Kamala Harris’ campaign for president is in many ways one of the most feminist campaigns in history. Just don’t mention the f word.
Harris has avoided talking about her status as a possible first female president, rarely embracing the feminist label. It’s a marked departure from the suffragette-white pantsuit symbolism of Hillary Clinton’s own historic 2016 campaign. At this summer’s Democratic National Convention, Clinton had only one speech Clinton focused on Harris’ trailblazing place in history, citing the central metaphor of her failed bid: that stubbornly unbreakable glass ceiling.
At the same time, Harris championed undeniably feminist policy goals. He is kept reproductive freedom The centerpiece of his campaign, he was the first vice president to be nominated See an abortion provider (no presenting president has ever been), and advocated for Child care policies as a key component His economic message.
As much as she doesn’t want to talk about it, it’s hard for Harris to avoid is First woman of color and second woman to be nominated by a major party. Harris may not be embracing a label of feminism, but if we define feminism as seeking political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes, then her candidacy fits the bill by its very existence.
Political observers read Harris’s writings A decision not to lean on her race and gender identity As wise, she went all-in on feminism, mostly because of the trauma of what happened to Clinton. But it also speaks to the place feminism, as a movement and an ideology, holds in popular culture in 2024 — a very different place from the one it enjoyed in 2016.
Feminist policies are still popular. People love abortion rights. They like the idea Child care reform. But feminism as a label is far less galvanizing. Instead, it seems to be in the odd position of appearing too dull, uncompromising and moderate to be of interest to the left and too dangerous and radical to be embraced by the right. Its repositioning can best be understood as a feminist shift: it feels different now than it did last time.
Girlboss has been cancelled. Pantsuit Nation shuts itself down Last March and then Resurrected himself in July with support from HarrisBut it is no longer the spiritual home of a presidential candidate’s most ardent fans. The iconic pussy hat was previously sworn by in 2019 Too racist and transphobic to be truly feminist.
There is a sense that feminism is no less necessary for mainstream Democrats now than it was a few election cycles ago. This may be partly a response to the hard-fought Democratic primaries of 2016 and 2020, when the left argued bitterly about whether women were voting against Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton (in 2016) or Elizabeth Warren (in 2020).Voting with their vaginas“
In some of Sanders’ statements most vocal And inflammatory Supporters in that primary, wanting a woman to be president became intellectually unusual, insufficiently progressive, a little gauche, a little cold. It means you are prioritizing gender solidarity over class solidarity.
It focuses on how meaningless the symbolism of a female president is and how silly it can be for women to care about it
Sanders himself sometimes appears to echo this sentiment in a milder form. “It’s not good enough for someone to say, ‘I’m a woman, vote for me.'” He said in 2016. In 2020, Warren said she told him a woman could not win the presidency (Sanders denied this).
Sanders didn’t even win the primary, but the recurring debate each election cycle helped create and standardize a mocking talking point that’s still popular today. It focuses on how meaningless the symbolism of a female president is and how silly it can be for women to care about it. You can see this strain of attack rear its head when Harris’ detractors say that in his ambiguous position on Gaza, he simply Gaslight Gatekeep Girlboss MassacreA tug that poked at his cock. Why worry about representation and identity politics, the thinking goes, when you should be focusing on policy.
To the center-right, the problem with feminism is not that it is too centrist but that it is too extremist and alienating. It remains the subtext of the central one The difference between Republicans and Democrats This selection, despite the change in vibe. Democrats overwhelmingly favor gender equality and Republicans want more traditional gender hierarchies.
This difference provides a possible explanation for the much-discussed political gender division Gen Z men and women. Post me too, young women seem to be breaking to the left while young men are either sticking with the trends of previous generations or leaning right. (The information here is, it should be noted, quite inconsistent.)
The Survey Center on American Life, a polling agency run by the right-wing American Enterprise think tank, found that while young men and women held similar political views for most of the past two decades, in 2021, 44 percent of young women identified as liberal, while only 25 percent of young men did the same. Moreover, In a 2023 survey, 43 percent of Gen Z were men said millennials generally consider themselves feminists, compared to 52 percent of men.
Not all Gen Z men are turning right. Yet feminism provides a convenient scapegoat for those who are. Gen Z men feel that rapidly changing gender roles have left them behind socially and economically,” The New York Times reported in August“And see former President Donald J. Trump as a champion of traditional masculinity.”
Daniel A., director of the American Enterprise Institute’s American Life Survey Center. Cox wrote, “for growing numbers” of young people. In an article for Business Insider“Feminism has less to do with promoting gender equality and more to do with simply attacking men.” Cox argues that as young people see their educational, professional lives and mental health outcomes slip off the statistical cliff, they increasingly resent the political solidarity their peers see in feminism. “Out of a sense of heightened insecurity, more young men are adopting a zero-equality view of gender equality,” Cox wrote “If women gain, men inevitably lose.”
Properly positioned as a safe haven for these men alienated by feminism, Democrats face the question of whether feminism is a liability if they lose their potential young voters. “If the Democrats are the ‘women’s party,’ as one party strategist claims, it’s not surprising that men are looking the other way,” A recent article in Politico stated.
The rightward turn of the youth and the infatuation of the left and liberals play a role here. But to be honest, I think the biggest contributor to feminism’s demise isn’t politics as much as pop culture. The hype cycle that feminism is going through right now feels all too familiar to me as a feminist writer who covers women in pop culture. Every rising female star has the same experience: first she’s loved, and then she’s overhyped and overexposed.
After the regressive misogyny of the Bush era, feminism began to rise as the country embraced Barack Obama. In the early 2010s, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift alike declared themselves feminists, and mainstream new direct-to-consumer corporations adopted feminist mission statements as quickly as they adopted flashy sans-serif millennial pink logos. After the dual trauma of Trump’s election and the explosion of Me Too, feminism came into focus as one of the nation’s central concerns. It seemed important and serious and important because it was. It was already commodified, and so about to get more.
The pussy hat was the most depicted feminist icon of the year. After its arrival in 2017, it was displayed Runway show, Magazine coverand short-lived Will and Grace Revival (Grace uses her to hide candy in the movie). Every time it was shown, it seemed to lose a little more edge.
Our decade of corporate-friendly, simple, mainstream feminism was very, very popular in ways that served big corporations and electoral politics salesmen alike.
The same thing happened over and over again with all the popular feminist products and archetypes of those years. Hollywood has released dozens of pop culture revivals and Reboot And the sequels that tried to justify their existence through their feminism and then they weren’t very good. Famous girlfriends have become scammers and bullies.
We had a decade of corporate-friendly, simple, mainstream feminism in a very, very popular way that worked for big corporation salespeople and electoral politics alike. It got distorted and then it got boring. Now it is out of fashion.
The good news is that what’s going out of fashion is just the decades-old symbol of feminism, not its substance. Reproductive freedom is incredibly politically popular. The past decade of mainstream feminism has left the movement with dozens of powerful activists and networks ready to mobilize.
A woman is running for president and has decent odds of doing so. She just thinks the chances of becoming the first female president are good as long as she doesn’t talk about it.
On the other hand, if Harris loses after being so careful about the f-word and all the baggage that comes with it; If we found out that America would rather re-elect the man who overthrew Ro And finding a perfectly capable woman criminally liable for sexual harassment, no matter how beautifully she identifies as a feminist, rather than being granted office — well, if that’s the case, we’d learn a lot about what this country is really thinking. Women and their project of political and social equality.
