For several months, in the late summer and early fall of 1789, after the storming of the Bastille and the food shortages that had come in its wake, some of the men agitating for political change in France had spoken of staging a protest at the royal palace at Versailles. There had been talk of a mass demonstration of starving Parisians outside the opulent home of King Louis the XVI and his family; it had not yet come to fruition.
But on the morning of October 5, a Parisian woman, driven to a seething fury by the scarcity and high price of bread at the city’s markets, began to bang a marching drum. Other women quickly joined her and began to walk through the Paris streets. As the crowd of women grew, some of them brought along their knives; some forced a church to begin tolling its bells to draw attention to their growing protest. They gathered outside the Hôtel de Ville, Paris’s city hall, demanding both food and weapons.
From there, the mob, by then reaching perhaps ten thousand, headed to Versailles, dragging cannons they had seized. After an overnight standoff, the crowd would grow to more than fifty thousand and return to Paris the next afternoon, the king and his family with them.
Two hundred and twenty-eight years later, on October 5, 2017—also nearly a year to the day of the release of the Access Hollywood tape that had not succeeded in delegitimizing the man who was now our sitting president—the New York Times published a story by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey headlined “Harvey Weinstein Paid off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades.” It chronicled multiple allegations of sexual predation and harassment made by women—including some famous actresses—against Weinstein, a powerful movie producer.
It was a story that I had been waiting, hoping, and, to the degree that I’d been able, agitating to read for almost twenty years. Frankly, I had never believed that I would ever see it in print.
One of my earliest jobs out of college had been back in 1999 when I was an editorial assistant at a magazine that Harvey Weinstein’s company Miramax had financed. As a young secretary at the magazine, adjacent to his then company, I knew of his brutal bullying of employees, had begun to hear hushed rumors of hotel rooms, nudity, and then of whispered payoffs; I’d also heard plenty of gossip about which actresses in which movies—the beneficiaries of which book deals or writing contracts—had slept with Harvey in order to get them. Back then it had been gossip, and also unthinkable that anyone would have or could have gotten angry about it, to any effect at all. Harvey was the key to the resurgence of New York’s film culture; he opened doors to stardom, to Oscars, to edgy writers and directors; he even financed feminist movies directed by Jane Campion.
My next job, which I’d begun in my midtwenties, had been as a reporter at a weekly New York newspaper, where part of my beat was covering the film business in the city. In the weeks before the 2000 presidential election, I had been working on my first deeply reported story, about O, a star-studded but violent reimagining of Othello that Miramax’s Dimension Films division had been refusing to release, perhaps out of deference to the cringy clean-media message of the Al Gore–Joe Lieberman campaign, which Weinstein was publicly supporting; already there was talk of Weinstein’s ambitions in Democratic politics.
Since Weinstein had failed to respond to my calls for comment, I had been sent by my editor, on Election Eve 2000, to cover a book party he was hosting, along with a more senior male colleague whom I happened to be dating at the time. I asked Weinstein to comment for my story; he didn’t like my question. There was an altercation; he began shouting at me, pushing me hard with his finger against my shoulder; he called me a “cunt” and a “bitch” and declared that he was glad he was the “fucking sheriff of this fucking lawless piece-of-shit town.” When my colleague intervened, first trying to calm Weinstein and then trying to extract an apology from him, Weinstein went nuclear, pushing my colleague down a set of steps, knocking him over with such force that his tape recorder hit a female party guest in the head, knocking her out. Then, screaming to the crowd about how my colleague had “hit a woman,” Weinstein had dragged him onto Sixth Avenue in Manhattan and put him in a headlock.
Such was the power of Harvey Weinstein in 2000—when you’re a star, you can do anything—that despite the dozens of camera flashes that had gone off on that sidewalk that night, capturing the sight of a famous and physically gargantuan film executive trying to pound in the head of a young newspaper reporter, I never once saw a photo. None were published. Harvey was famous for having the power to spin—to suppress—anything.
The next day, Election Day, the New York Post reported on the event and cast it as “a couple of pushy reporters” who had “pushed [Weinstein] to the breaking point.” The New York Times reported that Harvey and my colleague had “had words” and that I had started the whole thing by “question[ing] Mr. Weinstein about an article that had nothing to do with . . . the party”; Weinstein, according to a Miramax official quoted by the Times, had “realized it really wasn’t appropriate and was upset.”
