Feminism is a movement that is at once feared and loved, sometimes by the same people. I stepped into this project to find out why women were abandoning the f-word and the consequences of that. I’d guessed the reasons were complex, but I wasn’t quite prepared for just how muddled our thinking had become.
The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation Survey Project have been asking Americans what they think about feminism and women’s issues since 1995. The results are both broad and enlightening. As I expected, the 2016 poll showed that women were feeling lukewarm about feminism. Only 60 percent saw the movement favorably and just more than half thought the movement had, à la Joan Jett, a “bad reputation,” and that it should definitely give a damn. A smidge less than 40 percent of women thought the movement was angry, and another 30 percent thought it was outdated. Just about half the women felt the movement focused on changes they wanted (younger women were, on the whole, slightly more inclined to believe feminism cared about the same issues they did, while older women were more likely to give it the thumbs down). Only half, again, felt it reflected the views of all women, a number that hasn’t seemed to budge since 1989. And 40 percent of women felt it unfairly blamed men for their challenges, suggesting the man-hating stereotype has more pop-culture staying power than even Oprah.
At the same time, the vast majority of women felt equal pay for equal work, affordable child care, and the reduction of sexual harassment should be “top priorities” when it comes to improving women’s lives—all things feminism has worked diligently toward for decades. Other feminist priorities women agreed with were reducing domestic violence and discrimination against women of color and increasing the number of women in STEM. More than two-thirds of women felt a strong need for a women’s movement (note that pollsters didn’t use that dirty word feminism), a number that had increased since 1989, when only 59 percent of women surveyed felt there was a strong need. This is what psychologists call cognitive dissonance: the discomfort of holding two competing beliefs, ideals, or values at once. Many women, it seems, believe that feminism is for angry old man haters, as outdated and unhelpful as shoulder pads. And they see a strong need for better social policy and political movement to help women, which suggests that women believe we may not have achieved equality yet. This, I think, more than anything else explains how we really arrived at that now infamous saying, “I’m not a feminist, but . . .” We’re afraid and maybe a little apathetic, and some days we think we made it, but deep down inside we also know better.
And we’ve known better for a while. A 1996 research paper called “I Am Not a Feminist, But” published in the journal Political Psychology set out to explore the then new (but still totally baffling) trend of post-feminism in college-age women. The authors studied those who labelled themselves feminists, post-feminists, and anti-feminists, and their reasons for identifying as such. After they’d completed their research, they were forced to add a fourth label: precarious feminists. They slotted more than 40 percent of women into this category, more than any other (though the next highest, at 35 percent, was post-feminist). As a result, they concluded that precarious feminists are similar to post-feminists in that they see advancement resulting from individual abilities. Unlike the post-feminists, however, they are dissatisfied with women’s current status, but they are still lukewarm on the label “feminist.”
In another study, “Feminists or ‘Postfeminists’?” published nearly ten years later in the journal Gender & Society, scholar Pamela Aronson noted that the majority of young women she interviewed about their views on feminism and gender relations “were, in the words of one woman, ‘fence-sitters.’ They embraced a number of feminist principles yet rejected others and failed to classify themselves as either feminists or non-feminists . . . Despite this ambiguity, nearly all of the interviewees were supportive of feminist issues.” Fast-forward to today and it seems that equally musty adage “The more things change…” holds true.
Part of this might be explained by the perception women have about how others view feminism. A 2013 YouGov poll showed that, regardless of their own views on feminism, only 27 percent of women respondents thought that the majority of other women considered themselves feminists. Only 5 percent of women thought that men considered themselves feminists. In a poll the following year, 24 percent of women said they considered calling someone a feminist an “insult.” Women may, in their hearts, believe in the movement, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to don a “feminist” T-shirt or sip from an ironic “male tears” mug (as in “I drink male tears,” an idea expertly explored in Amanda Hess’s 2014 Slate essay “The Rise of the Ironic Man-Hater,” in which she noted that “on its most basic level, ironic misandry functions like a stuck-out tongue pointed at a playground bully”). Or if they do, they might not broadcast it, particularly offline.
Consider how this tension plays out for teen girls in the peer pressure cookers—i.e., the classrooms and hallways of high schools. “I have friends who believe in feminism but choose not to wear the feminist label because it comes with a lot of stigma, especially in school,” a young feminist named Majella Votta told me. “One day in school I heard a girl classmate say, ‘Ugh, feminism really annoys me,’ to try and impress these two guys in our class. Never in my life have I felt such pity for someone.”
When I recounted a similar story to a group of thirty-and-over women academics at a dinner party, many of them expressed shock. “But Justin Trudeau says he’s a feminist!” one exclaimed. And it’s true: the Canadian prime minister won over women in Canada and elsewhere with an endearing combination of snuggly panda photo ops, shirtless selfies, and this retort to critics, after choosing a gender-balanced cabinet: “Because it’s 2015.” It all depends on who’s claiming the label and in what context, with race, class, and life experiences all coming into play. What does Trudeau risk by declaring himself feminist? Feminism is experiencing an odd moment right now, where it is at once completely marketable (if you believe in a feminism that is soft on critical analysis but big on empowerment, looking hot, and buying dope shit) and distinctly uncool, like granny panties (if you believe in the kind that requires political action, tough reflection, and constant work).
