2016 Was the Year the Feminist Bubble Burst

By Michelle Goldberg, Slate

01 January 17

ike many journalists who write about the intersections of gender and politics, I was asked to draft an essay in advance of election night about the meaning of Hillary Clinton’s expected victory. I felt a superstitious unease—despite the pollsters’ assurances, I had always been terrified about the outcome—but I banged something out. The piece, excruciating to read now, discussed the significance of Clinton running on an explicitly feminist platform and winning thanks to women’s votes. I wrote about her promise to assemble a half-female Cabinet. “Her victory is a sign that the gender hierarchy that has always been fundamental to our society—that has always been fundamental to most societies—is starting to collapse,” I wrote just before Nov. 8. “In America, men no longer rule.”

Obviously, I was very wrong. Instead of the year that the highest glass ceiling shattered, 2016 might go down as the year the feminist bubble burst. In America, men have always ruled, and right now I wonder if they always will.

For the last couple of years, feminism has been both ubiquitous and improbably glamorous, its pop culture currency symbolized by Beyoncé silhouetted before a giant glowing FEMINIST sign at the 2014 Video Music Awards. On television, women went from ornaments to protagonists, starring in a slew of raunchy comedies in which men were often afterthoughts. Feminist polemics became a staple of fashion magazines. Female college students demanded standards of sexual consent that were often unfathomable to their elders. In my little corner of Brooklyn, ambient feminism appeared to influence the way fashionable young women dressed. They wore oversized shirtdresses or loose wide-legged pants and chunky shoes, clothes for doing things rather than displaying oneself. Last year, the New York Times ran a trend piece about hip young women rejecting thongs in favor of comfortable underwear. Female masochism, it seemed, was falling out of style.

Young women rebelled against the small indignities that make even the most privileged female lives taxing. They defined condescending lectures from poorly informed men as mansplaining. They named the male entitlement to public space that leaves women on trains and airplanes hunched into corners: manspreading. Sometimes the new feminism flirted with triviality and absurdity, but even its silliest manifestations were evidence of a revolution of rising expectations. It was as if the war for parity was nearly won, and what was left was a mopping-up operation.

I never wore one of those T-shirts proclaiming “The Future is Female,” but I came close to believing it. Certainly, I’ve always known that many women don’t identify as feminists, and don’t see their interests as being bound up with those of womankind. But in 2016, the polls foretold a history-making gender gap. Donald Trump’s bombastic campaign seemed like the terminal stage of aggrieved American machismo rather than simply the terminal stage of America.

In the days before election, I kept returning to a 4,000-word essay by Christopher Caldwell that the Weekly Standard ran 20 years ago. Titled “The Feminization of America,” it was meant to be apocalyptic, but it gave me a giddy hope. “Women are now thought to have more in common with other women than they do with men of similar ethnicity, religion, or income level, their interests coinciding more with those of other women than with those of their own fathers and brothers and husbands and sons,” Caldwell wrote with palpable alarm. “Women now constitute a class -- a dominant class.” It wasn’t true in 1996, but in 2016 the world that Caldwell warned of was just visible on the horizon. It seemed significant that his piece both began and ended by griping about Hillary Clinton.

For 25 years, after all, Clinton was reviled as a synecdoche for unseemly female ambition. That’s part of what made her candidacy so fraught. If she’d become president, it would have been in the teeth of widespread male opposition; even the models that showed her winning had her losing the majority of men. She proposed policies that would have increased women’s power and autonomy at every level of society: equal pay, paid family leave, subsidized child care, abortion rights. For all her manifold faults, her election would have both signified progress toward gender equality and made more such progress possible. Before Nov. 8, it looked as if the arc of history was bending toward women.

Trump’s victory has obliterated this narrative. In many ways it was a fluke; had a few thousand votes in a few Rust Belt states gone another way, we’d be talking about Clinton’s popular vote landslide and the decisive defeat of Trumpian reaction. However freakishly contingent his triumph, it forecloses the future feminists imagined at least for a long while. We’re going be blown backward so far that this irredeemably shitty year may someday look like a lost feminist golden age. The very idea that women are equal citizens, that barriers to their full human flourishing should be identified and removed, is now up for grabs. A pastor warming up the crowd at a post-election Trump rally in Louisiana promised that with Trump in office, the White House would be a place “where men know who men are, women know who women are.” The massive power of the American state is about to be marshaled to put women in their place.

