by Robby Soave
But explicitly identity-based appeals can backfire. And intersectionality might make them more likely to backfire, by lumping together a bunch of not-necessarily-related identity-based appeals.
When I asked Alicia Garza whether she thought the rise of white nationalism was in part a backlash against her own movement’s activism, she responded, “I do. I think it is a response to the changing demographic in this country, and globally, with the decline of white people in the U.S. and around the world. But,” she went on, “I also think it is a response to an increasingly successful movement to actually get closer to the ideals that this country was founded under.”
— FOUR —
BURN THE WITCH
FOURTH-WAVE FEMINISM AND #METOO
Before there was the #MeToo movement, there was Emma Sulkowicz and her mattress.
And when Sulkowicz graduated from Columbia University in the spring of 2015, the mattress—a symbol of female perseverance in a violent patriarchal world—went with her: she carried it across the stage, with help from several friends, as she walked up to receive her diploma.
Over her years on campus, Sulkowicz—an attractive young woman with a streak of purple hair, a millennial hipster’s sense of fashion, and an interest in performance art—had become the figurehead of the sexual violence awareness movement on college campuses, which held three truths to be self-evident: (1) that one in five women on campus would be raped, (2) that only between 2 and 8 percent of women lied about rape, and (3) that most campus rapists were serial predators who attacked over and over again. The first and most important of these self-evident truths—that the sexual violence rate for college women was somewhere between 20 and 30 percent—became a rallying cry for young feminists in the 2000s, drawing its staying power from a series of surveys that purportedly testify to its accuracy (more on that later). Taking the statistic seriously meant taking seriously the notion that American women not only are threatened by rape but live in a culture that explicitly condones it: a rape culture. The movement demanded not just that the broader public recognize the existence of rape but also an acknowledgment that rape is omnipresent: in schools, in homes, in the workplace, in politics, in Hollywood, and everywhere else.
Sulkowicz’s journey to the national spotlight began during her freshman year at Columbia University in 2011. (She initially responded to my request to interview her for this book, but failed to answer subsequent emails.) Among her circle of friends was Paul Nungesser, a German student. According to text and Facebook messages sent between the two that were later obtained by the press as part of Nungesser’s lawsuit, Sulkowicz first broached the subject of sex with respect to her then boyfriend, who was sleeping with other girls. She asked Nungesser, a friend of her boyfriend, to persuade him to use condoms when he slept around. Their conversations became increasingly intimate after that, and Sulkowicz was not shy about showing interest in Nungesser.
By the end of the year, they had entered into what the kids still refer to as a “friends with benefits” arrangement. According to Nungesser’s lawsuit, they had vaginal sex and, at Sulkowicz’s insistence, anal sex. (Sulkowicz’s text messages suggest, though do not confirm, that she expressed interest in this.) During summer break, Nungesser returned to Europe but stayed in touch with Sulkowicz, who graphically relayed her sexual adventures while maintaining that Nungesser was her true object of affection. She frequently told him that she loved and missed him.
On their first day back together at Columbia, on the night of August 27, 2012, the two again engaged in vaginal and anal sex. But they drifted apart after that, with contact between the two becoming less and less frequent. In his lawsuit, Nungesser maintained that Sulkowicz became “vicious and angry” over time as she realized that Nungesser did not feel the same way about her as she did about him.
Half a year later, in April 2013, Sulkowicz reported Nungesser to Columbia’s Office of Gender-Based and Sexual Misconduct. She claimed that the encounter began consensually but that Nungesser failed to obtain consent to have anal sex with her. She also said that he choked her.
The university investigated the matter, consistent with its obligations under a federal statute known as Title IX (more on that later). Nungesser maintained that the sex had been consensual, and a panel of administrators cleared him of wrongdoing the following November. Neither party was happy with the proceedings. Nungesser, for his part, had not been allowed to show the administrators the friendly Facebook messages Sulkowicz sent to him just hours after the alleged assault. Sulkowicz, of course, was dissatisfied with the results of the investigation and decided to go public. In the spring of 2014, she named Nungesser as her attacker—the details of the alleged crime were reported in major media outlets—and vowed to carry her mattress with her to class until he was brought to justice. “My rapist still goes to my school and is still on campus,” she said.
The young woman had unleashed a tidal wave.
Awareness about the twin problems of sexual harassment and sexual assault is where progressive activists have left perhaps their most visible mark over the past decade. The landscape for gender activism and anti-rape activism has fundamentally changed both explicit rules and informal norms, and not just on campus. The #MeToo movement—which inspired so many women (and some men) to come forward and publicize their mistreatment at the hands of exploitative and abusive figures such as Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, and even Donald Trump—might not have been possible without intersectional fourth-wave feminism. This brand of social-media-savvy female empowerment dates to about 2010 and is distinguished from previous waves of feminism by its laser focus on sexual harassment and violence. (For comparison, the dominant issue of first-wave feminism was women’s suffrage.) Fourth-wave feminism owes its existence to people such as Sulkowicz, anti-GamerGate crusader Anita Sarkeesian, and online feminist commentary sites such as Jezebel, Feministing, and Everyday Feminism. Julie Zeilinger, a twenty-four-year-old feminist writer and author of the book A Little F’d Up: Why Feminism Is Not a Dirty Word, told me in an interview that discovering the “feminist blogosphere” was particularly essential to her evolution as a feminist.
