, and my belly sloshed with the Tex-Mex breakfast I’d shoveled down earlier when hundreds of us swarmed a suburban Chevys. Nervous and excited, we leaned forward, our bodies at acute angles, anticipating the first glimpse. The stadium’s parking lots were a sprawling doughnut ring that could fit eight thousand cars, or up to twelve hundred buses. We had all wondered how many would show up.
Our driver, Frank, was the first to see them. “Wow, look at all those buses,” he breathed. Holy Moses. “I’ve never seen so many buses in one place.” Then we saw it. From our vantage point, high above the bowl of the parking lots, the bus tops glistened, blocking out the asphalt and filling the lots to capacity. (Nearly one thousand other buses, it was later reported, had permits to park elsewhere in the city.)
“Look at all the people!”
“We could hold the march right here!”
“I’m going to have goosebumps all friggin’ day,” someone behind me said.
Chester Starr led the bus in a chant as it inched behind the lineup to the lots.
“What do we want?”
“Equality!”
“When do we want it?”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
Dressed in matching red hats and unfurling contraband “Sisters of the North” signs, the Canadian delegations poured out. On everyone’s arm, scrawled in black Sharpie, were the digits 613-996-8885—the emergency consulate number for Canadians traveling abroad. “I don’t believe you will need this number,” Chester Starr said as she passed around the Sharpies, their chemical tang punching the air. “But just in case.” She warned us against possible violence, uncontrollable anger. Organizers expected counterprotestors, whether they were cheering for Trump or holding up anti-abortion signs. Nobody could guess at the size of the crowds we’d soon encounter, or the expected mood. The night before, more than 217 people had been arrested, and someone had set fire to a black limousine. As we grouped outside, Chester Starr flicked her lighter against a cigarette. Tension crackled off her; she wanted to make sure we all stayed together, that she got us there okay. She grabbed a cardboard tube from the depths of the bus, her own smuggled banner announcing our delegation. I followed her outside the parking lot as we snaked behind hundreds of other marchers. She apologized for being “cranky,” but I understood. Her phone was still buzzing with questions. Her fingers flew over the glass front, tweeting updates. Spark. Another cigarette.
It was a half-hour walk to our meeting spot with the other Canadians, including Marissa McTasney, an entrepreneur who’d taken the initial lead on organizing the Canadian delegation and who’d never engaged in activism before. Today was her birthday. In the weeks leading up to the march, McTasney had faced a deluge of online threats and horrific name-calling in response to media interviews. Men’s rights activists and anti-feminists had hurled what was now, to me, a vile, familiar roster: she was called fat, ugly, and stupid. And she was threatened with rape. Some men reached out via email, spewing right into her inbox. But here she was. Here we all were. As we headed down Independence Avenue SE, cars honked their support and people emerged from their houses and shops to thank us, to ask us where we were from. One family passed out Starbucks coffee, another Hershey’s chocolate kisses. By the time we met with the others, it seemed impossible that the day could turn to violence. Chester Starr charted our first steps on Facebook Live, wiping her brow before smiling wide: “Make some noise! All right, yes, this is exciting! We are going! We are on our way! We’re going to march! Woohoo!”
At the National Mall, the downtown park, the crowd enveloped us. Before that day, estimates had pegged the expected crowd at two hundred thousand; after crowd scientists analyzed the pictures, that number soared to at least—at least—470,000, roughly three times the number of people who attended Trump’s inauguration. (The Trump administration, of course, had “alternate facts” about the respective crowd sizes.) The crowd was so thick, I never made it to the speakers stage. I missed all the stars: Janelle Monáe (“Whenever you feel in doubt, whenever you want to give up, you must always remember to choose freedom over fear.”); America Ferrera (“A platform of hate and division assumed power yesterday. But the president is not America. We are America.”); Alicia Keys (“We will continue to rise until our voices are heard…until our dollar is the same dollar as a man’s.”); Scarlett Johansson (speaking to Trump: “I want to be able to support you, but first I ask that you support me . . . Support my daughter, who may actually, as a result of the appointments you have made, grow up in a country that is moving backwards, not forwards.”); and, of course, Gloria Steinem (“You look great. I wish you could see yourselves. It’s like an ocean.”).