We might well lose Roe v. Wade in the next four years. Trump has said the issue would then go back to the states, but there’s no reason to think that Republicans would settle for anything less than a national ban. There is a particular insult at the thought of a sybarite like Trump, who still won’t say whether he’s ever paid for an abortion himself, imposing a regime of forced birth on American women. When and if Trump strips us of bodily autonomy, there won’t be any illusions that he’s doing it to protect life or the family or sexual morality. It will be because he has power, and women’s hopes and plans for their own lives don’t matter to him at all.

Controlling the course of our own lives is going to get harder in many different ways. We can say goodbye to Department of Education pressure on colleges to address campus rape. We can expect the end of federal aid for Planned Parenthood and of federal government action to promote equal pay and fight sexual harassment and pregnancy discrimination. The Women’s Bureau, the one department in the federal government tasked with responding to the needs of women in the workforce, will now fall under the aegis of former Carl’s Jr. honcho Andrew Puzder, whose company is known for commercials featuring near-naked women in orgasmic communion with sandwiches. “I like beautiful women eating burgers in bikinis,” he said. “I think it’s very American.” Like top Trump adviser Steve Bannon, Puzder has also been accused of assaulting his now-ex wife.

In Achieving Our Country, a 1998 book much discussed since Trump’s election, Richard Rorty discussed how culture would change after the ascension of an American strongman. “Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion,” he wrote, adding, “All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back.” This will likely prove prescient. Under an administration hostile to women’s equality and contemptuous of modern political norms, the way we live will slowly start to change.

With colleges no longer worried about federal action on campus rape, enforcement will loosen up, and college men will realize they can emulate the president of the United States with impunity. The same will happen in many workplaces. Trump will be able to appoint a new chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency where a woman would file a complaint if she’s fired for getting pregnant, or if her boss, say, grabs her by the pussy. As avenues of redress for sexual discrimination and harassment close off, men who’ve been stewing about political correctness will discover a pleasing new latitude in their relations with women. Women who’ve fallen out of the habit of survival flirting will relearn it.

It remains to be seen how the culture at large reacts to these changes. My nightmare is a particularly vicious reprise of the phenomenon Susan Faludi described in Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, which looked at the multifaceted assault on feminism during the Reagan years. Faludi analyzed how, as women lost ground politically in the 1980s, feminism itself was treated as the cause of their growing distress. A great many indicators of female advancement plunged during Reagan’s reign. Wrote Faludi: “Government and private surveys are showing that women’s already vast representation in the lowliest occupations is rising, their tiny presence in higher-paying trade and craft jobs stalled or backsliding, their minuscule representation in upper management posts stagnant or falling, and their pay dropping in the very occupations where they have made the most ‘progress.’ ”

Meanwhile, women were told over and over again, and sometimes came to believe, that they were unhappy because they’d put too much stock in equality. “Backlash-era conventional wisdom blames the women’s movement for American women’s ‘exhaustion,’ ” Faludi wrote. “The feminists have pushed forward too fast, backlash pundits say; they have brought too much change too soon and have worn women out.”*

If a new backlash comes, some women will embrace it. The uphill struggle for freedom and equality can be enervating. Many women find comfort and consolation in being provided for by a man—or in the dream of being provided for by a man—and are sick of feminists making them feel guilty. Others know how to negotiate the male power structure without challenging it, like Ivanka Trump. In a time of backlash, women will redouble their efforts to accommodate men, and the culture will celebrate their choice in making that accommodation. The backlash, wrote Faludi, “manipulates a system of rewards and punishments, elevating women who follow its rules, isolating those who don’t.”

People who are committed to gender equality will try to salvage what they can of the last 40 years of progress. They’ll try to maintain their morale, but living in total opposition to the zeitgeist is hard. In the defining drama of our time, a woman who was the most qualified person ever to run for president lost to a man who was the least. That can’t help but reverberate through the culture, changing our sense of what is possible for women. My abiding fear is that the idea of women running the world will start to seem like an innocent, dated dream, akin to communes, lesbian separatism, and spelling “women” as “womyn.” Someday I’ll tell my daughter about the time we all thought the future was female. I hope she doesn’t laugh at our naïveté.

