Everything's Trash, But It's Okay

by Phoebe Robinson

  At this point, you may be wondering what exactly this juicy moment of reality TV has to do with feminism, which is what this essay’s supposed to be about. Well, if you just hold your horses, I’ll tell ya. But what if I didn’t? LOL. What if this essay was one big time-wasting switcheroo? Remember on Sex and the City when, as an apology for sending over her boyfriend Aidan to help an injured and naked Miranda (I’m talking Miranda’s booty cheeks looking like two marshmallows that were supposed to be sprinkled in a cup of hot choc but ended up on the floor), Carrie came to Miranda’s crib with bagels, but really it’s an excuse to talk about relationship troubles with Aidan (AND, I REPEAT, MIRANDA WAS ASS OUT LIKE THE COPPERTONE GIRL*), which pissed off Miranda, who dubbed them the “bullshit bagels”? Okay, but instead of me pulling a Carrie and hooking y’all up with bagels, I just spent the past five pages temporarily turning my book into a BuzzFeed article about legendary reality TV moments. If I did something that trifling and you cussed me out like Robert De Niro did number 45 at the 2018 Tonys,* I wouldn’t even be mad. I’d accept it the way ghosts accept being told to leave someone’s home, which, by the way, is the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard. Ghosts, can’t nobody see you! Just lie. All the time, as a kid, my parents would tell me to do my homework and I’d say, “On it!” Meanwhile, I was in my room continuing to live my life with my headphones on like I’m at a UN summit, listening intently to the radio so I could press the record button on my boom box at the right time to add Aaliyah to my mixtape. I mean, what goofy-ass ghosts are just out here telling the truth, packing up their night creams, and moving out? Whew! OMFG, so many tangents just happened, people! Now you know what it’s like to date me. My apologies. Time to get back on track.

  Why am bringing up the Tyra speech and the best line from it? IDK about anyone else, but I am, at this particular moment, extremely confused and emotionally conflicted about the state of womanhood and feminism in America. While I was always low-key suspicious about feminism thanks to reading about the history of this country as well as being a black woman living in it, the election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States, thanks in part to the 53 percent of white women who voted for him, proved to me that we aren’t living in a feminist country. And ever since the night that number 45 was elected, feminism has seemed to be in a bit of a state of emergency. Except that’s not entirely true. Feminism, like any movement that’s designed to challenge the status quo and strive for equality, has always been in some state of emergency. Has always had to contend with blowing out fires, both internal and external. Has always made strides in progress and reverted back to bad habits. It’s just a shame that I and many others didn’t understand that until that fateful evening of November 8, 2016, a night that rocked the nation and changed the course of American history and possibly international history.

  It’s rare for a single decision to alter the course of history, and it’s even rarer to actually feel that seismic shift happen in real time. Not only is it rare; it’s also powerful to seemingly be in tune with everyone when the shift happens and be able to feel all their feelings, especially the rawest ones that usually bubble below the surface. The induction of the “new normal” is scary, exhilarating, and so overwhelming that you might laugh or cry or be stunned to silence. Being that deeply connected to the energy vibrating from everyone around you is the stuff of comic book lore and almost too much for the human body to take while, at the same time, it’s kind of exhilarating seeing how capable our bodies are. I can only imagine that the vibrations that made their way across the country on November 8 must have been similar to the ones felt when Lincoln abolished slavery or when women were allowed to enter the workplace. For the folks who were alive when those events took place, the takeaway might be that stuff was amazing or an abomination (or, in the case of the moon landing, a government conspiracy). As for the 2016 US presidential election, depending on who you ask, what occurred two years ago was either the worst, the best-worst, the worst-worst, or the best-best thing to ever happen, and the fallout was immediate. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start a few hours prior to the result being announced.

