More Than A Magazine, A Movement
It is not simply or only “hatred” that motivates the sexists of the world, but the very desire to define and therefore to control.
It’s then easy to see how attacks on reproductive rights are connected with the prevalence of sexual assault and harassment: Because if women are fully self-determined—can determine when and if they have children, when and with whom they have sex—then they cannot be there, fully, inevitably, without their own desire, for you. For a man.
Our collective inability to imagine women as viable leaders doesn’t only percolate through the fictional worlds of popular culture. It also frames consequential political debates—and elections.
As painful as it is to reckon with, we must now—after El Paso, after “send them back,” after Charlottesville and the astronomical rise in hate crimes—abandon the fantasy of benign voters led to the polls by the pull of the personal pocketbook.
The idea that women’s voices and policy initiatives—and sports team ethos—don’t have a substantive impact on just about everything from government to corporations to universities is just patriarchal “fake news.”
Unless we reckon with the depth and staying power of white supremacy and toxic masculinity, we will never be able to do anything more than defend what little inclusion and democracy we have. That begins with acknowledging it.
Our very democracy—and indeed, our planet—is in peril. Why would we entrust the old white men who made the problem to clean it up?
In the wake of the Kavanaugh fallout, how can we not feel the fierce urgency of feminism?
Women—often young women and more often than not women of color—are assuming the leadership of modern movements for intersectional social justice. These are not the fantasies of a fervent feminist. These are just the facts.
We must believe that most women understand the difference between the single inappropriate hug or a random sexual joke and rape and harassment.
After all these years, universality and the common good are still the (unmarked) province of straight white men.