One reporter tweeted that, from where he was standing near the back of the packed park, it would take him nineteen minutes to walk to the stage, if the route were clear. After he tweeted, he realized he was no longer at the back; hundreds more people had closed around him. There were so many people that they filled the entire march route. I didn’t move for an hour as we waited for the staggering crowd ahead of us to start. And even then, we moved not along the route, but beside it, uncontainable. I was so surrounded that I couldn’t quite fathom how big the crowds were until a friend sent me an aerial shot. And pink was everywhere—everywhere. Anti-feminists and Trump supporters had mocked marchers for knitting pink “pussy hats,” a cheeky play on Trump’s own derogatory talk and a way to reclaim a word that was never meant to be ours. (Also, the cat-eared hats were cute.) A blogger with Chicks on the Right wrote the hats were “what happens when militant feminists from across the country put their ‘deranged cat lady’ knitting skills to use.” And they call us killjoys.
The crowd itself reflected the deliberately, unapologetically diverse mandate of the march, a mishmash of messages and chants, people and goals. This was discord acknowledged and celebrated, a promise for the feminist movement to do better, written on the faces of everyone, and shouted in every hoarse voice, separate and together. Black Lives Matter signs punctuated the throngs of people moving slowly, the chants rolling through like a tidal wave. We shouted: “Show me what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!” We shouted: “We want a leader, not a creepy tweeter!” We shouted: “No hate! No fear! Immigrants are welcome here!” We chanted for Muslim rights, transgender rights, queer rights, Indigenous rights, disability rights. We chanted for inclusivity and diversity, and a free media. Signs asserted: “Love trumps hate,” “Let it rain glass,” “Climate change is real,” and “Women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights.” We invoked humor: “We shall ‘overcomb,’” “There shall be hell toupée,” and “This pussy grabs back.” Maya Angelou was a hero. Martin Luther King was a hero. Nasty women were heroes, too, and the motto “Love is love is love” thrummed through the crowd. So many women carried signs that simply read “Equality.” Through it all I heard drummers, playing out a steady rhythm, like a beating heart.
I embarked on this project because I wanted to examine the growing influence of anti-feminist narratives, the paralyzing effects of the “Ciao, feminism!” culture, and how both are polluting feminism’s necessary growing pains and intense self-analysis. This book joins a number of recent titles that analyze how feminism is connecting today, how it’s being attacked and celebrated and practiced, and what it means to put feminism in the bright and glaring spotlight once more. I’ve interviewed some of the authors of these other books and discussed the work of others. I see all of us working together, even those of us who are strangers, to ignite a sorely needed conversation on equality and human rights, and how we, as a society, choose to value, protect, and guarantee both. I’ve heard from so many feminists who, upon hearing that I actually spent a fair amount of my research time with anti-feminists, remark on my bravery or ask me what “they” w
ere like, their curiosity akin to a five-year-old studying an especially nasty bug. I hope these pages answer the latter question, and call for us all to have that same bravery, to learn from those who disagree with us, if only to make ourselves stronger.
At its core, though, my subject has been how women today navigate their lives. My goal was to trace the trajectory of how women define their choices and the contexts in which they make them, particularly in a world that historically and currently has prescribed who we can and cannot be. That trajectory is not one line, but many; not straight, but messy. It reveals both true steps toward equality and also the fierce need to not let that be enough. We need a relentless, energetic force that doesn’t stop until it has dismantled our structural imbalances and barriers and built something better. Some women have made great strides, sure, but that is not the same thing as equality. And isn’t that what’s at stake here: the very definition of what we mean when we talk about equality?