The Washington Post observed this same tension in its article accompanying data graphs from the Kaiser survey. Post reporters recounted what one college sophomore (and feminist) told her professor when asked for her personal thesis: “Feminism is not a political movement.” For younger generations, wrote the journalists, feminism “stresses personal freedom as much as it does equality.” Call it an extension of choice feminism, a term that rose to worried prominence at the turn of this millennium’s first decade. In a 2010 paper, Michaele L. Ferguson of the University of Colorado at Boulder argues that choice feminism is a response to three common criticisms of feminism: that it is too radical, too exclusionary, and too judgmental. “Ultimately,” she concluded, “the problem with choice feminism is not that it celebrates women’s choices without having a political consciousness. The problem is that, even complemented by a political consciousness, the turn to choice feminism is motivated by a fear of politics.” What good was political consciousness, she asked, if women were afraid to use it?
In addition to seeing feminism as a bad thing, nearly 70 percent of women also saw it as “empowering.” Because what does empowerment mean? Whatever you want it to. It’s a term I’ve heard both feminists and anti-feminists use, each to describe their own movement. “I have a bad case of empowerment fatigue,” Bitch magazine editor, and one of its three founders, Andi Zeisler wrote in “Empowering Down,” a chapter in her 2016 book We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement. “As a catchall phrase that can be understood to mean anything from ‘self-esteem-building’ to ‘sexy and feminine,’ to ‘awesome,’ empowerment has become a way to signify a particularly female way of being that’s both gender essentialist—when was the last time you heard, say, a strip aerobics class for men described as ‘empowering’?—and commercially motivated.” She argues that the word has been used to sell and embrace hundreds of contradictory messages, including everything from high heels and cosmetic surgery to having children, being an asshole, buying a gun, and more. “By the time the satirical newspaper The Onion announced ‘Women Now Empowered By Everything a Woman Does,’” she added, “it really did seem that ‘today’s woman lives in a near-constant state of empowerment.’”
As feminism does the necessary work of practicing intersectionality, these pluralities of meanings are both vital and confounding. When I asked a seventeen-year-old named Mia Salvato who lives in northeastern Ohio why she thought her peers could be reluctant to politically rally around feminism, she told me the movement needs its Rosa Parks. “I feel like feminism is so disembodied,” she told me. “There’s not somebody we can look at and say, ‘This is who we’re fighting for. This is what we’re fighting for.’ And, personally, I would like to see that happen, even if it’s a straight, white woman.” So long as it’s someone, she said, that anyone could look to and say, “See, this is the problem.”
It’s a call for focus—a sort of reverse Beyoncé, somebody who doesn’t just make feminism cool because she’s killing it but urgent because she’s losing. We don’t need a champion, necessarily, but somebody to champion, a subtle but distinct difference. And so, depressingly, this is where we return: trying to hurdle over the idea that women have nothing left to win.
Well-intentioned mainstream, white feminism—the kind the second wave and even the third wave have embraced—reminds me of my high school self. I grew up in a now large suburb one quick train ride away from Toronto. My school was big and multicultural, a hodgepodge of different-colored bodies teeming through the hallways, sitting in classrooms, eating at the cafeteria, and running through our sports fields. For two years in a row, our valedictorian was a Black woman. We had a step team. The entire school attended our two-hour Black History Month production every year. My friends’ faces reflected the school’s make-up: a mix of religious, cultural, and racial backgrounds. As I listened to them dish about their families and their lives, I leaned toward our similarities. All our moms annoyed us. We all faced pressure to maintain brainiac status and bring home top marks. We liked the same TV shows. We made the same jokes. In modern parlance, these girls were my ride-or-dies. I saw us as the best girl gang ever.
And we were. Those friendships were real. Some of those girls remain my closest, dearest friends today. But I cringe now at how little I understood then. The diversity of the school wasn’t reflected in Dr. Porter’s gender studies course; only one of my friends took the class with me. Of course, I knew that my friends’ families and communities were unlike mine, yet in so many ways I benevolently and naively shrugged it off. I deliberately chose not to see the biggest differences, and I thought that was a good thing. We are all humans! We are all the same! Look at our colorful mosaic of people! I’m a good white person! You’ve met my high school self; maybe you’re her right now. Hell, I can still be her sometimes. I sincerely, sweetly, and 100 percent wrongly believed I was doing the right thing: championing equality. I was actually discounting their own realities and experiences, and the worlds they lived in when they were not at school. I had taken a person-sized eraser to their selves and, with the best intentions in the world, scrubbed them out.
Mainstream feminism slides down the same slope with its all-for-one, one-size-fits-all approach. The we’re-all-the-same narrative is threaded through our discourse, stitched through our academic papers, public events, and online conversation, hemmed tight into both our history and the statistics we use to battle for better rights. This universality assumes that the unfair system affects all women in the same manner, or that all of our issues, from gay rights to racial discrimination, are divided from each other.
