Further Thoughts On the Sisterhood

As we gear up for the 2020 election, I was re-reading some of the stuff I wrote in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, particularly my Election 2016 Fallout series.

Here's me, on white women's complicity, two years ago:

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This loss is largely on white people, who disproportionately supported Trump while minority groups rejected him. We also saw white women voting against their own interests for a racist misogynist candidate.

Despite that, I also refuse to demonize white women more than white men.

I mean, really, the pieces that instantly came out about white women "selling out the sisterhood"? Yeah, they did. And people are surprised by this why, again? Oh, right, because nobody fucking listens to feminists, that's why. EVEN THOUGH it's the sad lesson from The Handmaid's Tale (1985): The very worst, most patriarchal, racist dystopia would not exist without the complicity of privileged classes of women.

Men alone cannot make racism and sexism "work." It is always a tangled knot. Forgive the circularity here, but many women hate women because women are hated. White women have a long history of benefiting via their kinship and marriages to racist, misogynist white men. It pays to be a cool non-feminist girl, for a time anyway. ("Trump can grab my pussy," boasted one Trump supporter, who both completely misunderstands the consent element of things and perhaps thinks her offering will insulate her from even worse misogyny than what she sees around her, inflicted on "other" women).

And this sweet, fresh hell in The Nation? In it, the author argues that white working class women in particular rejected Clinton because Clinton spent too much time cozying up to Lena Dunham and Big Feminism, whatever the fuck that is, when she should have been promoting:

"...[A] robust economic agenda focused on women’s needs: a $15 minimum wage, universal child care and pre-K, paid family leave, free college, and tough laws that crack down on wage theft and guarantee fair scheduling and equal pay for women."

You know, the very policies Clinton supported, to varying degrees, had anyone in the media stopped talking about her emails for 10,000 straight days and actually fucking covered them.

Sure, everyone has their theories about whose fault this is.

What seems clear is that white men are almost completely being given up on as people who can contribute to the electorate as anything other than angry beings who must be coddled and centered lest they elect nightmare authoritarians to make life hell for everyone else.

Example: An actual think piece in The New York Times, which I won't link to but is titled "The End of Identity Liberalism," sneers at the "failure" of liberalism's "narcissistic" "identity politics." Here's my summary of this piece and the dozens like them I've seen: As Trump fills his cabinet with KKK-supported white guys, white guys everywhere think liberalism has failed them because liberals talk too much about race and gender.

And so, the twin narratives about white people are that we ought to empathize with white male feelings of aggrievement while being disgusted at white female complicity. That, my friends, is just another fucked-up misogynistic fallout from this shit-show of an election that I refuse to indulge.

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My addition to this piece, now two years later is about The Women's March, which I was initially very excited about as a movement to channel women's anger and feminist resurgence.

Many of the women who marched, in my experience, were angry and somewhat-traumatized by the election of Trump and the misogyny we watched Hillary Clinton endure during the race. Relatedly, Trump's election is a symbol of white male supremacy, and very specifically female subordination, in the United States.

I had long known that prominent national leaders of The Women's March had supported Bernie Sanders and seemed to, I'll just say, not be fans of Hillary Clinton. They excluded specific reference to Hillary Clinton's historic run in communications about the March, which always seemed like a major disconnect from the rage and pain many women were feeling very specifically about how the mainstream media and Hillary's competitors treated her.

I have always wondered why seemingly anti-Hillary folks were chosen as leaders of a movement that was largely catalyzed by Hillary Clinton, and had been uneasy about it, but staying united against the Trump regime has always struck me as more important than letting that bother me too much 

A little over a year ago, I wrote of some of the intra-feminist conflicts within The Women's March, and specifically the decision some on the national team then made to invite Bernie Sanders to speak at the Women's Convention in Detroit in 2017, with some of their initial communications suggesting a sort of center-stage role for Bernie at this women's event. To me, it seemed like a decision that simply didn't think very highly of a not insignificant number of Women's March supporters - and the resulting criticism bore that out. For the leaders to virtually ignore, and thereby diminish, the historic nature of Clinton's run while continually lauding one of her white male opponents was bound to alienate many women.

Now, I think the best I can say is that I'm not even sure how relevant the national leaders are to the numerous local Women's March groups or the many women doing progressive, feminist work across the country, in their communities, and on social media.

From reports I've been reading, I think some factions of the left at best have very strange, gaslighting definitions of intersectionality that posit that only certain forms of identity-based oppression are valid for progressives to focus on at the moment and that if a person isn't that identity then they are a political neophyte, and an all-around shit person, who has nothing to contribute to the movement.

Somewhere around half of the white women who voted in 2016 voted for Trump and the left has been in a moral panic about it ever since. That statistic is also now used to treat white women as a monolithically-privileged class of conservative monsters, regardless of whether we're progressive and/or also poor, queer, trans, old, fat, disabled, or non-Christian. White privilege is real, even for women. And, many people have simply given up on trying to adeptly talk about people who have white privilege while also being oppressed along other axes of identity.

White Feminist used to mean a non-intersectional feminist, but it has quickly come to mean "any women who is white and has an opinion about something," such that now progressive white women are in the same category of "feminist" as Ann Coulter, which you'd think would render the whole fucking concept null and void among any person with a rational thought in their brain but here we are. And, even many progressive feminists have internalized this thinking.

It must be an MRA's dream come true.

In many ways, I have felt very disconnected from politics on the left, right, and center for the past couple of years, with a few exceptions. All of this is part of the backlash. Women have so many pressures to "forever cancel" other, flawed women, when men rarely do the same to each other.

Every generation of women will have to endure this, I believe, as the reasons women are given to hate themselves and each other, including and especially the "progressive social justice" reasons, continue to adapt to every gain feminists make.