Here it was: power at work. Weinstein’s physical aggression, the act of beating up a journalist, transformed into an exchange of “words,” while the actual words in question—my questions of a powerful man, questions lodged as part of my job, my work as a reporter—were described in the newspaper of record as “inappropriate” and “upsetting.” Though he had done the physical pushing, we—the less powerful human beings he had pushed—could be comfortably described in the press he controlled as “pushy.”
In the months and years that had followed my own run-in with Weinstein, I began to hear from other reporters who’d gotten wind of other kinds of power abuses: the whispered dalliances I’d heard about in my earlier job were rumored to be worse than what I’d understood—did I know anything? Could I, as someone who’d been a firsthand witness to his verbal and physical aggressions, help them track down evidence of his sexual misbehaviors? I talked to every reporter who ever came to me for help with these attempted stories—and there were many, some of them legendary investigative journalists; I shared what I had heard, the rumors and gossip; I collected numbers and shared email addresses of anyone I thought could help them tell a full story about Harvey.
But mostly from these other journalists, I learned more than I offered. I heard about the stories they’d heard, yes—about the ubiquity of his behavior, about an ever clearer view of this man as a monster, perhaps a rapist. But far more than that, I learned about what felt like the complete, Sisyphean impossibility of ever bringing this information to light. Because all of these journalists, some working for years to report the story of Harvey Weinstein, traveling the globe to track down leads, fearing weirdly (as I had, after my incident with him) that their phones were tapped and that they were being followed (it seems it was all true): they never got the story.
The danger and impossibility of challenging a powerful man was made all too clear. I remembered what it was like to have the full force of this mountainous man screaming vulgarities at me, his spit hitting my face; of watching him haul my friend into the street and try to hurt him. Among the reasons that I never really entertained the idea of reporting the story myself was that I had been shown so clearly that I could not have won against that kind of power—both physical strength and the ability to manipulate the power of systems and institutions to cover up its abuses.
There was the suffocating force of cultural expectation itself, long since calibrated around patriarchal abuses, making it hard for any woman to trust that anyone would believe she had been wronged. We knew that rape and even sexual harassment were wrong, of course: this was years after Anita Hill. But the normalized notion of a casting couch, the nostalgic view of legendarily brutal studio bosses like Louis B. Mayer and of desperately ambitious actresses willing to do anything for a part: these had been worked into our romantic, imaginative DNA, and that romance, the easy way we integrated the exchanges made between men who had power and women who needed a piece of it as just part of how things worked, provided insulation to those men.
Then, there were less sentimentalized protections in place: Weinstein had employees sign elaborate nondisclosure agreements; he gave consulting jobs and book contracts to journalists who might otherwise expose his behavior; he gave money to powerful people in politics, building enough goodwill with them to provide a layer of protection, a kind of deafness to the ugly rumors that might circulate among less powerful people. For decades, the reporters who did try to tell the story butted up against a wall of sheer power that was leveraged against those who’d otherwise want to challenge him: the ambitious actors, vulnerable assistants, all the executives and subordinates whose careers, salaries, and reputations were in Harvey’s hands.
And then all of a sudden, the power was imbalanced. The revelation of Weinstein’s abuse—sexual submission fetishized, yes, but also simply submission and humiliation, the transformation of power into a weapon of degradation via massages and masturbation and daily diminution—was laid bare.
After the Times piece came one from Ronan Farrow at the New Yorker, reporting on long-suspected allegations that Weinstein was not simply a harasser but a rapist. Then came more. And more. And more. Women, and a few men, poured into magazines and newspapers and onto television to tell their own stories, about Harvey and about so many others: actor Kevin Spacey and television journalist Charlie Rose and magazine editor Leon Wieseltier and political pundit Mark Halperin and morning show host Matt Lauer and chef Mario Batali and comedian Louis C.K. and restaurateur John Besh and professors and Ford factory plant managers and progressive activists and fast food managers and senators and congressmen. The stories were told by farmworkers and flight attendants and hotel workers and union organizers and police officers and by women in Silicon Valley and Sweden and China and France.
The rage had been building, had leaked out earlier in the mini-uprisings, the insistence that other men whose behaviors had been open secrets—from comedian Bill Cosby to Fox News machers Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes—be finally made to pay a price for their behavior toward women. But something had shifted. Perhaps it was the election of Donald Trump, the fact that he stood in as the ultimate, inflated embodiment of white patriarchal power abuse who had faced no repercussion for his behavior, or maybe it was having seen women gather as armies to bring down Cosby and Ailes and to protest Trump’s inauguration and the Muslim ban and efforts to repeal health care. Then again perhaps it was simply the impossibility of containing the fury any longer, after we’d had this view of its injustice, its breadth and depth.