Consider the historical milestones feminism celebrates. We’re fond of saying Canadian women earned the right to vote in federal elections in 1921. We make less of the fact that it was only white women who earned that right. Many women of color weren’t allowed to vote until the late 1940s, and Inuit women only won the right in 1960. We celebrate Canada’s Famous Five for winning equality for privileged white women while making less of the fact that they spewed racism and xenophobia elsewhere. Three of them campaigned for forcible sterilization in Alberta, an act that passed into law in 1928 and was used to mutilate more than four thousand people, mostly women, before it was struck down in 1972.
We bandy about statistics on lower earnings, scant economic representation, violence, rape, and more—some with such frequency that they’ve reached near celebrity status, like the Kim Kardashian of numbers. But we often fail to mention those numbers correspond to straight white women, many of them middle class and able bodied. For women of color, gay women, transgender women, women with disabilities, and so on, those storied and outrageous numbers are often far worse. And yet, time and again, we iron out the nuances, turning feminism into a pressed shirt. No wonder so many women feel left out.
In some ways, the Great Lump-In makes a lot sense: feminists had to eke out basic rights before they could focus on the details, or at least that’s always been the argument. It’s a convenient one. It allows us to forget that many of the women who have led feminism are those able to do so largely because they weren’t the ones on the fringes struggling to survive. But that’s only part of what makes our homogenizing of feminism so inexcusable. Let’s think about it: The more feminism surges toward exclusion, building those moats and drawbridges and whole fortresses around itself, the more it becomes part of the same establishment it’s fought so hard to tear down (or at least gain access to). From where many women sit, the white, established, straight, upper-class, male-dominated society doesn’t look a whole lot different from white, established, straight, upper-class feminism. And why would it? Both are only speaking to, and about, themselves.
At everything from cocktail parties to panel events, I’ve found myself in the company of older feminists who expect me to speak on behalf of my generation and corner me as if I’m a magical unicorn—or a sacrificial lamb. I’m praised for being there and for caring about women’s rights, but few women listen to what I have to say. Conversations tend to oscillate between outright dismissiveness, historical lecturing, and demands for answers. One night, I sat in an upscale pizzeria in Toronto (the type of restaurant that pairs your pinot grigio with your pepperoni) with three women, all in their fifties and sixties, who had worked together in the finance industry for decades. Successful, cultured, and firmly rooted in the middle- to upper-middle class, they were well coiffed and well off: hair cut into precision bobs, clothes tailored and neutral, makeup tastefully applied. I adored and admired them. Every winter they bought a “culture package” comprising tickets to the city’s plays, musicals, ballets, operas, and speaker series. Sometimes, when one of the women had a ticket to give up, it was benevolently bestowed upon me, the starving writer. I’d been with them before, but this was the first time we’d ever talked about feminism.
They were delighted to find out that I am a feminist, too. “Good for you,” they said. They told me that, in the 1970s and ’80s, early into their careers, they realized the importance of feminism when they battled to gain equal footing with the men in their offices. They fought hard to have their job titles and salaries reflect the actual work they did. One was almost fired, more than once, for refusing to be the coffee girl at meetings. We laughed uproariously as she recounted how she’d told a boardroom full of men where they could put their cream and sugar. (Guess!) It wasn’t lost on any of us that I was too young to have been alive back then, or that I owed a lot to women like them.
Then the mood shifted. Suddenly, they wanted me to explain how young women could possibly complain when men harassed them in the office, given how they dressed like “sluts.” Well, actually, they wanted me to condemn these supposedly slutty women, as they had. Were they not trying to sleep their way to the top? Did they not realize it was inappropriate to wear a skirt that tight or short? How could these young women expect men to take them seriously when they paraded their cleavage? Did they really expect men not to look? Had the older generation fought so hard to gain a toehold, only for these boob-baring young women to ruin it all? One bomb after another, and I was expected to field them. I felt like I’d been designated Young Feminist, Vice President of Explaining Everything. It was an impossible job. I fumbled a subject change, but they sat patiently undeterred, knives at sharp angles, suspended over their pizza. I imagined the serrated blades as long-nose saw sharks out for blood. It was ridiculous, I know: me conjuring these women as menacing, threatening. But in that moment, it didn’t feel like we were all part of the same sisterhood; it felt like civil war.
I couldn’t translate my generation’s sartorial choices in a way that made sense to my dining companions, not in a way that squared my generation’s aversion to victim blaming and rape culture with their struggle to have men see them as equals in the workplace—hell, to even let them into the workplace. I tried every tactic, every argument. Didn’t every woman deserve a safe, harassment-free work zone, no matter what she wore? Wasn’t it a slippery slope down to “asking for it” territory if we scrutinized work clothes? Did they truly believe all these young women were trying to sleep their way up the corporate ladder? But whatever case I made came back to the question of why. Why were young women dressing like that? Why were they ruining everything? Eventually, frustrated, I gave up. “I have no idea,” I answered tensely, honestly, throwing my fellow young women under the bus. I felt like a fraud.
