White women, mothers of daughters, have stepped forward to justify predatory behavior by claiming “groping is no big deal.” They have marched and held signs defending both Trump and Kavanaugh. Amid reports about Kavanaugh’s temperament being unsuitable for the highest court in the land, stories that reflect a history of issues with self-control have been met with an almost cavalier lack of interest in the potential consequences of giving someone unfit so much power. In a response to stories about Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh getting into bar fights as an undergrad, prominent Canadian journalist and right-leaning centrist political pundit Jen Gerson argued on Twitter, “My position on bar fights: A relatively small number of men possess the temperamental bent to engage in a bar fight. These men can be problems. But you wouldn’t want to be stuck in a zombie apocalypse without such men. They are problems we are stuck with.”
It almost sounds like a logical response until you remember that we’re talking about the Supreme Court, not the apocalypse. And even if we were talking about a zombie apocalypse as a real possibility, you don’t want the hotheaded, short-tempered potential rapists with you for the apocalypse. At best they would be a danger to you; at worst they would use you to shield themselves. It’s the kind of no-win situation that can only be avoided by refusing to be a handmaiden of the patriarchy. Well, at least that wouldn’t be in my plans. Yet, here we are with women who benefit from mainstream feminism doing all the work of the patriarchy to undermine their own rights and freedoms.
Mainstream, white-centered feminism hasn’t just failed women of color, it has failed white women. It’s not making them any safer, any more powerful, or even any wiser. It supports the goals of white supremacy so often and so uncritically that 53 percent of white women voted not just for the idea of a president who has a legacy of disrespecting and abusing women, but for the system that supports him. Conditions aren’t getting better for white women; in fact these patterns reflect a return to a paradigm where the only difference is that their cage is gilded, while others are entrapped in less decorative confines.
It’s easy to say, “Well those weren’t feminists,” and pretend that feminism is something that is only accessible to liberals, but the reality is that we got to a government that debates the right to choose, the value of women in the workforce, and whether being a rapist is a reason to disqualify someone from the highest offices in the land because feminism empowers all women without really engaging with what that can mean for marginalized people. It’s bad enough that white women won’t even vote to protect themselves; what’s worse is that as a voting bloc they have enough power to harm others. Senator Susan Collins from Maine is a white woman who owes her position to the advances won by feminism. Yet, even though she’s pro-choice, she still opted to confirm Justice Kavanaugh, despite clear evidence that he is anti-choice.
Conservative feminists figure out reasons to justify why they deserve equality and safety at the expense of others. Professor Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women and The War Against Boys, routinely argues against policies that aid girls and women socially, while claiming to be a real feminist because she’s not interested in gender but in equity. Her idea of equity doesn’t include addressing the structural problems of sexism because now that she has succeeded in getting what she wants, she seems curiously unconcerned with the lives of other women who are not like her. When Karin Agness started the Network of Enlightened Women on college campuses in 2004, the stated goal was intellectual diversity, but in execution the focus has been on recognizing men’s “achievement” in being gentlemen on campus, victim blaming, and protesting performances of The Vagina Monologues. It’s not feminism for all women, just for those who think they can be safe inside a patriarchal white supremacist society. It requires no empathy, compassion, care, or concern, and yet it is still technically feminism. Conservative feminism enables some of the worst policy decisions under the guise of women protecting women.
Whether their justification is being against abortion or the misguided belief that the racism and sexism espoused by the GOP are harmless, they are happy to benefit from feminism and affirmative action while undermining the very concepts that gave them access to power. Ultimately any argument that they are somehow separate from mainstream white feminism ignores not only the numbers in terms of votes but also the ways that mainstream feminism will rush to bolster and defend them. When Alabama passed the most restrictive anti-choice legislation since Roe v. Wade was enacted, it was not white men who were responsible. State rep Terri Collins wrote the bill, and Governor Kay Ivey is ready to sign it. They’re conservative women who have been empowered by feminism to do harm.
When Megyn Kelly was being castigated by some of Trump’s supporters for daring to ask him about his misogynistic language toward women, there was a push to rally around her, to protect this new “brave feminist” voice. The fact that Kelly made her name by way of the most perplexing casual racism (sternly arguing that Santa Claus was white, for example) and other Fox News–friendly bigotry was suddenly swept away in a tide of one-way sisterhood. Kelly changed absolutely nothing about her politics, while she rode a moment of quasi-feminist behavior all the way to a better job with a broader reach. She promptly dropped any pretense of learning from her experiences with misogyny, then resumed her original pattern of supporting a white supremacist ideology that leaves no space for women who are not like her to achieve more than a limited measure of success. Ultimately it wasn’t her criticism of Trump that got her fired, nor was it any advocacy for the rights of women. Kelly’s career on daytime TV ended as it began: in racism. This time, though, it was an ardent defense of blackface mixed with plummeting ratings that took her off the air.
You can argue that conservative values are at odds with feminist ideology, but ultimately the question has to be not only “What women are we empowering?” but also “What are we empowering them to do?” White women aren’t just passive beneficiaries of racist oppression, they are active participants. White women have long been the bedrock of conservative ideology in America, from Phyllis Schlafly’s attacks on the Equal Rights Amendment to current antiabortion pushes. For white, mainstream feminism the arguments are further left politically, but still exclusionary.
Whether it is Abigail Fisher suing to undermine affirmative action or Sheryl Sandberg leaning into Facebook’s pandering to alt-right conspiracy theories, the reality is that white, mainstream feminism has to confront the idea that the power to do harm rests in women too. We can’t simply pretend that the politics that unfold around the impact of feminism aren’t informed by the greater world. Case in point, the recent proliferation of white women calling the police on Black and Brown people for reasons that run the gamut from eating lunch to being in a parking lot. Feminism has told these women they have a right to occupy every space, but it has not passed on the message that they don’t have a right to force everyone else to comply with their whims.
When everyone was celebrating how peaceful the Women’s March was and posting pictures of white women in pink pussy hats posing with cops, there was a seemingly sincere attitude of “See, this is how you do protests,” which was in stark contrast to the way Black Lives Matter protests have been met with cops in riot gear, dogs, and worse. Challenging the patriarchy too often stops at challenging the ways it is used against other women and their communities. Racism has permeated feminism to such an extent that even when white feminism should be making common cause against white supremacy, white feminists are instead being validated in their fear of people of color, especially Black people. Instead of questioning themselves or the narratives they’ve been taught, they fall back on the familiar. They have been taught that the police are there to protect, and they forget or outright ignore that while the police may rush to a white woman’s defense, for many women, the police and the state in general are a source of violence.