The reporters and the storytellers had finally banged the marching drum, bringing thousands onto the streets and ringing the bells, in 2017, insistent on making a historic charge and extracting the kings from their grotesquely guarded palaces.
The anger window was open. For decades, for centuries, it had been closed. Something bad happened to you, you shoved it down, you maybe told someone but probably didn’t get much satisfaction—emotional or practical—from the confession. Maybe you even got blowback. No one really cared, and certainly no one was going to do anything about it.
But in the four months that followed the reporting on one movie mogul’s sexual predation, a Harvey-sized hole was blown in the American news cycle, and there was suddenly space and air for women to talk—to yell and scream and rage.
Fixing on a hashtag—#metoo—that had been pioneered by the activist Tarana Burke in 2006 as a movement designed to reveal the ubiquity of sexual violence done to women and girls, but was taken up more broadly as an internet campaign in the fall of 2017, women spilled so much that had been bottled up for so long: they told stories of bosses and colleagues and teachers and mentors who had grabbed them or coerced them or insulted them or belittled them. There was a huge range of tales—everything from violent assaults to unwanted kisses to quid-pro-quo offers of professional advancement in exchange for sex, to more minor offenses, like groped butts and grazed boobs, unwanted come-ons and lewd late-night messaging from colleagues.
What united the stories was the way that they made the storytellers feel, what the events had led them to understand: that in public spheres, they had been regarded, treated, evaluated differently; that they had been used or degraded, had not been taken seriously professionally by powerful men. Many of the women who told their stories (there were men who told theirs too, but the majority were women) felt that the treatment they’d experienced had damaged their careers, dulled their prospects, muffled their ambitions, and kept them from the kinds of achievements in the public sphere that the powerful men of whom they complained had reached.
Some of those who spoke did so to friends or family members or to other colleagues, many for the first time. Some women lodged complaints, years later, with HR departments. Some spoke to reporters, providing corroborating evidence, contemporaneous witnesses, photographs and diaries for documentation; they showed their nondisclosure agreements and settled lawsuit filings; they produced the friends and husbands they’d told at the time, though many, many of them had told no one.
Then there were others who simply took the things that had always been private, quiet—the whispers, nudges, and meaningful stares that had served as warnings—and made them public and loud, with no mediation; they wrote their stories on social media, in tweets and Facebook posts that could be sent around the world in seconds. Some women in the media compiled a shared document, anonymously detailing their encounters with “shitty men” in their industry, men they named. It was dangerous and irresponsible and a sign of exactly how desperate, how utterly, profoundly furious they were, and how out of fucks they were about letting the world know.
There were other bizarre and creative acts of revolt: when the feminist writer Nicole Cliffe got wind of the fact that the antifeminist polemicist Katie Roiphe was planning to leak the name of the original compiler of the Shitty Media Men list in Harper’s Magazine, she announced that she would match the fees writers would have otherwise been paid for publishing their pieces in that issue, in exchange for pulling them from the magazine in protest. Cliffe was open about the fact that she did not ask her husband before promising funds from their joint account—a move that recalled the second-wave feminist Alix Kates Shulman, who’d remembered writing a check from her joint checking account, her first without asking her husband’s permission, in order to pay for members of the New York Radical Women’s collective to get inside the 1968 Miss America pageant and drop a banner reading “Women’s Liberation” at the moment the new winner was crowned.1
I wasn’t sure I liked the Cliffe approach, or the Shitty Media Men list; they were destabilizing to my profession, to the norms of professional and ethical behavior I’d been raised to respect, and—I feared—to feminism itself. They seemed too much, too risky, too intense. I felt like I was in some space movie, on a ship getting rocked by fire as it moved forward at a speed I’d never traveled before. Would it hold? Would we survive? I think it was the first time that I had experienced anything like radicalism in my own sphere, and it felt unsafe. Exhilarating. Terrifying. Uncomfortable. Necessary and long overdue and as if it were either going to burn us all up or save us.
It was definitely not feminism as I’d known it in its contemporary rebirth—packaged into think pieces or nonprofits or Eve Ensler plays or Beyoncé VMA performances. That stuff had certainly had its place and had done its crucial job, pulling feminism out of the suffocating murk of backlash. But this was different. This was 70s-style, organic, mass radical rage, exploding in unpredictable directions. It was loud, thanks to the human megaphone that is social media and the “whisper networks” that were now less about speaking sotto voce than about frantically typed texts and all-caps group chats.