“I was just sort of exposed to these hilarious but really intelligent younger women,” she said. “It was a perspective and a voice that I never heard before and really resonated with me.”
Undeniably positive things have resulted from feminist advocacy. It was certainly a long time coming, but media companies such as NBC, Fox, Netflix, and Amazon Studios are finally holding men in positions of power accountable for mistreating women in the workplace. The public is listening to victims and believing what they say. Fourth-wavers are following in a proud tradition of feminists fighting for equal rights—and eventually achieving them. And though the election of Donald Trump—and rejection of Hillary Clinton—was undoubtedly a blow to feminists, it was tempered by the fact that Hillary’s victory would have landed her husband, an accused rapist, back in the White House. Bill Clinton’s fraught relationship with feminism finally appeared to come undone in 2016: the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg, echoing several other high-profile left-of-center pundits, wrote that the former president “no longer has a place in decent society” because of his behavior toward Monica Lewinsky, Juanita Broaddrick, and others.1 Even the feminist activist and writer Gloria Steinem, who had famously defended Bill’s lechery in 1998 on partisan political grounds—critics accused her of inventing a “one free grope” rule—partly walked back her earlier stance, telling the Guardian, “I wouldn’t write the same thing now.”2
Many people forget the role progressives played in defending Clinton from charges of impropriety. The seven-million-member progressive advocacy group MoveOn.org was formed in 1998: it was named for the desire of its originators to persuade the public to move on from the Clinton-Lewinsky episode. Twenty years later, MoveOn.org is gleefully tweeting #MeToo along with everyone else—a gutsy move for an organization that was born of a desire to sweep the president’s sexual miscond
uct under the rug and now reflects the new priorities of the left.3
And yet, for all the broader societal good that has resulted from recent gender-related activism, a crusade of the most devout has left campuses reeling from a series of witch hunts that fundamentally reshaped the norms of human interaction for college-aged young people, and not necessarily for the better. In response to a storm of activity from militant young feminists, campus administrators and the federal government enacted a new regime of far-reaching policies. Critics of these policies—the author of this book included—claim that they abrogate the due process rights of students charged with sexual misconduct, threaten free expression as it relates to sex, grow the campus bureaucracy, violate the law, and rest upon bad statistics and junk science.
“This erasing of distinctions between the criminal and the loutish was a central feature of the campus initiatives of the Obama administration and led to many unjustified punishments,” wrote Emily Yoffe, a contributing editor at the Atlantic and an important critic of leftist feminism’s excesses, in an article for Politico.4
Gender-based activism overlaps substantially with the causes of the movements discussed in earlier chapters. Readers will recall from Chapter One that intersectionality was invented for the purpose of linking the struggle for women’s rights with the struggle for black people’s rights. Zillennial feminists are consciously and deliberately intersectional, and they are perfectly willing to shame fellow feminists who do not promote racial and sexual equality as well.
“Our identities aren’t singular,” Juniper, the trans Berkeley student, told me. “Issues are never just a race issue. They’re never just a gender issue. So for myself, I’m queer, but I’m also brown, and I’m also super-poor. So all the identities to me just mix up, and that creates my experience.”
Intersectionality can make it difficult to separate individual slices of the activist pie. Even so, explicitly feminist activism has notched considerably more victories than the anti-Trump resistance or Black Lives Matter, and thus it’s possible to take a close look at the kind of world these activists want to create—they have come closer to realizing it than many of their comrades. And if the subtext of the previous chapters was that illiberal activism can undermine the noble causes it claims to support, the subtext of this chapter is that illiberalism itself creates problems.
The Waves
Equal political rights was American feminism’s first cause; second-wave feminism, which began in the 1960s, took a broader approach to equality. It was during this decade that the idea of describing feminism as a series of waves first appeared, courtesy of a 1968 New York Times article titled “The Second Feminist Wave.”5 (Coincidentally, this same issue of the Times contains a profile of Marcuse that brands him the leading philosopher of the “new left” and sympathetically relates his assertion that it is “self-defeating” for society to extend tolerance and free speech rights to everyone.)
The article concerned a new-to-the-scene activist group, the National Organization for Women, and featured interviews with some of its young, radical members—including twenty-nine-year-old Ti-Grace Atkinson, president of NOW’s New York chapter, who was quoted as saying she’d grown bored with advocating for legalized abortion; the issue was just too tame. “I’d rather talk about the demise of marriage,” she said.6 Her cause célèbre was abolishing the family as a unit, preferring that children be raised communally—a practice with which some communist countries had experimented.
NOW’s president, Betty Friedan, was more conservative than Atkinson, but her thinking was still revolutionary for the time. In her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, Friedan posited that women not only were oppressed because they had been denied political equality but also were subjugated by culture and tradition in a society that relegated women to domestic roles as wives and mothers.