Later that night, on my way home and pondering the earlier exchange, my mind darted back to an interview I’d done months earlier. I’d asked a feminist about ten years older than me why the sisterhood seemed so fractured. She’d answered immediately and ominously: “Feminists eat their young.”
In the midst of other older women who grilled me, like the women at dinner had, but rarely inquired about what mattered to women my age and younger, I often forgot I had a right to be there, too. I forgot I could call myself a feminist without having to pass a test. Which is to say that I would often run to the washroom and pep-talk myself in the mirror, reminding my red-faced reflection that I was the editor of one of the country’s oldest progressive magazines for eff’s sake. It was my job to have opinions about this shit. This sideline feeling continued to happen into my early thirties, well past the age anyone could realistically mistake me for a spring chicken. And I knew it wasn’t just me. “Age is the single most divisive issue in the women’s rights movement right now,” Ottawa-based Julie Lalonde told me.
When I interviewed her, Lalonde was twenty-nine, with a Governor General’s Award already under her belt for her feminist work. She was also part of several feminist organizations, had spearheaded even more projects, and worked part-time as an anti–violence against women educator. Aside from her GG award, Lalonde was most well known for her role in securing a student-run women’s sexual assault center at Carleton University. Lalonde had returned to the school for her master’s degree after completing a bachelor’s in women’s studies. During her first year back, in 2007, a horrific sexual assault occurred on campus. It took seven years for her to get the student-run support center to open, but she refused to back down. Basically, she was a badass.
She was also keenly, painfully aware of the fractures in the feminist movement and had become disillusioned with academic feminism during her fight for the support center. While she acknowledged women’s studies is what brought her to feminism, she added that she was embarrassed to admit it now. She contended that many tenured professors in the women’s studies department had refused to support the push for the center. They avoided the picket lines and instead urged silence. Lalonde said they told her they feared showing support would harm funding for their department. To her, that idea was outrageous. Even the woman who taught Lalonde’s feminist activism class refused to get involved.
That people with such privilege refused to use it to help those with less or none appalled Lalonde. “I just couldn’t accept it then,” she said, “and I can’t accept it now.” Her entire outlook on the movement changed. She could see the fracture lines. When Lalonde said age is the most divisive thing, she didn’t mean older feminists are duking it out with younger ones, rock ’em, sock ’em style, but that the movement has split along different points of view, old and new. The feminist waves are all crashing into one another, and we’re in turmoil. As much as older feminists can seem surprised and baffled by younger feminists, the lines aren’t strictly generational; they’re ideological. One woman’s feminism can seem as different from another’s in the same way Cheerios barely resemble Lucky Charms—both cereal in name only.
Bitch co-founder Lisa Jervis also argued against the generational divide in a 2004 op-ed. She confessed to loathing the question “Are you in the third wave?” To her, the distinction of which wave she was born into was irrelevant. “We’ve reached the end of the wave terminology’s usefulness,” she wrote. “What was at first a handy-dandy way to refer to feminism’s history and its present and future potential with a single metaphor has become shorthand that invites intellectual laziness, an escape hatch from the hard work of distinguishing between core beliefs and a cultural moment.” By definition, first-wave feminism encompassed the suffrage movement. The second wave was, by comparison, a spark. The women’s liberation movement, as it was known at the time, rose quickly in the 1960s and ’70s, urging equality beyond the right to vote. While the third wave’s start date is murky, it’s generally characterized as pro-sex, pop-culture hungry, man friendly, and, well, young. If you’re under 40, you’re part of it.
The problem, Jervis argued, is that it’s all chronological. Categorizing feminism into waves flattens the differences in feminist ideologies within the same generation and discounts the similarities between different ones, all in one fell swoop. Second-wave feminists become the worst stereotypes: lipstick averse, hairy-legged, celibate man haters. Third-wave feminists become fluffy, crop-top-wearing sex fiends who have historical amnesia. Categorizing makes it easy for the mainstream media to write alarmist stories and can create an almost cartoonish divide between generations, amplifying discord. One generation forgets the mothers of the movement; the other dismisses the activism of its daughters. When we buy into the wave theory, we forget common goals, like the fight for abortion rights, equal pay, and ending violence against women.
Jervis and many other feminists who dislike the wave terminology have begged women to recognize the generational divide as “an illusion.” I agree that age doesn’t dictate a woman’s feminist ideology. To assume a woman’s personal politics derive solely from her age—and that the same principle could be blanketed across an entire generation—is absurd and, in itself, sexist. And yet, here we are again. Technology and social media are changing the movement. Younger feminists today are acutely aware of feminism’s intersections with other battles: anti-racism, Islamophobia, anti-poverty, disability rights, transgender rights, sex worker rights. The connection points are many. Perhaps dividing the feminist movement according to age was acutely unfair, but it didn’t stop us and, as a fourth wave now emerges, the movement is having trouble bearing the weight of our differences.
