“I tried to change. Closed my mouth more, tried to be softer, prettier, less awake.”
There was Beyoncé, riffing on a poem by Warsan Shire called “For Women Who Are Difficult to Love”—about a female subject who is with a man who finds her intensity frightening—in her visual album, Lemonade, released in April of 2016, the week before Donald Trump would officially become the Republican candidate for president.20
In the video, Beyoncé strides jauntily through city streets in a big yellow dress, swinging a baseball bat with which she smashes car windows and takes the tops off fire hydrants, releasing furious geysers of water and causing flames to erupt behind her. In the video, women look on with surprised delight while men stare at her, wary. At the time, the narrative arc, words, and visuals of Lemonade, understood to be Beyoncé’s ferocious response to her husband Jay-Z’s infidelities, appeared wholly unconnected to politics.
But the shift between the public performance of polished empowerment feminism offered by the pop star just two years earlier, and the unleashed rage at men’s bad behavior (and at the women who enable it, including Beyoncé’s “Becky,” the slang term connoting white women) also marked a certain kind of turning point. Even in Beyoncé’s universe—still glossy and gorgeous, still with men near the center—cheerful feminism was gone; in its place a slick wrath, a punitive and righteous rage, presented as having been pent up, like floods and flames, now pouring forth onto the streets. By the spring of 2016, Beyoncé was mad, and at least some of her anger was about men—the husbands and fathers of her lyrics—and how they treated women.
Her rage would turn out to be a harbinger in the months to come, as the reality that Donald Trump was going to be the Republican nominee for president set in and revelations of his vile behavior toward women became better known. Trump found women’s bodies and their functions grotesque, called Clinton’s trip to the bathroom during a debate “disgusting,” made a comment about debate moderator Megyn Kelly having “blood coming out of her wherever,” and had once told a lawyer who’d had to take a break to pump breast milk during a meeting, “you’re disgusting.” It was perfectly clear that when he promised to “Make America Great Again,” part of what Donald Trump was promising was a return to a retro version of white masculinity, and all of the misogynist subjugation and objectification it comprised.
That he was the candidate felt absurd, anachronistic in the era we were assured was postfeminist. Yet a postelection study done by Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, looked at the nation’s leading newspapers and news networks and found that the press covered Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton equivalently, as if they and their faults were legitimately comparable. The ratio of negative to positive coverage of their fitness for office was the same: 87 percent of the stories about each of them were negative, thirteen percent were positive.21
This relative parity in coverage, the both-sides-ism that defined media coverage of the race, was a reflection of the lie at the center of everything. Because the reality was that Trump’s racist and sexist attitudes were not in fact out of line with contemporary assumptions; they were not disqualifying. They were measured on the same scale that weighed Clinton’s real but politically ordinary flaws, because on some level, his biases were still considered legitimate. The idea that the nation had moved beyond retro, macho white attitudes about who could lay claim to political power had always been a fable, one that had worked to quash the dissent and discourage the disruptive fury that might have otherwise had more power to beat back Trump before his rise.
When, a month before the election, it was revealed that Donald Trump had been caught on tape joking about women with Billy Bush—a Today show host and member of a family that had produced two American presidents, the cousin of another man who’d run for president against Donald Trump—about how “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything . . . grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything,” people got mad. Women got mad. The night that the Access Hollywood tape was made public, a Canadian author, Kelly Oxford, tweeted, “Women: tweet me your first assaults. They aren’t just stats. I’ll go first: Old man on city bus grabs my ‘pussy’ and smiles at me, I’m 12.” In response came more than twenty million tweets and visits to her Twitter page, many posting under the hashtag #notokay to signify stories of unwanted sexual contact, many women recalling incidents from when they were children or teens.22
The next week, women began to come forward with stories about how Trump himself had kissed or groped them against their will: a former People reporter, Natasha Stoynoff, wrote about how years before, while she’d been reporting a story on Trump and his third wife, Melania, he’d taken her into a room alone and “within seconds . . . was pushing me against the wall and forcing his tongue down my throat.”23 Stoynoff recalled her surprise at the incident, how when she got back to the hotel room, her “shock began to wear off and was replaced by anger. I kept thinking, ‘Why didn’t I slug him? Why couldn’t I say anything?’ ” Another woman, seventy-four-year-old Jessica Leeds, recalled to the New York Times how, on a flight three decades earlier, she had been seated next to Trump, and he had groped her, touching her breasts. “He was like an octopus,” Leeds told the Times. “His hands were everywhere.”24 She had changed airplane seats and not reported the incident, she said, because she was groped so frequently back then. “We accepted it for years,” she told the paper. “We were taught it was our fault.” But hearing Trump deny on television, in response to the Access Hollywood tape, that he had ever grabbed a woman against her will, Leeds said, “I wanted to punch the screen.”25
Michelle Obama—the nation’s first lady, who had been caricatured during her husband’s 2008 campaign as an angry black woman and had worked relentlessly to battle that perception—roared to furious life, making a remarkable speech, in which she called out the “hurtful, hateful language about women” that Trump had been deploying on the campaign trail and described how the flood of stories from women about abuse and harassment had “shaken me to my core in a way that I couldn’t have predicted.” It was a critical speech, in part because it had been Obama who that summer had issued the left its directive during the Democratic Convention, after a week of unreconstructed racism and sexism at the Republican Convention in Cleveland. “When they go low, we go high,” she had admonished, advising her side to behave with the assuredness that morality would surely win the day.