What the Drug War Could Look Like Under President Trump

By Tessa Stuart, Rolling Stone

01 January 17

"With Trump in the White House and Sessions in the Justice Department ... it's hard to be optimistic," says Drug Policy Alliance head

or marijuana legalization advocates, election night brought a lot of good news: Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada and California all legalized the drug for recreational purposes, plus voters approved medical marijuana measures in Florida, Arkansas and North Dakota and relaxed restrictions on a medical pot law already in effect in Montana. Arizona was the only state to vote down a marijuana initiative, and it was defeated by a relatively slim margin.

The spate of victories was the cherry on top of several years of progress on issues like sentencing reform, civil asset forfeiture reform, clemency and harm-reduction.

"We've been working for years or decades on all these reforms. And we're finally feeling, especially these last two or three years of the Obama administration, that oh my God, things are actually moving forward," says Ethan Nadelmann, who founded the Drug Policy Alliance in 2000 and one of the foremost experts on drug policy efforts underway around the country.

The one major curveball of the evening was, of course, Donald Trump winning the presidency. "Hillary looked like she was going to be a continuation of the Obama policies on the stuff that we work on," Nadelmann tells Rolling Stone. So what will happen to the movement with Trump and his administration in power?

Just how devastating President Trump will be for the drug policy reform community was a subject of some debate in the days immediately following his surprise win. On the rare occasion Trump has addressed the issue, he's expressed support for medical marijuana and, on the issue of legalization more broadly, he's said he thinks "we should leave it up to the states."

"Twenty-odd years ago, when he was asked what he thought, he said we should legalize all drugs," Nadelmann says. "We know that, personally, he appears to be a teetotaler. He doesn't even drink, and may never have even used marijuana. On the other hand, he's obviously operated in New York, or he's been in the entertainment world to some extent, so he has to be comfortable around people who have used drugs recreationally. He does have a personal experience, as Bill Clinton did, with a sibling who has struggled with drug addiction."

But the people Trump almost immediately started installing around himself inspire far less optimism.

A "Drug War Dinosaur" at the Justice Department

First there was Trump's inauguration committee, which included two names familiar to legalization advocates: Sheldon Adelson and Mel Sembler, two of the biggest donors to campaigns to block medical marijuana and marijuana legalization, according to Nadelmann.

The news that Trump intended to nominate Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions for attorney general broke a few day later. "Sessions' nomination has definitely put a scare into both the marijuana reform community and the marijuana industry – at least the small percentage who are politically conscious and aware," Nadelmann says. Arguably only Rudy Giuliani would be a worse choice from the perspective of groups working to advance sensible drug policy, which in addition to DPA include the Marijuana Policy Project and National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

Sessions famously said in the Eighties that he thought the KKK "were OK until I found out they smoked pot," and his legislative record bore out that contempt for drugs and drug users. "Given what a hard-liner and how terrible he has been on so many [issues] – marijuana, certainly, but [also] sentencing reform, forfeiture reform, a whole league of other issues we work on – [Sessions] just looks terrible" for AG, Nadelmann says. "Almost the only good thing we can track down that he did was when he helped with the crack powder citizen reform in Congress back in 2010." 

Having an attorney general who is generally hostile to drug policy reform can have a huge, if indirect, impact across the country. The nation's chief law enforcement officer has wide latitude to influence policy through appointments to a range of jobs they help oversee. They're in charge of selecting the head of the DOJ's criminal division, have a say in who will be made a U.S. attorney and help choose federal judges.

"If you're appointing a whole lot of highly aggressive right-wing prosecutors as U.S. attorneys, that means you're significantly increasing the possibility that these guys are going to be much more aggressive," Nadelmann says. "It also means that Sessions can reject the Cole Memorandum – the August 2013 memorandum which gave Colorado and Washington a qualified green light to proceed. Or they could even keep the memorandum in place, but begin to interpret it very, very strictly."

Rolling Back Progress in Congress

On November 8th, Republicans also managed to hang on to their control over the Senate. Coupled with a Sessions Justice Department, that majority will probably thwart incremental progress in Congress on legislation like the CARERS Act (which would resolve issues preventing legal marijuana businesses from filing taxes and using the banking system), the Rohrabacher Amendment (which prohibits the Justice Department from spending any money to go after medical marijuana in the states where it is legal), and the McClintock Bill (which would do the same, but for any states that have passed legalization).

The CARERS Act is already stalled in Congress, and though the McClintock Bill got surprisingly close to passing, Nadelmann says the outlook is not good for it or the Rohrabacher Amendment. "If that's not renewed, that's going to put a real scare into the marijuana policy reform community," he says.