  There were Election Night viewing parties all over the cunch aka country, and I chose to go to a friend’s house so we could celebrate the inevitable and only logical outcome at that point: Hillary Clinton being president. To be clear, I’m not implying that my homies and I voted for her because she was the lesser of two evils; on the flip side, we also didn’t see her as a savior without flaws. She has many that have been well-documented for decades by the media, and people of color have mentally noted that her record when it came to race was spotty at best. Still, just like this pair of pants that I own—which are made of such temperamental material that, after I sit down for half a second, the now heavily wrinkled fabric around my crotch looks like the face of an unamused Chinese shar-pei, yet I wear them anyway because they flatter the rest of my figure perfectly—I, for one, had decided there was enough good there in the possibility of a Hillary presidency to outweigh the not-so-good. At the very least, she’s highly intelligent and had the résumé to hold the office. So that night at my friend’s Election Night viewing party, in addition to us celebrating what we thought was HRC becoming America’s first female president, we were also toasting the fact that the three-ring circus that American politics had turned into, courtesy of Trump and the media, was finally coming to an end. Basically, my friends and I were like Whitney Houston, Angela Bassett, Loretta Devine, and Lela Rochon on the poster of Waiting to Exhale, just in flowy pajamas, laughing because the drama of men is over, while the song “Exhale (Shoop Shoop)” fades into the background, signaling a brighter future.

  Cut to the end of the night. The flowy jim-jams had been replaced by black turtlenecks à la Simon and Garfunkel, and we were singing, “Hello, darkness, my old friend.” It became clear that Clinton was not going to hit that magical number of 270 Electoral College votes, and the world as we knew it was over. That’s not an overstatement. The hopes and dreams that Barack Obama had set in motion seemed to evaporate in an instant. Some of us cried. Others were so devastated that they put down the alcohol. There were also some who were angry. Most of all, we felt hopeless, helpless, and stunned.

  I mean, none of us could have predicted the following confluence of circumstances that would allow him to win: (1) apathetic voter turnout (according to CNN, voting turnout was at a twenty-year low), (2) the unrealistic expectation that the number of black voters would be enough to overpower the disgruntled white working-class vote, (3) Hillary’s refusal to make campaign stops in key states like Wisconsin, for example, which she ended up losing, (4) “whitelash” from racist people who loathed Barack Obama being in office for the past eight years,* (5) hella sexist voters, and (6) white women who wanted to protect their whiteness so much that they ignored the sexual harassment claims that have dogged Trump for years, including the Access Hollywood audio of him essentially bragging about sexually assaulting women with the poetic phrase “grab ’em by the pussy.” Yeah, like I said, stunning. But more than just feeling shock, I was also disheartened because I knew there were plenty of people who were overjoyed at the outcome.

  Then a thought popped up in the back of my mind that I couldn’t ignore. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so rocked by the election results. I mean, once homeboy launched his improbable campaign, which got more successful by the week in spite of his around-the-clock blunders, shouldn’t I have seen it for what it was: an upgraded version of a bigoted Bat-Signal—the original one was a spotlight shining in the sky and projecting an image of the KKK’s David Duke—that was a call to action for people of Trump’s ilk (the racists, the sexists, the homophobes, the transphobes, etc.)? Therefore, I couldn’t help but wonder, isn’t the fact that I never fully believed Trump could be number 45 a sign that my stubbornness and naïveté prevented me from seeing America for what it truly is? Yes, but that’s not entirely my fault.

  To thos
e on #TeamBarackObama #TeamYesWeCan #TeamEverybodyBlackBoutToWin, America appeared to have moved forward in a way that would make it impossible to return to the ignorance and racism of the past. Yes, he and his family faced an onslaught of racism during his tenure in office, he was routinely disrespected by his constituents, and he had to deal with roadblocks from other politicians hell-bent on making it difficult for him to get anything accomplished. But still. Despite all this ugliness, there was no denying that seeing this black man elected president—with that black-ass name of Barack Hussein Obama, married to a black-ass woman named Michelle, who not only was accomplished in her own right but also showed she had autonomy outside of being someone’s wife, and together the two of them raised two black-ass kids—had lulled me into a false sense of security. It felt like a new era, and that anything was possible because there was proof of it every day inside the White House. It felt like actual, groundbreaking change, but now that this nation is two years and counting away from those glory days, I look back at the Obama years, and I see more clearly what that time represented for me. I spent those eight years living the way some people do during January 1 through 4.