One of the most important works of second-wave feminism, Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, focused on the role sexual violence played in the subjugation of women. Rape was a political act, according to Brownmiller, a “conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.” The popular though unscientific notion that rape is about power rather than sex, oft-recited by today’s gender activists and even ordinary media figures, can be traced to Against Our Will; sociobiologists have been arguing with feminists about it ever since.
Second-wave feminism fought for women’s sexual autonomy—including access to contraception and abortion rights—but eventually disputes arose within the movement over the hot topics of pornography and prostitution. The sex-positive wing of the movement viewed attempts to restrict pornography, for instance, as infringements on sexual expression and the rights of women, and as a capitulation to religious puritanism. But leading feminists such as Steinem, Andrea Dworkin, and Catharine MacKinnon took a different view. In her 1981 book Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Dworkin defined pornography as “the orchestrated destruction of women’s bodies and souls.” MacKinnon, who today serves as a visiting professor of law at Harvard, took the position that porn was a form of “forced sex” and should be outlawed as sexual discrimination.
Other feminists, describing themselves as individual-rights feminists, fought back against Dworkin, MacKinnon, and Steinem. One such individual-rights feminist, the lawyer Wendy Kaminer, reserved especially harsh criticism for Steinem, given Steinem’s associations with the repressed-memory recovery movement, a 1980s-era moral panic in the United States. Younger readers will be surprised to learn that the repressed-memory movement united sex-negative feminists with some conservative Christians, psychotherapists, social workers, and gullible news reporters who all believed that children throughout the country were being sexually abused by Satanic cults; the children, when questioned extensively (read: coached) by agenda-driven therapists, would “remember” their abuse. “The newest category of feminism, personal-development feminism, led nominally by Gloria Steinem, puts a popular feminist spin on deadeningly familiar messages about recovering from addiction and abuse, liberating one’s inner child, and restoring one’s self-esteem,” Kaminer wrote in the Atlantic in 1993, as the panic had begun to subside. “The marriage of feminism and the phenomenally popular recovery movement is arguably the most disturbing (and potentially influential) development in the feminist movement today.”
On the other side, defenders of the recovered-memory movement insisted that the public must believe the children who claimed to be victims of abuse. This became the movement’s mantra; in fact, the people involved in the most visible Satanic abuse episode, the McMartin preschool trial, even named their advocacy organization Believe the Children. The McMartin family, accused of witchcraft, sodomizing the children in their preschool, and magically transporting them to an underground lair to participate in orgies, were eventually cleared of wrongdoing.
Media coverage finally soured on ritualistic Satanic child abuse as the public came to its senses in the 1990s. Debunked as junk science, the recovered-memory movement faded into, well, memory. Also forgotten was the pivotal role second-wave feminism played in motivating the townsfolk to take up pitchforks. According to the New York Times, Steinem donated money to the McMartin investigation. Ms., the feminist magazine she cofounded in 1971, ran a cover article with the title “Believe It! Cult Ritual Abuse Exists” as late as 1993.7
“In the coalition powering the satanic abuse persecutions feminists constituted a powerful component, most conspicuously in the form of Gloria Steinem and Ms. Magazine,” wrote the journalist Alexander Cockburn in a 1999 article for the magazine Counterpunch.8
Steinem and her allies largely lost the argument concerning the various moral panics—porn, prostitution, Satanism—that divided their movement. As the 1990s marched on and Gen X came of age, second-wave feminism gave way to third-wave feminism.
In many ways less well defined than second-wave feminism—feminist scholar Elizabeth Evans said that confusion about its definition was “in
some respects its defining feature”—third-wave feminism was nevertheless inarguably more laid-back and permissive when it came to vice: very much a reaction against second-wave feminism’s Victorian tendencies.9 Aesthetically, third-wave feminism was heavily influenced by girl-positive punk rock acts such as Bikini Kill and Bratmobile, dubbed “riot grrl” music. The reclaiming of the word “girl” was arguably part of a backlash against second-wave feminism, which had rejected the concept of “girlhood” as patronizing—an attempt by powerful men to put women in their place. Third-wave feminism, though, was more concerned with creating positive, affirmative identities for women than with advancing specific political goals. Second-wave feminists thought bras and makeup were tools of the patriarchal oppressors; third-wave feminists thought women should wear high heels if it made them feel good about themselves, and avoid them if not. Destroying the very idea of family itself was not on the agenda, thank goodness.
But the idea that people should automatically believe the alleged victim of a sexual crime—irrespective of the credibility of the accuser or plausibility of the accusation—did not die with second-wave feminism. Like the spirit of Sauron, it endured in spectral form until conditions were favorable for its return.
In an interview, Kaminer told me that the censorious “therapeutic feminism” of the 1980s “has thrived on college campuses, engendering broad definitions of sexual harassment and assault, restrictions on allegedly misogynist speech and behaviors, and curbs on the due process rights of alleged offenders. Off campus, it spawned the excesses of the #MeToo movement.”