"With Trump in the White House and Sessions in the Justice Department, I think it's hard to be optimistic," Nadelmann says. "The chances of positive marijuana reform legislation coming out and becoming law has diminished at this point."

Smarting for a Confirmation Fight

Sessions still needs to be confirmed, of course, and groups like the Drug Policy Alliance are gearing up for a fight. "We're going to do everything possible to block his nomination," Nadelmann says. But the group doesn't have a lot of reason to be optimistic it will prevail. "We know it's going to be tough because there are key people like Rand Paul, or [Jeff] Flake in Arizona, or [Susan] Collins in Maine, who [one would think] would be put off by some of this highly aggressive stuff [but who] have already indicated that they're going to vote for Sessions – in part out of the tradition of senatorial courtesy, in part because Sessions is generally liked by his colleagues."

If they can't block his nomination, groups like Nadelmann's will at least try to "extract some assurances about what he will or won't do as attorney general" during the confirmation process. 

Even if they succeed at defeating Sessions – he was rejected by the Senate once before, after all – he’s just one of several Trump appointees who could cause problems for the drug policy reform movement.

Questions About the Cabinet 

The prospect of Tom Price heading the Department of Health and Human Services, for instance, is troubling because he's voted against virtually every drug policy reform bill out there, including medical marijuana provisions supported by other Republicans, says Nadelmann. HHS has oversight of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration – "the ones who have ultimately some say over funding of research in this area."

For drug czar, several dispiriting names have been put forward, including Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who dropped an investigation into Trump University after she accepted a $25,000 campaign donation from Trump. "That would be pretty bad, given the position she's taken [and] the role she's played as AG in Florida," says Nadelmann. "Some of the other names who've been bandied about have also looked pretty bad."

The contrast will be stark when Trump's selection is compared with the current czar, Michael Botticelli, who, Nadelmann says, "in the last couple years has been dramatically better than any of his predecessors on a whole range of issues, including being openly supportive of harm reduction, needle exchange, overdose prevention, holding drug courts accountable to public health standards, a range of his rhetoric.

"But we now have the possibility that Trump could go back to the old days of having a Drug War rhetoritician in that job," he says. 

Even in agencies you wouldn't imagine would have much impact – Housing and Urban Development, for example – a hostility toward evidence-based drug policy could create real problems. "How they handle the issue of drugs in federally funded housing becomes an issue, so that's another place where the federal government could either be helpful ... or aggressively harmful," Nadelmann says.

Holding Ground at the State Level

Even if the federal outlook is relatively grim, reform advocates could continue to see progress at the state level, especially in Democratic enclaves like New York, New Jersey, New Mexico, Colorado, California and Washington, D.C., Nadelmann says. "Sentencing reform, bail reform, parole reform, decriminalization of marijuana, to some extent civil asset forfeiture reform, how you allocate funding between treatment and prevention versus law enforcement, some big chuck of harm reduction funding, from needle exchange to overdose prevention: a lot of that stuff can continue to move forward and will continue to move forward."

What will get really dicey is when state and federal policy are at odds with one another. "That's really where the federal government can mess up things at the state level. And I think that especially plays out on the issue of the legal regulation of medical marijuana," Nadelmann says. "And that's going to be a very complicated issue."

All that said, Nadelmann thinks the legal marijuana industry is a genie that can't be completely forced back into the bottle. "The fact that this [industry] is already producing tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of legal tax-paying jobs, the fact that it's now a legal industry worth many billions of dollars, the fact that it's already bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue for state governments – all of those are rational reasons for why a Trump administration should have a fairly hands-off approach. But that assumes that they're willing to let rational considerations trump the old Drug War rhetoric."

One glimmer of hope for legalization advocates comes straight from Trump's inner circle: Some hope Peter Thiel, Trump's outspoken ally in Silicon Valley, could influence the incoming president's thinking in a positive way. Thiel’s Founders Fund has invested millions in Privateer, one of the biggest players in the legal marijuana market. And, according to Nadelmann, Thiel isn't the only one who has both Trump's ear and an interest in protecting the legal marijuana market.

"When I look around the country and see the number of people investing in the marijuana industry who have high-level Republican connections ... it means that even though marijuana reform has been disproportionately advanced and pushed by Democrats, and even though Democrats are much more likely to vote in favor than Republicans, the fact of the matter is that you have a significant and growing minority of Republicans who are supportive of marijuana legalization," Nadelman says. "And also quite a growing number of individuals who are invested in the industry."