Extremely powerful men lost their jobs—Harvey Weinstein lost his company; Charlie Rose was fired; Mario Batali was exiled from his restaurant empire; Matt Lauer was dismissed from the Today show; Senator Al Franken was asked to resign by his colleagues, many of them female. The list of men kept growing until there were too many too count, too many pieces to read. Never before, in my memory, had so many white male authority figures been censured, dismissed.
It was feral in its intensity, and even for those of us who were completely persuaded of how urgent and correct the process of reckoning was, it was not fun. Because the stories were so awful, many of them the sickening, chilling stuff of nightmares. But also because the conditions that had created this perfect storm of female rage—the pervasiveness of harassment and abuse; the election of a multiply accused predator who now controlled the courts and the agencies that were supposed to protect us from criminal and discriminatory acts—were so undeniably grim.
It was also harrowing because it was confusing, because the wrath might have been fierce, but it was not uncomplicated. In the shock of the house lights having been suddenly brought up—of being forced to stare at the ugly scaffolding on which so many of our professional lives had been built—we had scant chance to parse what exactly was enflaming us and who. It was the tormentors, obviously, but it was also our friends, our mentors, ourselves.
Among the greatest challenges faced by the women’s movement in all its iterations has been the structural difficulty of persuading women to express sustained, public anger toward their most direct oppressors: men.
This difficulty exists for many reasons, and takes us back to the fact that women, unlike many racial, ethnic, or religious groups in the United States, are not an oppressed minority, but rather a majority population, integral to homes, families, personal and professional networks in every geographic, religious, racial, and ethnic category. Here’s what that means, practically: every man has a woman in his life, and every woman has a man in hers.
The intransigent bitch about sexism and misogyny is that even when women recognize, truly feel the weight of the numerous and varied ways in which they have been subjugated and offered less based on their gender, we must confront the fact that the bad guys are, in many cases, also our good guys: the men in our beds, our hearts, our families. They are our brothers and fathers and uncles and friends and lovers and husbands and roommates and sons.
We love them.
We also often need them: to be our colleagues and family members and boyfriends and buddies, to help us raise our kids, to bring home paychecks on which we subsist. Because they have so much more professional and economic power, men are very often our bosses, our mentors, the guys who gave us our breaks and who we continue to rely on to give us promotions, raises, assignments. Because white men have had such disproportionate political power, it is often they on whom women—feminists, left activists—rely on a larger scale: as representatives, advocates, party leaders; to challenge them is to potentially imperil a whole political party, and with it, crucial protections, advocacy, an ideological agenda itself.
Of course it is precisely this reality—once again, this dependence—that has permitted powerful men to mistreat and discriminate against those with less power. It is also what has often kept women paralyzed—by fear, risk, love, loyalty—and reluctant to push back angrily against their own ill treatment, or in response to the ill-treatment of other women.
The potential for damage to relationships on which women depend is real; consequences may be both emotional and material. Women’s challenge to male authority or power abuse can send a family into disarray, end a marriage, provoke a firing, either of a woman or of a man on whom other women—colleagues and family members—rely economically. Fear of these repercussions (alongside a long-ingrained and realistic fear of simple futility) are very often fierce enough to inoculate women against expressing, and perhaps in many cases even feeling, the outrage at men that they might otherwise make known.
It is so much more peaceful to not get mad, to not even think about the gross injustices that pepper our daily interactions with men: double standards, intellectual disregard, objectification, sexual harassment, pay inequity, differential domestic expectations and burdens, unequal representation, the banality of daily diminution. Often it is simply easier not to consider any of this, much less try to fight back against it, especially when fighting back means fighting men you’d prefer to keep thinking well of.
“Once you know something, you cannot unknow it,” wrote Judith Levine of what it means to have felt feminist anger toward men in her 1992 book My Enemy, My Love. “You can’t sign up for consciousness-razing groups . . . but neither does the new knowledge erase the feelings that preceded it. . . . [W]hat do you do if you also love the hated person, need him emotionally, or depend on him materially, if you feel compelled to placate him or fearful to disturb him? A powerful unspoken theme of post–World War II feminism—and women’s lives since feminism—is the struggle with . . . the fury of recognized oppression.”