  You know what I’m talking about. Those glorious four days at the beginning of the year where people are high off the “new year, new me” vibes. I don’t know what it is, but there’s something about the calendar changing that makes folks stand in front of a mirror, Dr. Phil’ing themselves with tough love and tons of plans for grand transformations. And then right around 7:03 A.M. on January 5, reality sets in and with it the realization that a lot of work is required for personal growth to last, so #NewYearNewMe quickly devolves into #NewYearSameMeStrugglingToDoTheBareMinimum. I’m not writing this from judgment; I’m not a New Year’s resolutions person, but I get it. I just do this kind of stuff in other ways, such as the way I exercise.

  Sorry to bring up weight again after spending the previous essay writing about it, but I’m an infrequent exerciser. I’ll go hard for a month and then take two weeks off. Or two months of training literally goes down the drain because life gets in the way and my lack of discipline and dedication results in me not up in the gym working on my fitness for months and months. Point is that I’m inconsistent, but one thing that remains constant is my energy when I start getting into an exercise routine. I’ll work out and do like twenty-three lunges over the course of two days, look in the mirror, and be like, “Oooh, look how toned I am,” before calling Lloyd’s of London insurance so I can pull a Heidi Klum and take out a $2 million policy on my legs. All kidding aside, just like the New Year’s resolution makers and my fellow fickle exercisers, I got hyped as hell about the Obama presidency and rode the wave of happiness right into the 2016 election, believing that since we knocked down one barrier, our work was done, and like dominos, other barriers were going to come crashing down. I think a lot of feminists as well as the feminist movement itself felt that way.

  After we make some progress (like director Ava DuVernay becoming the first woman of color in charge of a $100 million movie budget), we sometimes get excited as if the everyday microaggressions women face are now a thing of the past. And even if there is more structural change going on (i.e., the passing of Title IX in 1972, which is a law that states no person can be discriminated against on the basis of their sex at an educational program getting federal financial assistance), we still have a long way to go because it’s clear that in plenty of instances, the #YesAllWomen doesn’t apply to all women, even as we’re in the age of #MeToo and #TimesUp, which are currently dragging the patriarchy out the door as it’s kicking and screaming to stay in the past. Don’t believe me?

  Just this year, award-winning star of Transparent Jeffrey Tambor has been embroiled in controversy ever since he was accused of sexual harassment by two trans women, Van Barnes, his personal assistant, and Trace Lysette, an actress and Tambor’s costar. Before an investigation could be completed, he quit the series, briefly disappeared from the spotlight, and reemerged on a character-redemption tour of sorts, starting a promo run for the upcoming season of his other show, Arrested Development.

  During an AD cast interview with the New York Times, Jessica Walter cried while recounting being on the receiving end of Tambor’s verbal abuse. Instead of listening to her, the other male cast members downplayed what she went through and essentially chalked up his bad behavior to nothing more than “this is what having a job is!” Naw, bruh. “What having a job is” includes getting a lunch break or being paid overtime or indefinitely mailing out your Forever 21 returns via your job’s UPS account because that one time your boss made you work three minutes past 1 P.M. on a Summer Friday like four years ago and you still haven’t gotten the fuck over it. That, my friends, is what having a job is. Knowing you can act a fool because you’re well respected in the workplace so no one will call you out—that is abuse of power. Obviously, many folks inside and outside entertainment agreed with this sentiment and rightfully came to Walter’s defense, which, on the one hand, yaaas for having her back against verbal abuse and mansplaining, but on the other, the way people tripped over themselves like former track-and-field competitor Lolo Jones did over hurdles at the Olympics to assist Walter was kinda bullshit.

  No shade to her or what she went through, but c’mon! Really? We’re going to let Cis White Woman Tears be the “They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom” Braveheart rallying cry that gets people to act; meanwhile, when trans women Barnes and Lysette recounted in detail how they were SEXUALLY HARASSED, seemingly everyone got quiet the way kids do when they tiptoe across a creaky wooden floor in the hopes of spying on Kris Krings eating some chocolate chip cookies while dropping off some Christmas presents. There was no rallying cry to be heard for Barnes and Lysette. Aside from a few bloggers, no one in the media came to their defense. Most importantly, no one saw the irony in the fact that the show he was allegedly doing this behavior on was a show specifically designed to show the humanity of trans people, and yet when the women expressed how they weren’t in a safe space, their humanity was ignored. As the great Lil Wayne once said, “Real Gs move in silence like lasagna.” I guess so do those who don’t understand that in order for feminism to work, it has to be intersectional.