Now Obama was mad. And crucially, while so much of the angry reaction to Trump’s abhorrent trespasses had come on behalf of white women, she was ensuring that the white experience of coercion and harassment was not the only one that would be heard in a country in which black women are even less likely to be believed as victims of assault, and far less likely to be treated with respect. Obama called out the press for its inattention to women’s anger, chiding those who were “treating this as just another day’s headline, as if our outrage is overblown or unwarranted.”
Powerfully, Michelle Obama argued that there was something to do with this outrage, urging all the women out there who were livid to take action. “While our mothers and grandmothers were often powerless to change their circumstances, today, we as women have all the power we need to determine the outcome of this election. We have knowledge. We have a voice. We have a vote.”
Many women took Obama’s words to heart. We were furious; I heard from friends who were rounding on their street harassers for the first time, yelling back at them. Men, including a former senator, told me of how shaken they were to hear from their wives and friends and mothers and coworkers about the ubiquity of sexual assault and harassment, how they had had their hair blown back by the anger they hadn’t even known had been pent up. Women took some of Trump’s sexist words and worked to reappropriate them—turning the phrase “nasty woman,” which he’d called Clinton in a debate, into a T-shirt slogan, and printing up all manner of Etsy merchandise promising that soon “pussy” would “grab back.” Millions of women, and some men, rushed to join the Clinton-supporting internet group Pantsuit Nation. But in a season in which Clinton supporters were still being lectured by many in their lives on the right and the left, the group was private, visible only to its members on Facebook.
There was a creeping fear that this explosion was too little, and perhaps too late. The week before the election, I traveled to Boston to speak to a group of women, most of them lifelong feminists. One former National Organization for Women (NOW) chapter president in her fifties expressed her anxiety to me: why were these groups secret? She recalled how furious her friends had been over the treatment of Anita Hill in 1991, how in her memory, women had left their office buildings and stormed outside en masse to show that they had indeed had enough. How their public show of anger—the current of outrage and desperation to express it—had eventually led to women’s electoral run on Washington the next year. Why weren’t women taking to the streets? she asked me with concern. I didn’t know, I replied, but I hoped that perhaps it was because they knew that they didn’t have to; as Michelle Obama had noted, now—as had not been possible in 1992, as had never been possible before—they knew they could walk out the door on an upcoming Tuesday and vote for a woman for president.
The weekend before the 2016 presidential election, an old family friend and political science professor joked to me, “I’ll see you in our female-led future.” I looked at him, pretending to hold my breath with fear. “Be kind to me in the reeducation camps,” he said with a smile. This was an optimistic joke. So many were optimistic.
But the optimism was part of the trick: the reaffirmation of the myth of Clinton’s power. On an episode of Saturday Night Live that followed the release of the “pussy tape,” comedians portraying debate moderators Anderson Cooper and Martha Raddatz introduced the candidates as “Republican nominee Donald Trump and . . . can we say this yet. . . ? Probably fine. . . . President Hillary Clinton.”
This surety, that Clinton had already won the presidency, was what prompted so many white people on the right, including white women, to vote against the creeping ascendency of women, especially against the woman who’d been so effectively vilified on both the left and the right. It was also what disabused women on the left of the purportedly overdramatic notion that the country was still powered by enough misogyny and racism that it would elect an openly hateful bigot, or that they needed to truly stir themselves on Clinton’s account in order to combat those biases and beat Trump. In treating her as though she had already beat him, and not like the single tool on the table with which the nation might stop this monstrous racist patriarch, we talked ourselves out of the outrage we should have been mustering. We didn’t have to be angry on behalf of Hillary Clinton, this seductive song went. If anything, we should be angry at her, for not having done enough for us with the power we imagined she had.
After the election, Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri would tell TV audiences about what she’d heard from women in her state immediately after the election: “I just assumed he wouldn’t win,” her constituents said in retrospect. “I could have done more. I should have done more.”26 Americans who might have exerted more energy to oppose Trump or support Clinton—especially white women—were goaded into inaction by the assurance that sexism and racism were things of the past, and that to work themselves up about either would look silly, would be unnecessary exertions on behalf of an imperfect candidate. And of course, many other Americans—including white women—were moved to support Trump for essentially the same reason: what they heard as the threat that white patriarchy had lost its grip.
Which is why Donald Trump kept doubling down on the thing that made him purportedly unelectable, alleging that his opponent didn’t have the “stamina” to be president, inviting women who had previously accused her husband of sexual misconduct to a debate—not in an effort to jump-start the overdue feminist reassessment of Bill Clinton’s sexual improprieties, but rather to humiliate and destabilize Hillary. Trump’s primary defense against accusations of assault and harassment was that the women weren’t attractive enough to hit on—“Believe me, she would not be my first choice,” Trump had said of Jessica Leeds27—and he took care to note, after watching Clinton walk in front of him at a debate: “I wasn’t impressed.”
Clinton’s left critics would often comment that she’d lucked out in her draw of opponents, that she’d won—and then blown—a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to run against such a cartoonishly awful man. What this view failed to acknowledge was that it was the opposite of both luck and accident that this man had been summoned, elected by his party to face down the first woman who was running to be president, the woman we’d been assured would be president. To fight her, and her predecessor—another history-making challenge to white masculinity—the Republican Party had chosen a figure who embodied every one of the strains of denigration and disrespect that had historically worked to bar women and nonwhite men from the presidency and to deny them equal access to political power.
It worked. He won.