The shift, so far, only seems to exacerbate the movement’s ageism. “The two issues that are bound to divide a room of feminists are sex work and transgender inclusion,” Lalonde told me. “And I think the controversy around those two issues is born from the generational divide within the feminist movement.” Some women, in other words, believe sex worker and transgender inclusion belong in the movement and are central issues going forward; others do not. As I see it, Lalonde could have added any number of uncomfortable issues around privilege to the list of room separators. For all our careful tiptoeing around generational stereotyping, it seems clear that one subset of women close their eyes and see white, straight, middle-aged, middle-class, able-bodied women as the feminist movement, and others close their eyes and see a complex rainbow.
Yes, the feminist movement can thrive on difference—a whole mass of women working apart but also together toward the ultimate goal of, as writer bell hooks put it, gender justice. But for many young women I’ve interviewed, it doesn’t feel like we are united at all. Instead, it’s more like we are building our own generational islands, erecting fortresses, and then catapulting stones. Those who happen to wander onto our islands are often treated with hostility, like they are bumbling tourists, if not outright enemies. We’ve become distracted with fighting each other. We hurl questions, insults, and harassment at dinner parties, on Twitter, and at women’s conferences and committee meetings.
“It isn’t doing us any good,” Lalonde told me. “It’s only perpetuating the idea that we can’t get along.”
And the anti-feminists love us for it.
I once attended a panel on feminism during which one of the speakers, a white, sixtyish feminist, with a luminous moon-white bob and graceful hands, expressed her bewilderment over the movement’s current divisiveness. She was clearly brilliant and dedicated, a grandmother of the movement who had spent much of her life researching the law as it pertained to gender, race, and the uneven application of justice. And yet she felt that the movement was much better at diversity in the 1960s and ’70s. Women of all colors were at those early modern rallies, she said, all working together. They were there, she emphasized, as if that were enough.
Though she sat poised and not at all gawky, she reminded me of my high school self—the one that buffed over differences, sanding them down to a dull uniformity. I couldn’t help but wonder if, all those years ago, she’d ever asked those women how they felt; if those “others,” those women of color, were ever given the opportunity to speak, to lead; if even then she wondered who wasn’t there at all. Mostly, I wondered why she thought that simply being at a place meant meaningful involvement, and for all women, not just for those who were, in fact, present.
Any woman who has existed in the world should know better than that. Just think of the times you were in a room of men, maybe at work or at school, or even in your own home, and they all talked over you. Think about the times men explained your own experiences to you, the times they confidently stole the spotlight, the times you felt the smallest even when you had the biggest things to say. That’s what feminists like Lalonde mean when they criticize feminism for its exclusivity. It doesn’t matter that girls and women are there; it matters that we let all women speak and then make the room to listen to them. And right now, we’re unequivocally failing.
None of this is easy. For many women—even white ones, even rich ones, even ones in happy homes—grappling with the idea of privilege is difficult. It can seem exceedingly difficult to define, let alone acknowledge. Few would argue against the statement that the women of Hollywood’s elite have more money/opportunities/private islands/jets/beauty/everything than the average Jane. And yet even female film actors face overt sexism and are paid less than their male counterparts, proving, perhaps, that creeps and the wage gap both find all of us in the end.
I can hear the chorus now: So, then, aren’t we all in it together? Don’t we all have it bad? That’s not the point. It’s as if admitting privilege simultaneously erases both a woman’s pain and the inherent unfairness she faces daily. Certainly, it’s a very scary prospect for any woman still bearing the weight of her gender, as we all do, in one way or another. But this rabbiting fear has driven us to reinforce the same power structures feminism is meant to abolish. Instead of moving forward all together, as capital-F feminism claims to be doing, we’ve swiped sideways, an undulating wave of fallen dominoes.
It’s so hard to know where to begin. As a white woman, even though I recognize and speak out about the root causes of feminism’s divisiveness, I am part of the problem. Even as I call for all of us with privilege to shut up and listen to those who don’t have as much, or any, I’m elevating my voice. As much as I do the hard work, I can also rationalize with the best of ’em. Sometimes I feel like saying, “You know what? I’ve done enough, I need a rest.” Sometimes it can feel like I’ve fought so hard for my voice to ring loudly, I don’t want to hush it. Sometimes it can feel like I have so much work to do in my own life—juggle several gigs to pay my bills, wash the leaning tower of plates in my sink, go to therapy—that no time is left for thinking about women’s rights, let alone my privilege. In those small, selfish moments it’s hard to remember that’s not what a better feminism demands.
Confronting privilege means we need to open doors and cede platforms in thoughtful and consistent ways. We need to keep doing it, keep listening, keep stumbling, and keep trying to do better. That’s exhausting, trying, humiliating work that turns inward to ourselves and to the movement, instead of outward to the world, a far easier task. It’s uncomfortable. Trying to figure out what your privilege is and what you can do about it can feel like knotting yourself up into a roadside World’s Biggest Pretzel attraction—over and over and over again. But we have to do it anyway. Well, I mean, that’s one argument.