We all don’t fucking have enough bread. If we continue to deny that, we’re heading for a dismal future. We’ll never reach parity in the workforce; structural support to keep women from opting out will remain stunted; we’ll continue to make less while we do the same work; we won’t have control over our own bodies; we’ll continue to be raped at astounding rates; we’ll continue to be told and to believe that we deserve it; we’ll keep acting like this is the best we can do; we’ll see bigger roadblocks placed in front of women of color, women with disabilities, and women who identify on the LGBTQ spectrum; Indigenous women will keep going missing; and we’ll continue to categorize women, deciding who is worthy of attention and who is not, how a woman can be and how she cannot. We will tell ourselves we chose it. Some of our lives will get better, because that is the undeniable promise of anti-feminism and post-feminism (even, to some extent, mainstream white feminism).
These backlash movements are appealing precisely because they pin both success and failure on the individual. It’s a heady mix of choice and can-doism that allows women to claim their own empowerment while not acknowledging what keeps others from claiming theirs. I don’t believe anti-feminists and post-feminists truly want the worst of the Dark Ages for women, or that pop feminism only cares about white, middle-class women. But I do believe they work in their own way to protect a system that has given them power and protected their values while maintaining very clear roles—it promises them certainty in a time when uncertainty blooms like weeds. And I do believe we can do better. It’s more important than ever for us to keep making more bread, until all our baskets runneth over.
If we ever hope to achieve this, feminism also has to do better. It must keep peering into itself and keep practicing inclusivity and intersectionality. Not to get too sappy, but it must keep practicing love. Whenever I think about this, I think back to what Colleen MacQuarrie, a PEI-based activist, told me about the successful campaign for abortion access in her province. She credited a lot of the success to hope and the celebration of different tactics and coalitions within the movement. Activists welcomed new ideas and responded with a simple, “Yes, and how can I support you?” For her, hope did not come from envisioning one single mass movement but rather a diverse upsurge of movements in constant dialogue about the principles of equity and respect for different peoples and the world we live in. “If we can have more voices and more actions, I don’t worry that we won’t be creative enough,” she told me. “I don’t worry that we won’t be able to find the evidence. I know we will. What I worry more about is the silence. I worry when we’re not hearing about the uprisings.” She added that action is about hope responding to its antithesis: despair. “Despair is the gift to oppressive forces. To the extent that you can inspire despair and degradation, you’re winning the status quo.” Anytime we see a rise in despair, she argued, you hear a Mad Libs–style, fill-in-the-blank-here question: “What can we ever do about…?”
Hope is an antidote to that despair. It tells us that we can do something and then it propels us into action.
Later, I’d hear about the counterprotestors. A makeshift float, which its driver dubbed “Trump Unity Bridge,” tried to truck Trump supporters through the march. Later, anti-feminists would troll the social media accounts of marchers, posting anti-abortion gifs and spreading misogyny. Later, at a bar with the Canadian marchers, I’d hear men jeer at feminists, drunkenly telling them to “go back to the kitchen.” Later, as we prepared to walk back to the parking lot, locals would tell us which streets to avoid, warning us that it wasn’t safe for women at night. We’d discover our bus had broken down, and our grassroots organizing would falter, stranding some of us in the parking lot, lost. American Red Cross disaster relief would swoop in and save us, doling out fleece blankets, Ritz crackers, and hot chocolate. We’d joke that it wasn’t symbolic.
In the coming weeks, all the old tropes would dance by like cardboard cowboys at a carnival shooting gallery. Anti-feminists and conservatives would point to Madonna’s comment to the crowd—that she’d “thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House”—as proof of feminism’s inherent violence, its terrorist intent. And, later, the women who marched would have tough conversations about how to keep the momentum going. They’d debate and discuss how to be intersectional, stumbling forward and back, striving to build a new feminist movement. Later, we’d remember that it was all so, so uncertain, this success. But right now, all of that was far away. Surrounded and embraced by a thunderous crowd with no edges, we were a reminder that, together, nothing could touch us. In that briefest of moments, we were unstoppable.
