How Feminism Has Changed in the Trump Era
And we thought 2016 was rough.
The past year has been a tough one for feminists. Donald Trump, a man who boasted about grabbing women’s genitals, is the president of the United States, and his cabinet is the whitest and most male in decades. Republican domination of Congress, many state legislatures, and a majority of governorships means that reproductive rights are on the chopping block. When Obama was in office, the question was how far feminists could push forward. Now, the question is how we can hold off the onslaught of assaults against our rights, freedoms, and liberties.
Not only has organized, institutional feminism – the groups that work for feminist causes, the women who are the public faces of the feminist movement – been set back this year, feminism’s dominance in pop culture also seems to be waning. But something angrier and rawer seems to be bubbling up in its place. Women aren’t just talking about girl power anymore. We’re seizing it.
The Obama years were good ones for feminists. The Affordable Care Act made contraception more affordable and accessible than ever before – for most American women, it was suddenly free. Gender-rating, the process by which insurance companies would charge women more for the inconvenient fact that we have babies and perpetuate the human race, was barred. Surviving rape or domestic violence could no longer be considered a “pre-existing condition” worthy of hiked-up insurance costs or denial altogether. We made important gains for reproductive freedoms, including a landmark Supreme Court decision striking down a Texas law that made abortions exceptionally difficult for many women to get. Another Supreme Court case made same-sex marriage rights the law of the land, and that night, the White House was lit up in rainbow colors. The era of “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the military was over, and gay, lesbian, and transgender soldiers were finally permitted to serve openly. Obama signed into law important protections for female workers, so that we could fight back if we faced discrimination at work. He signed a reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, worked with the Department of Housing and Urban Development to finalize a rule barring landlords from evicting domestic violence victims, and pushed colleges to do a better job of addressing sexual assault on campus. Under Attorney General Eric Holder, the Department of Justice prioritized voting rights – important in a country where people of color are too often disenfranchised (and for a party whose strongest supporters are African-American women).
And of course there was the symbolism of the Obamas themselves: Barack a self-described feminist and hands-on dad; Michelle a fiercely intelligent lawyer expertly balancing the traditional feminine requirements of a First Lady with her own brand of humor, intellect, and elegance; the two daughters they raised together in the White House, who we all got to watch grow into bright, ambitious young women. This was a 21st-century family, living out feminist family values under the national microscope.
Popular culture changed, too. I began writing publicly about feminism in the early 2000s, back in the days when blogs were new, Facebook was only open to students at select elite schools, and there wasn’t YouTube or Twitter, let alone Snapchat, Tumblr, or Instagram. Sure, you could find other feminists on college campuses, but feminist media was specialized and niche – there was Bitch and Bust (both excellent publications), and Katha Pollitt was writing feminist commentary in The Nation, but for the most part, feminists like me were trying to convince other young women that our F-word wasn’t a dirty one.
Somewhere along the way, it felt like we won – or at least crested a hill. Feminism became cool, and young women who weren’t feminists were somewhat suspect. Shonda Rhimes and Lena Dunham brought feminism to television shows both mainstream and critically acclaimed. Pop celebrities not exactly known for their political views, like Taylor Swift and Katy Perry, embraced the feminist label. “Are you a feminist?” because a regular question interviewers asked famous young women, and should they answer “no,” the write-up would inevitably be irresistible outrage clickbait. Beyoncé sampled Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reading from a talk that eventually became her book We Should All Be Feminists, and at MTV’s Video Music Awards, Bey performed in front of a lit-up sign reading FEMINIST in bright white.
Beyoncé might have been where we peaked.
Was it perfect? Far from it. The United States remains the only developed nation in the world without paid leave for new mothers. Our treatment of poor women and immigrant women remained abhorrent even under Obama, and those women today are especially vulnerable. Feminist victories also meant more feminist in-fighting, purges, and purity contests. But largely, the eight years of Obama’s presidency moved us in the right direction, and feminist activistshad the luxury of being able to demand that movement come faster, and there be more of it. We had the luxury of arguing over whether Beyoncé was a good-enough feminist.
This is no longer the case. Trump has swiftly dismantled much of Obama’s feminist legacy and seems determined to undo more, from workplace protections to contraception access to LGBT equality to fighting campus rape. We aren’t moving forward politically; instead, we are resisting this sickness emanating from the White House and threatening to infect more of America.
Perhaps as a result of this darker moment, pop culture feminism seems to have faded. Yes, we had Wonder Woman, and of course feminist celebrities still talk up women’s rights, but the political landscape is so bleak that it’s hard to feel celebratory about feminist pop culture these days. Another starlet proclaiming “I’m a feminist” feels empty, inert – we’ve heard it before, and so what?
But all of the Obama-era organizing wasn’t for naught; nor was the pop culture rallying irresponsibly lightweight. Instead, both set us up for the moment we’re in now: One in which feminism, firm on its feet after eight years of stability and growth, no longer has to make itself palatable to be popular. Instead, it has a steady enough foundation to shape-shift, even into something rawer and darker. And today it feels more organic, angry, and spontaneous than I’ve ever seen.