The second decade of the millennium has ushered in a new wave of feminists who are ready to live in this discomfort. They believe wholeheartedly in “half Hispanic, half Eastern European” feminist blogger and writer Flavia Dzodan’s seminal and declarative 2011 essay: “My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit!” In typical salty language, Dzodan describes the importance of intersectionality by likening it to a “shit puff pastry.” “The shit puff pastry,” she wrote, “is every layer of fuck that goes on above me, below me, by my sides, all around me.” Other feminists have called it a shit sandwich. Still more have described it as moving through the world tethered to a set of weights. Add one if you’re a woman, another if you’re a woman of color, another if you have a disability, another if you land on the LGBTQ spectrum, another if you live in poverty. Intersectionality is, essentially, the belief that we cannot untie our oppressions from each other. It calls for a plurality of feminisms, and a movement that acknowledges that while we’re all fighting for equality, we’re not all standing on even ground while we do it.
Some call this growing movement the fourth wave of feminism, sometimes rather derisively. Canadian conservative Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente penned an exploration of fourth-wave feminism after learning the “new” term intersectionality in March 2016. After giving a snarky but accurate definition of it in her column, she lamented that “these folks” had influence outside university halls and prayed for it all to go away. “When I grew up, kids were urged to be blind to differences. Now they’re urged to see nothing but,” she wrote. “Perhaps one day we’ll stop trying to identify ourselves by labels and just call ourselves human beings.” Even Antonia Zerbisias, former Toronto Star columnist and co-creator of the hashtag #beenrapedneverreported, has railed on fourth wavers. In the wake of Canada’s Jian Ghomeshi sexual assault trial, which cost the radio star his job at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and put him at the center of a national conversation about consent and privilege, she wrote in support of the system that acquitted him: “Memo to my sob-sister, fourth-wave feminists: get over it.”
That’s not to say only younger women believe in intersectional feminism. While this rising sect of the movement was born in the current generation and certainly skews younger, it’s not solely age that divides us, but belief. There are those of all generations and so-called waves who think intersectional feminism is essential and vital in the push for women’s rights, and then there are firm feminists, like Wente, who’ve never heard of the word, or those, like Zerbisias, who have, and yet see it as a trivial, even petty, term. They are the feminists who want the club to look like how I saw my high school: a happy, Kumbaya-singing circle of diversity. To them, intersectionality breeds the in-fighting that’s become feminism’s Achilles’ heel. With a small shift, they’re right: the tension of those feminists who demand intersectionality and the others who don’t get it is like vinegar to baking soda. Fizz-bang-explode.
I’m not advocating feminism totalitarianism, rows of identical, marching Feminazis (as we’re so terribly called) with Sharpied moustaches and shiny boots. Nor am I rooting for anarchy. What we need is a movement that recognizes, allows, and even celebrates its differences. In my feminist Shangri-La, we embrace the plurality of feminisms and can still work together and respect each other. We’re allies. We disagree without slinging mud; we don’t stage self-destructive shows for the anti-feminists’ entertainment. In other words, if feminism wants to survive and grow, not shrink, it’s vital that it learn how to communicate within itself.
In April 2016 I attended the Saturday night headline event of Canada’s national Spur Festival, a celebration of politics, arts, and ideas. The one-hour event boasted a one-word title, “Feminism,” bestowing the movement with the singular power of God, or perhaps Madonna. The program booklet provided scant context: “Spur celebrates the accomplishments and contradictions of the feminist movement and explores feminism in practice.” In an hour? How ambitious. Sitting in the audience, my bottom already going Novocaine numb on the barely cushioned seat, I wondered whether the organizers simply couldn’t think of anything else to say, as if the idea of wading through the movement and drilling down past the omnipresent feminism was too daunting.
As the minutes ticked closer to showtime, I watched as the downtown Toronto theater filled to three-quarters capacity. The number of men surprised me. Fifteen minutes late, the stage lights blinked on, tiny suns that revealed the speakers’ racial diversity: two white women (Constance Backhouse, a law professor, and Stacey May Fowles, a novelist and essayist); one Indigenous woman (Kim Anderson, a Cree/Métis writer and university professor); and two Black women (moderator Vicky Mochama and Lena Peters, a young activist and founding member of Toronto’s Black Lives Matter). The next hour unfolded with a humming energy as the women discussed everything from racism to colonialism and from the possibility of a feminist Magna Carta to Instagram.
Mochama directed the conversation between women whose approach to their feminist practices often bore little resemblance—not necessarily a bad thing. The differences came to the forefront when Mochama asked the panelists to finish the sentence “We the feminist people, to form a more equal society . . .” As Fowles jokingly groaned “Oh, God” at the enormity of the question, the audience laughed and clapped. Anderson, who responded first, stated simply “respect all life” (though, when asked, she explained that the three-word concept must underscore all approaches to equality). Backhouse said any declaration must focus on changing the culture to dismantle discrimination. Peters emphasized that we shouldn’t even try for the unity an answer would suggest: “That’s the scariest version of feminism, right? The club. That’s why so many people shy away from the label.” She added that she doesn’t want her grandchildren’s feminism to resemble hers. If it did, “it would be yucky, and old,” she laughed. Fowles agreed, adding that if such a proclamation existed, “I certainly wouldn’t want to write it.” Feminism should not be set in stone. The tension made for a lively discussion, and an even livelier question period.