  Look, I get that everyone is learning and we learn at different paces. Hell, I’m still learning. I don’t always get it right. Far from it. I still accidentally misgender from time to time. I don’t fight for sex workers and lower-class women as hard as I should. I’ve said things and made jokes in the past that I wouldn’t even dream of making today. We all have; however, in the age of #TimesUp and #MeToo, when people are thrown the softball of defending trans women yet fail to do so . . . Say it with me, y’all: Feminism! I was rooting for you; we were all rooting for you! Sadly, this is a sentiment I have expressed often over my course of being a feminist, but I probably felt it most in the days and weeks following the Trump election.

  I spent days after the election gathering my bearings. I would cry in Lyfts. Or get on the phone with my dad and talk to him for hours. Or do comedy shows because laughter is a great reprieve from anger. During this time, hurt, rage, restlessness, and a litany of other emotions layered on top of each like winter clothing during a ski trip, and pretty soon a call to action was formed. And not like the BS call to action like when a friend sends a mass email telling people to subscribe to their YouTube page, or the one I got recently from college friends whose ten-year wedding anniversary is coming up, so they’re asking people to donate money so they can celebrate their marriage. And it’s not like they just want a nice brunch where there’s French toast with three kinds of butters. These mofos had the audacity to ask us to help them get overseas so they can do some in-depth activities like a tour of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogy movie sets, a helicopter ride over the scenic parts of New Zealand, and a whale and dolphin safari. #NeggaPlease #RuthNeggaLegitHatesHerLastNameBecauseOfAssholesLikeMe. But for real, that has got to be the most
entitled married-people trash I’ve ever heard of. Like, bitch, I went to your wedding. Got you a gift. And now I gotta help pay for your anniversary present? Y’all had ten years to save for this trip and you’re giving me six months. See? This is why some nonmarried people are salty towards some married folk. Single people don’t ask for this kind of stuff. But there are those married peeps who act like their being legally together means they’re allowed to keep asking everyone for money like they’re an autorenewal subscription plan for Hulu. So ig, but if we’re going to be ig, then can I get a gift for not being married to someone who’s not a good fit for me? I have done that for more than ten years. Moving on. The point is the call to action following the 2016 election was all the way legit. If there were folks who were tired of the status quo and wanted a brash reality TV star to mix things up, there were also women who were tired of not being heard and they weren’t going to take it anymore.

  In Hawaii, a woman by the name of Teresa Shook created a Facebook event, inviting friends to march on Washington in protest. Quickly, similar events were created all over the platform by Evvie Harmon, Fontaine Pearson, Bob Bland (a New York fashion designer), Breanne Butler, and many others. Like a lottery to see a Broadway show for a discounted price, these invites inspired thousands and thousands of women to sign up to march, and smartly, Harmon, Pearson, and Butler teamed up, beginning the official Women’s March on Washington. And because people of color don’t sleep, meaning they didn’t want this shit to be a Lilith Fair of whiteness in which the concerns of nonwhite and non-well-off women were swept under the rug, the demand that the march be led by women of different races and backgrounds was made and swiftly met. Vanessa Wruble, cofounder of the march and copresident of OkayAfrica, served as head of campaign operations and brought on Tamika D. Mallory, a black woman; Carmen Perez, a Latina; and Linda Sarsour, an American Muslim, to serve as national cochairs alongside Bland. This Ocean’s 8–style crew was rounded out by former Miss New Jersey USA Janaye Ingram, also black, who served as head of logistics, and Paola Mendoza, a Colombian-American filmmaker who came aboard as an artistic director and a national organizer. Once the players were in place, the official name of Women’s March on Washington was selected. And then it was off to the races. Everyone. Was. Getting. Mobilized. And. I. Was. Blown. Away.