Just after the inauguration of President Trump, millions of women around the world staged the largest mass global protest in history. They gathered on the Mall in Washington, D.C., and a park in Nairobi, a street in Tbilisi and a ship in Antarctica. From Mississippi to Macau, women (and lots of men) showed up and made themselves heard. Their message: This pussy-grabbing misogynist is not my president. Yes, the Women’s March had organizers, eventually. But it initially grew out of Facebook posts and informal pledges to show up and say something. It grew out of a broad sense of dissatisfaction and an expansive desire to get boots on the ground – you can’t force or plan that kind of energy.
Nor did it dissipate after the march. Women are running for office in record numbers; still more are working and volunteering on campaigns. They’re running to serve the public and improve the country, but many were finally pushed to throw their hats in the ring because they’re angry, and this seems like a good place to channel that rage.
Women are also speaking out about men who have harassed and assaulted them. After the New York Times and the New Yorker published extensive investigations into media mogul Harvey Weinstein’s alleged acts of sexual assault, coercion, and harassment, women across industries began to say men had done similar things to them, too. Some of it was individual storytelling, keeping the perpetrators anonymous. But increasingly, women named names. When those names were recognizable enough, journalists investigated, verified, and published. And heads rolled. Men have lost jobs, board seats, starring roles, television shows, paychecks, their reputations. Finally, there seem to be serious social consequences for harassment and assault.
Would we be here if not for Trump? I suspect not. Many Americans (especially the truth-tellers and investigators in media) seem to have recognized, belatedly, that looking the other way on abusive behavior allows abusers to continue to rise through the ranks and accrue more power, while women are victimized by predatory men or are eclipsed in male-dominated industries. The victory of Donald Trump, a career chauvinist who was accused of harassment and assault by more than a dozen women, over Hillary Clinton, who was poised to be the first female U.S. president, was perhaps the most literal incarnation of this dynamic that Americans have ever seen. After November, it was too late to turn back the clock on him. But many of us seemed to conclude that we could at least stop harassers and abusers earlier both by speaking out and by taking allegations more seriously, and that our general tolerance of misogyny was a big part of what brought us Trump in the first place.
Rage is a healthy reaction when a know-nothing woman-groping chump triumphs over an intelligent, hardworking, and much better-qualified woman. Rage is the only sane reaction when you start to put all the pieces together: That we wound up with Trump because we are a country in which the hatred of women is baked in; that this hatred, and the related objectification, is behind every ass-grab, every catcall, every attempt to regulate our uteruses and vaginas and ovaries, every rape joke, every online comment that we’re a bitch, every promotion denied because our actual work may be better but Steve shows so much promise.
American women have been the nice girls who waited our turn. Many of us dutifully donated to Planned Parenthood, cheered YAAAS QUEEN when Beyoncé slayed, cast our ballots for Hillary Clinton while carefully articulating all the reasons she was an imperfect candidate and we weren’t being so silly as to vote with our vaginas. We worked for pay and raised children and maybe murmured something about “balance” but didn’t demand that men did much more. We assumed if we just worked hard enough and proved ourselves – if we were polite while we did it, if we smiled and remained helpful and magnanimous – we might find not only individual success, but success for this whole women’s-rights thing. Maybe we would get to the point where our daughters wouldn’t face the same problems. Maybe, if we went through the proper channels and made sound and logical arguments, we could stop debating whether birth control was health care and whether new parents should have the paid time to bond with a tiny baby; maybe we’d reach a moment when, finally, our bodies would finally be ours: our uteruses would be free of government intervention and our breasts and buttocks free of unsolicited grabs.
A lot of women, even those who didn’t previously and perhaps still don’t label themselves “feminists,” seem done with nice. And the explosions that come when nice girls let out years (or decades) of pent-up indignation are messy and chaotic. Those explosions look like the “shitty men in media list” that made the rounds several weeks ago, wherein anonymous women named men they said had behaved badly toward women; accusations ran the gamut from rape and assault to awkward behavior at lunch. Many people (including myself) found the list discomfiting and dangerous. It’s also a sign of a moment, and a movement, that is increasingly unruly, but frothing over with primal and red-hot energy. A significant number of women are no longer worried about being nice or alienating men.
The pessimists among us worry that all of this will eventually backfire – there will be a false accusation that undermines every woman who might come forward, or we’ll simply grow collectively numb to these stories and reactionary takes on how feminists are ruining society will start to garner more clicks. And yet, there’s something invigorating and necessary about this shift toward not giving a damn. Finally, a critical mass of women doesn’t seem to care what men think, and isn’t afraid of threatening their stranglehold on power. We are running against them for office, and sometimes we are winning. We are threatening their job security. We are upending the assumption that power is inherently male. We are not apologizing when they get fired for bad behavior of their own choosing.
It’s not the white-pantsuit feminism of carefully organized action and work-within-the-system politicking; it’s too wild and in the mud. But this year, in Donald Trump’s America, wild and muddy is what feminists needed.
Jill Filipovic is the author of The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness. Follow her on Twitter.
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