During the onslaught of #metoo-inspired allegations, a few of the many women who were both supportive of the movement and close to the public men accused of harassment gave eloquent voice to the paradoxical pains they felt.
CBS This Morning host Gayle King said of her former coanchor Charlie Rose, a man who was accused, all told, by more than thirty women of harassment, of exposing and forcing himself on younger colleagues, “I’ve enjoyed a friendship and a partnership with Charlie for the past five years. I have held him in such high regard and I am really struggling, because what do you say when someone that you deeply care about has done something that is so horrible? I can’t stop thinking about the anguish of those women: what happened to their dignity, what happened to their bodies, what happened, maybe, to their careers.”2
The comedian Sarah Silverman spoke about her close friend and fellow comedian Louis C.K., accused by other female comedians of masturbating in front of them without their consent and then relying on a system of enablers to punish them professionally for telling the story. The process of exposing the culture of pervasive harassment, Silverman said, was like “cutting out tumors: it’s messy and it’s complicated and it is gonna hurt but it’s necessary and we’ll all be healthier for it.” But, she went on, “It sucks. And some of our heroes will be taken down and we’ll discover bad things about people we like. Or in some cases people we love.” Describing her long friendship with C.K., she said, “I love Louis, but Louis did these things. Both of those statements are true. So, I just keep asking myself: can you love someone who did bad things? I hope it’s okay if I am at once very angry for the women he wronged and the culture that enabled it, and also sad, because he’s my friend.”3
It was a dynamic that was not simply painful for female accusers and friends of the accused, but an obvious weak spot that those who were not supportive of the #metoo movement were eager to exploit, in an effort to defend against the female anger and put a stop to the campaign. “When we start conflating and putting all these things all in one bucket,” warned the conservative Fox News personality Greg Gutfield of the breadth of complaints, “we’re going to start hurting your fathers, your brothers, your sons, your grandfathers.” The retired NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, defending himself against the claim of a former younger colleague that he had come to her hotel room and tried to forcibly kiss her in the 1990s, pounded out a middle-of-the-night, bathetic letter of self-defense in which he proclaimed, “I am proud of who I am as a husband, father, grandfather, journalist, and citizen.”
In May Samantha Bee would joke darkly about the dynamic of emotional captivity to the men close to us, in both its personal and political forms, in a furious tirade against New York’s freshly resigned attorney general Eric Schneiderman. Schneiderman had not only been a guest on Bee’s show, but a prosecutor whom she’d previously hailed as a feminist superhero, a man on whom feminist women were depending, and who had just been revealed as an allegedly violent abuser of his girlfriends.
“The good legal work that you did for women does not absolve you,” she bellowed, during a nuclear-grade opening monologue. “It will not give me one second’s pause about tearing you a new asshole on television. I give zero fucks. I would do an act entitled ‘My Dad Is a Monster’ if I had to. . . . Eric Schneiderman, you are trash and we do not need you.”
Bee’s rage resonated in 2018, in part because it reflected the liberating and livid surprise of having gotten to this point. It takes years, it takes emergency circumstances, it takes the electric shock of having so much injustice laid bare, to goad mass numbers of women into actually turning on the men in their lives—their elected officials or their dads or their partners or their bosses—and telling them what Bee told Eric Schneiderman over and over again in that seven-minute monologue: Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.
It may have felt cathartic in its pop culture iteration, coming from a comedian in charge of her own show. But the catharsis stemmed in part from the fact that letting loose any comparable anger within workplaces or families might come at steep costs for women who did not have their own shows.
“I saw the people who spoke up evaporate,” said public radio producer Kristen Meinzer, who publicly accused radio host John Hockenberry of sexual harassment, during a conversation with other #metoo storytellers. “I couldn’t lose my job.” She went on to note that “so much of how we’re taught to live in this world as women is to keep the peace, to smile, to try and giggle it off, to say, ‘Oh, that’s fine’ when it doesn’t feel fine . . . How do you preserve your own job, how do you preserve your own space, and how do you preserve your physical safety as a woman? A lot of that is: we have to be nice.”4
There is, of course, a long history of women who, in moments of political or personal crisis, make the revolutionary decision to not be nice, though the personal and political implications of this choice have rarely been obscure.
“Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands,” Abigail Adams warned her own husband presciently in the spring of 1776. “Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion.”