Epilogue
Months after my trek to Washington, the Women’s March movement remains defiant. Post-march, Washington HQ, determined to capitalize on the march’s infectious momentum, immediately launched its follow-up campaign, 10 Actions/100 Days, kicking off a new project every ten days. These mini-movements included everything from postcard writing to the hashtag-worthy A Day Without Women, which encouraged women to take the day off from both paid and unpaid work. The 100 Days campaign stood in solidarity with Syrian women. It supported immigration and preached unity. Quite frankly, it did some awesome stuff, and in April 2017, Time magazine put the co-organizers of the Women’s March on Washington on its 100 Most Influential People list. “This is the rebirth of the women’s movement,” Time declared. “These women are the suffragists of our time. And our movement isn’t going away—it’s just the beginning.”
The need for the women’s movement isn’t going away, either. April was a strange month. President Donald Trump signed legislation that allows states to deny federal family-planning funds to Planned Parenthood (as well as to other abortion providers), but in the semi-good news department that month, Bill O’Reilly was booted from Fox News following a storm cloud of sexual harassment allegations. Why only a tentative thumbs-up to O’Reilly’s ouster? While it’s encouraging to see conservative bulwarks condemn shitty treatment of women, I’m less thrilled that it took so damn long. I can hear the echoes of anti-feminist critics now: But can’t women just be happy they ruined him, Shrill Feminist Lauren? Sure, we can be happy he finally, finally, finally (times infinity) faced some consequences for his alleged actions. Y’know, after a successful career of fame and fortune and all that—none of which he’s really losing. The problem with such increased attention to feminist issues is that it can make it difficult to parse real political change from PR-motivated blips.
O’Reilly has been in the spotlight before for his gross behavior. The allegations against him date back decades and include settlements with five women. It seems likely that the withdrawal of fifty advertisers from the show had more to do with his departure than a newfound allegiance to feminist values. In response to all of this, O’Reilly trumpeted the ol’ it’s-not-me-it’s-them line. “[It’s] tremendously disheartening that we part ways due to completely unfounded claims,” he said. “But that is the unfortunate reality many of us in the public eye must live with today.”
Skip forw
ard a few months, and we can see the same attitude on display with Harvey Weinstein. When media first broke the story of allegations of sexual harassment and assault in October 2017, the Hollywood bigwig released a statement, quoting Jay-Z, that said he was trying to do better and that he was also building a women’s scholarship foundation to be named after his mom. Lisa Bloom, his original (and now former) lawyer, who famously built her career on helping women, called him simply “an old dinosaur learning new ways.” And yet the story could not be stopped; this time women would not be quiet. On October 15, Alyssa Milano tweeted a suggestion from a friend: “If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.” In twenty-four hours, the hashtag was tweeted over half a million times. In the following week, more than fifty women in the industry came forward to share their Weinstein stories. Then another thirty-eight women came forward, this time against director James Toback. As Amber Tamblyn said in the New York Times of the women bringing their stories forward: “Now that we have collectively spoken, we can never go back.”
Yet, post-Weinstein both media and anti-rape activists had to rush to counter the rising victim-blaming narrative—the same one we always hear whenever survivors come forward, particularly in our new anti-feminist climate. That narrative, we know, is the one that attempts to draw a correlation between time and truth. Questions of why it took so long for women to speak up often seek to undermine the power of survivors sharing their stories and rising up together; it’s a narrative that dismisses the consequences of speaking up even as it tries to enforce them. Myriad outlets, from Bustle and Entertainment Weekly to the Guardian and NPR, ran stories with headlines like “Why it took so long for accusations against Harvey Weinstein to come out” and “Why did no one speak out about Harvey Weinstein?” Despite the headlines’ tone, the articles often sought to explain to their readers that such questions didn’t have easy answers. But the fact that these articles are still appearing so early in such news cycles exposes a deeply anti-feminist symptom of a larger problem. We still rush to judge survivors; we still want to believe this isn’t part of our culture. What a reminder that public outrage does not mean instant eradication of firmly held cultural, patriarchal footholds. In the months following the march, I ping-ponged between wanting two contradictory things: for us to be buoyed by little wins and for us, and others, not to mistake these wins as finishing-line markers. Feminists can, and did, protest O’Reilly and Weinstein, but what we can’t do is stop. We cannot afford to be lulled into complacency again, to ever again let such abuse ever slip by unremarked.
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