I was happy to see The Atlantic declare The Death of Millennial Feminism, because it’s long overdue. The occasion that marked the turning of the zeitgeist was Lindy West’s new book. Until Andi Zeisler’s piece at Salon, I hadn’t seen a single person try to defend it.
The Atlantic article is really good:
The reaction to the book has been fascinating, by which I mean that basically no one else believes West’s account of her polyamorous relationship either. This discourse has become so overwhelming that in a recent Substack post, West expressed annoyance and defensiveness that anyone would question the latest version of her story: “My life isn’t subject to public audit. I already gave you what I wanted to give you.”
This might be true, although I would say again that if you don’t want people picking over your personal life, avoid writing a memoir.
Nonetheless, I do feel great sympathy for West. How was she to know that the great omertà of Millennial Feminism—that we had to take whatever people said about their life stories at face value—had broken?
…This is why so many women who considered themselves left-wing—myself included—eventually parted ways with Millennial Feminism. At the beginning, the movement felt intoxicating and liberating, but it soon became clear that sticking with Millennial Feminism would have required submitting ourselves to a voluntary lobotomy. After all, Lindy West essentially did.
Imagine reading that and disagreeing. Andi Zeisler’s take is that “People really love to see feminists fail.” The self-lobotomy is evident from the very first sentence:
Of all the things I am absolutely certain I’d make a shambles of, writing a memoir and being one-third of a throuple are in the top five.
Polyamory was self-evidently stupid when we were in our 20s, too, and we’re old enough to have witnessed the stupidity firsthand. Keep in mind that Zeisler writes about having a son who’s on the verge of adulthood. Imagine your mom writes on the internet about how swinging is aspirational, with stars in her eyes.
Zeisler notes that she talked to at least one person who reacted to the book correctly, and then simply moves on:
What did you think? I texted a friend who had also just finished reading. Hours later, a response came through: “Lindy, blink twice if you need help.”
The internet of the 2010s was full of hilarious women, and West stood out…
I’m interested in how she tries to explain away the Atlantic article:
Lewis’ piece is nominally about Lindy West and “Adult Braces,” but it’s much more about the author’s longstanding beef with identity politics. Lewis isn’t wrong that West was both a catalyst for and a casualty of a time when “the personal is political” was misunderstood to mean that every personal choice should be politicized. But there’s a sneering edge to the glee with which she declares that Millennial feminism is dead (which it isn’t) — an echo of the directive given to Newsday reporter Marilyn Goldstein about reporting on the women’s movement in 1970 (“Get out there and find an authority who’ll say this is all a crock of sh*t.”), an eternal, recursive impulse to see feminists knocked down and put in their place.
She’s trying to subtly whine that Helen Lewis is a TERF, being fully committed to ALL the dead ends.
Lewis never mentions “the personal is the political” at all, actually. It’s Zeisler who’s mischaracterizing it. It means what it says.
Lewis cited the following as evidence for Millennial Feminism’s death:
Today, very few traces of it remain. Jezebel was sold off and closed. Tumblr has withered. The viral internet no longer reliably delivers traffic to epic takedowns of problematic figures, so hungry young freelancers have largely stopped pitching them. The publishing industry’s lust for jeremiads about “white feminism” is over. No one has used the word girlboss unironically in years. A key feminist legal precedent, Roe v. Wade, fell in part because Ruth Bader Ginsburg refused to retire, a fact that makes me wince every time I remember that one of the most-lauded books of Millennial Feminism was Irin Carmon’s Notorious RBG.
The link to “The Flytrap” was in the original Zeisler. It’s…reprints of old articles from Bitch Media, now defunct. Shameless.
Zeisler’s main tactic is to talk about how the death of feminism has been declared before: Gloria Steinem’s marriage, the end of Roe v Wade, etc. The vagueness of Rebecca Solnit as consolation:
As Rebecca Solnit wrote recently, two specious assumptions keep the funeral procession going: “One is that we’re at the end of the story, the point at which a verdict can be rendered and a moral extracted . . . if feminism has not won, surely it has lost.” The other presumes “that one event can be a weathervane, a measuring stick, for the failure of feminism . . . The perfect is the enemy of the good, and it’s often both an impossible standard and a cudgel used to bash in what good has been achieved.”
What even is time, amirite?
We must, in the end, trust Lindy West:
Oluo’s own PR offensive has only made West’s work more thankless, but her situation is not a referendum on feminism any more than it’s an indictment of polyamory (another institution whose implosion is often treated like a spectator sport. Unfortunately, what’s getting lost in all this noise is the fact that “Adult Braces” is” neither a book about polyamory nor a handbook for others to live by. If we want West’s next book to be written from the scar and not from the wound, we have to trust that she knows what will start the healing.
As if the expectation of non-hypocrisy is unreasonable.
What if feminism has in fact been dead since the libfems took over in the third wave?