Seventy-two years later, in 1848, two hundred women and forty-odd men convened in Seneca Falls, New York, to draft the Declaration of Sentiments, a document modeled on the colonists’ Declaration of Independence, which Adams’s husband John had signed. The Declaration of Sentiments was also a statement of independence—women’s direct rebuke of male power and a seeming return on Abigail’s promise of rebellion: “The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman,” the Declaration read in part, claiming that the object of these injuries and usurpations had been “the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.”
And then they described that tyranny:
He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.
He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice . . .
He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.
He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.
. . . In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master—the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement . . .
He has so framed the laws of divorce . . . as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women—the law, in all cases, going upon the false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands.
He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration.
He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction, which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known.
He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education—all colleges being closed against her.
He allows her in Church as well as State, but a subordinate position . . .
He has endeavored, in every way that he could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.
It was a deeply subversive document. By making it a play on the Declaration of Independence, the suffragists were employing the language and logic of righteous rage that America revered—the rage of the founders, white men who were furious about limitations set on their liberty—and using that blueprint to express ire on behalf of a population on whose liberties those founders had, in their moment of righteousness, set about limiting.
It happens also, in its call for independence, to be an outline of the building blocks of dependency, the very things that codified and enforced the imbalance of gendered power that got us straight to the present moment, one hundred and seventy years hence.
The women who wrote it knew that it wasn’t going to be warmly received. “We anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule.”
They anticipated correctly. As the historian Marjorie Spruill has noted, “Outraged newspaper editors denounced the convention as shocking, unwomanly, monstrous, and unnatural, or ridiculed them as Amazons or love-starved spinsters.”5 The New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett, Sr., a rabid opponent of both abolition and suffrage, called the activists a “motley gathering of fanatical mongrels, of old grannies, male and female, of fugitive slaves and fugitive lunatics.” He predicted that “full consummation of their diabolical projects would reduce society to the most beastly and promiscuous confusion.” More plaintively, one unsigned article in the Daily Oneida Whig of Utica, New York, wondered, “Was there ever such a dreadful revolt? This bolt is the most shocking and unnatural incident ever recorded in the history of womanity. If our ladies will insist on voting and legislating, where, gentlemen, will be our dinners?”6
This same question would again reverberate in the wake of the uprising of feminists of the Second Wave, more than a century after Seneca Falls. That mass feminist movement, kicked off by Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, and then taken up by activists more radical and diverse in their priorities, coincided with the sexual revolution, and enacted material and legal changes in opportunities for women that would permit them to remap their lives in relation to men. Activists of the Second Wave demanded more educational and professional access for women, better legal protections against rape, harassment, and workplace discrimination. Feminists fought for the legalization of birth control and abortion and for laws that made it easier for them to leave bad marriages; they fought about pornography, and worked to acknowledge women’s sexual appetites and establish their right to sexual autonomy and self-determination.
In many ways, the Second Wave was tackling the same laundry list of inequities laid out in the Declaration of Sentiments. In part this was because while the Declaration had been broad in its demands, and women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had succeeded in expanding educational and professional opportunities and altering some property laws, the major material win, more than seventy years after the Declaration’s composition, had been the Nineteenth Amendment. So much was still left to be done.
Activists of the 1960s and 1970s, whose revolutionary movement lasted less than twenty years, made many changes in a short amount of time, challenging their own circumstances and assumptions so swiftly and dramatically that they altered the power dynamics within their own marriages and made their husbands uncomfortable and confused, suddenly rebuked for behaviors and attitudes which had never before been presented as problematic. Many men felt that they had entered marriages with a shared set of expectations but that the personal-is-political upheaval of the Second Wave had very suddenly rendered those expectations invalid. The men were not wrong: the rules had changed midgame; their dinners were no longer, necessarily, on the table.
Cecile Richards, the former president of Planned Parenthood, has written of how her progressive dad, a lawyer who’d fought on behalf of labor unions and for voting and civil rights, was undone by the subversions of the women’s movement. Cecile’s equally progressive mother, Ann, had experienced a change during the 1970s, campaigning on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment. Her father, Richards wrote, was confused. “He had a wife who raised the kids, took care of every single dog and cat we brought home, threw dinner parties, and grew organic vegetables,” wrote Richards. “Dad had grown up—and was living in a household where women threw themselves into volunteer work and didn’t have careers. I realize now that for him (and so many other men of his generation) the prospect of total upheaval of the domestic scene must have seemed pretty frightening. Suddenly the tumult around women’s roles and aspirations wasn’t happening just on television; it was happening in our own home.” The Richards’ marriage, like so many of the era, ended in divorce.7 And Ann went on to become governor of Texas.