But once given their own chance at the mic, audience members kept circling back to feminism’s apparent divisiveness. One asked how to better include men, another how to better include mothers, and a third how to quell the social media infighting. Midway through, a woman’s voice broke on the first word of her question. She was a young woman, close to my age, her winged glasses hitting the curls of her hair. “I’m biracial,” she told the audience. Her mom’s hand popped a self-conscious hello from the crowd. The young woman apologized for crying as her voice warbled. She was heartbroken, she told the panelists and everyone else in the room. “The saddest thing for me,” she said, “is the divisiveness between women.” Wasn’t there a way we could all work together? In response, Peters chided her. She doubted, she said, that white women ever sat around a table and wondered how to get other women involved. She doubted they asked themselves how they could give up a little of their power and work together instead. For Peters, and many others, the suggestion that feminists all play nice presents a certain danger: a forced Stepford-like homogeny.
I later caught up with the young woman and her mother. It bothered her that nobody wanted to talk about the divisiveness. There had to be a way to work apart, but together. In doing so, we could acknowledge feminists’ many differences, she said, but also the common goal. She worried what would become of feminism if we couldn’t. It was like women were fighting over bread, she told me. That person had two slices. Maybe she had three. I could have had four. “But we all fucking don’t have enough bread.”
Jarrah Hodge’s voice strained with diplomacy, vibrating with the plucked tension of an elastic band about to snap. Underneath her careful words, Hodge was pissed. I’d called her because I admired her Canadian feminist blog Gender Focus, which she’d founded in 2009. Shortly before I spoke to her, she’d won the Best Politics Blog and the Best Activism and Social Justice Blog in the juried Canadian Weblog Awards. She was only twenty-eight and had already spent most of her life, online and IRL, in the feminist sphere, organizing events and rallies, sitting on boards, and advocating for her view of a more equal world. I’d just asked her about the sexism she experienced as a young woman online, but that wasn’t what she wanted to talk about. She thrummed with fake laughter: “Oh, I thought you were going to ask me about my experiences as a young woman in feminist spaces.”
It had been on her mind throughout the interview, she confessed. “I’ll answer that first,” she told me, “and then the second question, if that’s cool,” the second question being the one I’d actually asked her. Of course it was cool. By now, I’d realized the frustration young women felt was always boiling in the background throughout even the most general of conversations about young feminism; it needed somewhere to erupt. Hodge was careful to say she knew other feminists meant well. But she was tired of arriving at events she’d organized, or whose committees she’d steered, and hearing older women sweetly remark that it was nice she’d made it to her first feminist event. Other times, women will tell her it’s nice to see a young person, then demand to know why she didn’t bring more youth with her. More than once other women have assumed her mother brought her to an event. It always makes her feel like she’s not valued as an equal participant within the movement.
It’s not just a matter of hurt feelings. That kind of alienation can be devastating to a teenager or early twentysomething who’s just discovering women’s rights, stressed Anastasia Gaisenok, who, when I spoke to her, was just wrapping up her two-year tenure as the project coordinator for the Young Women Civic Leaders initiative in Vancouver (she went on to become executive director of the Youth Global Education Network). Gaisenok, who was born in Belarus and moved to British Columbia in 2003 to attend Simon Fraser University, also landed in the “pissed” category and she was not careful, or polite, in her criticism. As she spoke about the damaging effects of “pushing out” potential feminists, her Russian accent muddied her vowels in direct relation to how irked she felt, which was very. “This is a way to turn people off the whole thing, really,” she told me.
Many of the young women that she worked with, women who were interested in politics and wanted to change the world, were afraid of feminist spaces, Gaisenok noted. Once, when she suggested meeting at a local university’s women’s center, a place she thought was a natural fit, especially since five of the women in the group were students at the school—she was shocked to discover none of them had been to the center and balked at going. They felt they weren’t feminist enough and that they’d be chastised, she told me, proving the age gap doesn’t have to be wide to be felt. Gaisenok found it especially heartbreaking, she said, because she remembered being that girl: the one who knew hardly anything about formal feminist theory but who desperately wanted to be part of the movement advocating for change. Feminism needs to figure out how to bring women in who are currently on the periphery lest it turn away even more.