It was surely not entirely fun to live through the era of quickly disintegrating marriages, though let’s pause to acknowledge that it was also not fun to live through eras in which divorce was hard to obtain, and marriages, even abusive and unhappy ones, were not easy for women to extract themselves from. But the swiftness of the feminist rupture of early-married hetero expectation meant that the divorce wave was fast and big and produced many acrimonious splits; lots of kids suffered for it, lots of women and lots of men suffered through it. The chaos provoked by the divorce boom fueled an extremely potent antifeminist line: that feminists, in their political aims, were enemies of family, men, and marriage.
“If there’s one thing feminists love, it’s divorce,” Phyllis Schlafly loved to croon, practically until her death.8 What she did not acknowledge, of course, was that what feminists loved was equality of the sexes, and that the divorces that happened during the course of and in the wake of the Second Wave were often provoked by women’s refusal to remain legally bound to men who did not want to have equal partnerships. Or by the realization that if they could attain economic security on their own, they did not need to stay in marriages that didn’t make them happy, or in which they were treated badly.
As the historian Stephanie Coontz, who has written about the history of marriage, has pointed out, “Feminism didn’t make good marriages go bad.”9 But it did challenge men to be better, and offered women the opportunity to plan their lives around ambitions and desires not directly tied to husbands. These opportunities for escape and for alternate paths were, in fact, uncannily similar to what Elizabeth Cady Stanton had been clamoring for in the Declaration of Sentiments, what marriage reformers had been speaking about for more than a century.
Any time that men’s power is questioned or tempered or rebuked or challenged, it seems, they are made to feel uncomfortable, and it often feels that any form of male discomfort is untenable.
The doctor Larry Nassar, accused of molestation by more than one hundred young gymnasts, complained about having to listen to multiple women’s testimony against him, and about his fear that he might pass out on account of this ill-ease, during his 2018 trial; Senator Jeff Sessions squeaked about the way that Kamala Harris’s intense questioning of him was making him “nervous” during a Senate hearing on Russian interference in the Trump campaign.10 Recall that when Chuck Schumer was interviewed about his reaction to the Women’s March by George Stephanopoulos, the host’s question to the senator had been “Were you comfortable with everything you heard?” as if Schumer’s sense of ease were the pressing concern.
More punishing is the increasingly common intimation that the discomfort women cause men by rejecting or challenging them is the thing that explains why some of those men enact violence against women. In the wake of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School by a former student, one survivor, Isabelle Robinson, wrote in the New York Times of the “disturbing number of comments I’ve read that go something like this: ‘Maybe if [the shooter’s] classmates and peers had been a little nicer to him, the shooting . . . would never have occurred.’ ”
Many powerful men, and the women who seek to retain warm association with them, strain to ease their discomfort. Part of that is understanding—seeing—whatever disruption has upset men as destructive, problematic, and unnatural, rather than as corrective or overdue.
“The public censure of women as if we are rabid because we speak without apology about the world in which we live is a strategy of threat that usually works,” wrote Andrea Dworkin in the preface to Intercourse, her incendiary 1987 volume on the politics and power inequities of sex. “Men often react to women’s words—speaking and writing—as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women’s words with violence. So we lower our voices. Women whisper. Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back.”
Andrea Dworkin did not pull back, did not shrink herself or her words to be better in tune with male preference. She was a radical, lyrical, furious feminist writer whose thinking and prose were so provocative and so fiery that reading her work, even now, can burn.
Molested as a child, beaten by her first husband, Dworkin worked briefly as a prostitute in the Netherlands before coming to feminism after having been active in other social movements including the struggles against the Vietnam War and South African apartheid. As a feminist activist, she and the radical feminist lawyer Catharine MacKinnon—a kind of twentieth-century answer to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, with Dworkin as the scribe and MacKinnon as the action-oriented doer—stepped on a First Amendment third rail by proposing legislation to ban pornography.
Dworkin and MacKinnon were not alone in their fight against the pornography industry; Gloria Steinem, Audre Lorde, and others also argued for setting limits and exposing its misogynistic abuses. But Dworkin and MacKinnon went furthest, in 1983 writing a series of local ordinances, known as the antipornography civil rights ordinances, which sought to ban porn by treating it as a violation of women’s civil rights. Their mission, which launched first in Minneapolis, and was later taken up, with varying degrees of success and failure, in Indianapolis, Cambridge, and Bellingham, Washington, set off an internal battle within feminism—again an echo of Stanton and Anthony—between self-described “prosex feminists” and the antiporn (though as they might clarify, not antisex) work done by Dworkin and MacKinnon. The prosex feminists won, conclusively.
Perhaps most famously, Dworkin wrote, in Intercourse, that “violation is a synonym for intercourse,” which was widely read and understood as an argument that all sex is rape. She would maintain staunchly for years after that this was a misreading of her sentiment, that what she believed was that “sex must not put women in a subordinate position. It must be reciprocal and not an act of aggression from a man looking only to satisfy himself.” But the cruder reading of her words was the one that stuck, largely because it did the job of discrediting her as a deranged fringe heretic, as somehow broken in her noncomportment with male-established aesthetic standards for femininity (Dworkin was obese throughout her life and often wore overalls). Her presumed dysfunction could be smeared into an understanding of her brazen anger at sexist power structures, and would thereby work to invalidate that anger.
“People didn’t just disagree with Dworkin. They hated her,” wrote one of her most elegiac later critics, the journalist Ariel Levy, a description that could be applied to lots of public, challenging women in America, including many who have shared almost none of Dworkin’s radical politics, perhaps suggesting that it’s not the specifics of the ideology but rather the threat to male comfort and supremacy that provokes the loathing. “To her detractors,” Levy continued, “she was the horror of women’s lib personified, the angriest woman in America.”
The more pernicious and consequential threat of the censure Dworkin’s ire provoked was the way that her unapologetic fury could be blamed for turning other women off and away from feminism. After her death in 2005, one writer for the Guardian suggested, horribly, that “Dworkin’s true legacy has been that far too many young women today would rather be bitten by a rabid dog than be considered a feminist.”11 This was a terribly twisted knife: the suggestion that the legacy of willingness to express rage would be a generation of women less willing to voice their own fury, more willing to remain complacent.
Yet Dworkin’s reputation was its own meta-testament to how right she was about so many things, even as she was wrong about other things, from pornography to sex work. Her medium was part of her message, and it explains why Gloria Steinem once called Dworkin feminism’s “Old Testament prophet, raging in the hills, telling the truth.”
She knew what she was doing; “I’m a radical feminist,” she once said. “Not the fun kind.” In a New York Times review of Dworkin’s 1988 volume Letters from a War Zone, the reviewer, a woman named Lore Dickstein, wrote that “much of what Andrea Dworkin has to say is important . . . but how she says it tends to undermine her argument. . . . It rings in the ears, pummels the mind; one begs for release from this relentless harangue. But then, this is precisely Ms. Dworkin’s point, her message as well as her method; to hound and harass, to respond to indifference or even civility with a shrill pitch of outrage.”12
One of the hardest parts about writing this book, and about living through the #metoo movement, was realizing the sorrow I felt that Dworkin was not here to see what was happening. Not because I felt she would be wholly satisfied by #metoo; though I do hope she would be cheered that it was taking place. Far more than that, I was sad because during her career, as Levy has pointed out, Dworkin was unafraid to say that she longed to be read, to be heard, to be understood. And the tenor of the feminist conversation, as it bubbled over in the years after the 2016 election, was in moments so in the spirit of what she wrote that I have discovered, in returning to her work, sentiments that left her ostracized from popular political debate in her time, but which today—this week, this afternoon—might feel wholly appropriate in their tenor and pitch, even earn a bunch of fire emojis on Twitter.
“Feminism is dying here,” wrote Andrea Dworkin, “because so many women who say they are feminists are collaborators or cowards.” And “Men are shits and take pride in it.” And, of the western canon of white male novelists and their sexism, “I love the literature these men created; but I will not live my life as if they are real and I am not,” a sentiment I tweeted as I composed this chapter, and which quickly earned three hundred “likes.”
The relentless, pounding march of #metoo—an angry surge that I expected to last only a few days or weeks but which stretched months, and then, even after briefly abating, came roaring back in the form of new relentlessly reported exposures of systemic power abuse, lawsuits, committees to push forward new legal protections for women who’ve been harassed—told me that contemporary women were in no mood to play nice, even when it would have been so much simpler, so much easier, to just let it stop, make all the risk and discomfort go away.
They reminded me of the bulldozing insistence of Dworkin, her determination not to give in to the easier path. Her work, she wrote, “does not say forgive me and love me. It does not say, I forgive you, I love you. . . . No. I say no.”