“It’s a minefield,” Gaisenok fumed, the crescents of her cheekbones tightening in anger. “You are afraid to open your mouth in one of those discussions. If you say something that is perceived as not feminist enough, or not fully thought out, or a position that this particular person doesn’t agree with, then you’re immediately ostracized and made to feel so horrible.” She emphasized women need to be gentler and more understanding when it comes to young women discovering the movement. Instead, we’ve thrown up all sorts of barriers. The language of feminism can be inaccessible, said Gaisenok. At a recent panel on rape culture she wondered whether someone completely new to feminism would get lost in the maze of jargon; it took until the closing minutes of the panel to even define rape culture. If she was at entry-point level, she imagined, she’d feel so stupid listening without a clue about what was happening. She might, she surmised, even decide feminism wasn’t for her, or that it didn’t want her.
Considering the many roadblocks that prevent young women from adopting or aligning with feminism, from lack of education to its negative representation in pop culture, Gaisenok saw the counting-out attitude as an especially critical error. She likened feminism to a cliff: women could fall off it after being treated badly at a meeting, after threats on social media, after university, after they entered the workforce, after children, life, and so many other things got in the way. Feminism was a hard, tiring slog, she reasoned, and it was easy to topple off. No wonder so many young women weren’t even bothering to find out about the f-word, she said. Feminists were too busy either building barriers or helping to throw them off proverbial cliffs.
“It’s a very weird jam we’ve gotten ourselves into,” said Julie Lalonde. Like many of the younger feminists I interviewed, including Hodge and Gaisenok, Lalonde criticized the wider feminist movement for failing to encourage younger women to join. Technology amplified the movement’s reach and allowed it to talk outside the monolith, but it didn’t usually win women seats at media panels, committee tables, or at organizations that had politicians’ ears. It created pressure sometimes, sure, but it was still largely older, established, and often white feminists who were given the platform to discuss issues and guide change. The movement’s core feminist issues were predominately discussed in the context of younger women—reproductive rights, anti-violence in all its forms—but very seldom were young women allowed to speak for themselves.
The divide was both cataclysmic and catastrophic. “There’s not just a gap between men and women,” Hodge told me, echoing the gospel of modern-era feminism. “There’s a gap between people of color, people of different immigrant statuses, people of different ages. We want equality that isn’t just equality for middle-class, middle-aged, straight white women.” I don’t doubt that feminists of every generation feel the same way, but the mainstream movement has so far failed to put this new vision forward, front and center. And the longer it refuses to wholly, enthusiastically adopt the new generation’s commitment to intersectionality, the more it creates all sorts of schisms. Whether they are pushed out or left out, the casualties of the breaks are becoming clearer to me: the young girls and women feminism so desperately wants and needs.
With the exception of women whose mothers were feminists, the sweeping majority of young women I spoke to across Canada only discovered feminism in university. Some claimed to never have heard the term at all until then. “I didn’t know that word at all,” one twenty-five-year-old feminist named Emily Yakashiro told me. “It’s not because anybody prevented me from knowing it,” she added. The term just wasn’t used in her tiny, rural hometown. Once she started to volunteer at her university’s sexual assault support center, her activist life took off. After working in the anti-violence field for a few years, she entered the animation field, deciding she wanted to be at the forefront of crafting women’s portrayal in popular media. She also runs a website dedicated to dismantling sexism and racism in the fashion industry. None of it would have ever happened if she hadn’t wandered into the center one day on a break.
Suggesting the route to all feminism must be through institutionalized academia is dangerous, however. While we should never fear to introduce feminism into our hallowed halls, we must also recognize that relying on our universities to teach women feminism falls into the very classist, elitist structures that intersectionality and fourth-wave feminism want to topple. Not all young women have the financial means or inclination to attend post-secondary school. Other women might only conquer their fear of the f-word after they have their first real-world encounter with sexism and misogyny (what a fun rite of passage!). It’s a case of meeting people where they’re at. For some newbie feminists, Twitter and Tumblr, or even Beyoncé and Emma Watson, can be as effective teachers as, well, professional teachers. If feminism truly wants to grow, it has to reach not only a younger but also a wider audience. How to do it is a harder question to answer.
Consider one of the most successful youth recruiters of our time. Its followers and leaders tweet out more than ninety thousand snippets a day, extolling their lives and togetherness. It even has its own app. Pictures stream daily across Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr showing teen and twenty-something members scarfing down pizza, peacefully browsing through farmers markets, enjoying movie nights, riding Ferris wheels, and playing video games. The images are meant to reflect the strong bonds at work. Wannabe members not only know they’re welcomed, wanted, and needed but they know it will be fun to be there. The name of that movement? ISIS. Sure, it’s an extreme example of single-minded recruitment, but it’s also a stark reminder that feminism doesn’t want new members that blindly follow. It wants thinking ones.
We don’t need feminism as monolith, but we could all use a multipronged approach: more social media, more pop culture, more books, more Dr. Porters, and less fear, less stigma, less apathy. I worry that without all those things, those faced with an institution that isn’t doing very much to welcome them, speak to them, listen to them, or take them seriously at all will either leave the movement, stop caring, or never join to begin with. They’ll be the women and young girls who never had a chance to knock on feminism’s door. They won’t even know the door is there. Of course these women will believe feminism isn’t for them: that’s the message the movement itself is broadcasting.