The Ongoing Feminist Fight w/ Rebecca Traister

the Golden Globe. After all we've been through. We deserve an orgasm. Cis I deserve? Welcome to Go ask Allie. I'm Alli Wentworth and this season I'm digging into everything I can get my hands on, peeling back the layers and getting dirty. And on this episode, I'm talking about what it means to be a feminist, how to be a feminist, and certainly how to raise our girls to

be empowered. I grew up with a pretty feminist mother, and I remember were in six to celebrate the bicentennial, my mother put together an exhibit called Remember the Ladies, and it was so impactful to me because It was about all the wives of the founding fathers and how the women we're behind the scenes and the strength of everything that was accomplished. For example, Abiail Adams wrote almost all of John Adams speeches, But of course the women

were never recognized. But this exhibit, which went around all over the country, was the first time I kind of woke up and thought, Wow, you know, women don't get their recognition that they deserve. And I have the news on behind me which is showing everything that's going on

with Roe versus Wade Mississippi. I have friends crying their eyes out, and I'm sitting here wondering, certainly how my mother charted these waters, but also my two young daughters, who are going to enter this world as strong females, and how are they going to navigate everything that we're experiencing right now. So this couldn't be a more perfect guest.

Rebecca Treyster is an award winning author and opinion writer covering women in politics, media, and entertainment from a feminist perspective. She's the author of the New York Times bestselling books Good and Mad, All the Single Ladies, and the award winning Big Girls Don't cry. She appears as a political commentator on MSNBC and has been featured on the Daily Show, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Full Frontal with Samantha

b In Real Time with Bill Maher. All right, Rebecca tray Star, I'm just going to start by saying that this is a big day. We're not going to get into it, I think until the very end. But with Roe versus Wade is historic moment right now. And so there's no better guests to have on today to talk about feminism than you and how to be a feminist now? And I do want to start very quickly with one of your books. You had an Alice Walker poem which is one of my favorites, which is the feminine is

not dead, nor is she sleeping? Angry, yes, seething, yes, biding her time? Yes, Yes, I love that. So I wanted to start with that. It is this beautiful poem. Oh my god, I love her. I love her. Alright, So here we are. I'm going to ask you sort of a big broad question, which is, and this is really a personal question, how can I be a feminist now? Oh? You start on the place as hardest for me to answer. It's It's very interesting because so much of the work

that I do is analysis, not prescription. But what I find over and over again is that what people want is prescription. Right. I actually really understand this hunger because I feel it too to know what choice is to make. And there are a couple of things that I would say when it comes to these sort of questions about

what to do right now. But the sort of biggest prescriptive thing that I can say is that a lot of contemporary feminism, especially as it is been embodied and expressed, especially by a lot of the middle class white women, has so often been about expression. Right. This is like how do I raise my voice? How do I use

my voice? Right? And increasingly over the years that I've been writing about feminism and political and ideological engagement in the project of making the country a more just place for more people, what I've come to understand that, especially for those of us who come to this conversation with degrees of power, so much of what we need to do moving forward is not about our own expression but

about our own reception. Right. So that means listening, but not in that kind of like listen to others, like actual active listening. Looking around us, not just to our own experiences, though our own experiences often offer us guides and entry points to these conversations, right, I don't want to diminish our own experience as a way that many of us have come to these conversations. But like, it's not necessarily about us, like it's about a lot of people.

It's about working as part of a coalition. So what do you have to do to be part of a coalition?

The most important thing that those who are coming to a conversation about power imbalances, and who are coming to that conversation on behalf of people who are at the margins of power, is to understand that in order to make progress from the margins, you have to be part of a coalition, right, And being a part of a coalition means not just expressing, but receiving and working in tandem with other people, which means listening, learning about the

history you don't know, learning about the people that you don't know, learning about the stories that you don't know. When you talk about coalition building, you're talking about sort of building a coalition with other people that have experienced being on the lesser side of power. So it's not just about being a woman. It could it's about being black in our country, it's about being any kind of

marginalized group in our country. Right. So, in terms of this question of what does it mean to be in coalition with other people, that can take a million different forms, right, there's also this sense that the only form of protest is like what we have been told is, you know, like marching, right, but in fact being in coalition with others and the beginning steps of organizing, whether that means

politically or professionally. Sometimes the entry points are our own frustrations or sometimes it's initially seeing someone else's frustrations or inequity or injustice. But you know, it could mean you feel that there is some form of just injustice at your workplace that you're experiencing, or that a colleague is experiencing, and there's actually peril and you directly confronting a boss about it, right, the peril of job loss, of retaliation, whatever.

And so a coalition can involve reaching out to and listening to other colleagues who may be experiencing similar frustrations or related different but related frush strations based on power imbalances or things that are dysfunctional at their office, and maybe that leads to some broader like labor organizing, right, like a unionizing effort, or maybe it's simply finding a network of support and community to come up with strategies within your workplace to find a way to address the

inequities that provides the safety of numbers. Right. And of course we have the more you know, traditional ones going to meetings in your neighborhood, getting involved in terms of community activism, local politics something that we've seen a lot of people get into, especially and unfortunately only after the election, where you suddenly had people who had been totally uninterested in politics until then suddenly like and this is a

good thing, right, suddenly realizing that their town had a sheriff, right, and that people had died in their local jails, and that things that they didn't even know even though it was happening down the street from them. That came from being in coalition with other people who had been active in a week to these things and on the ground for years, and it was that's part of listening within a coalition is finding yourself shoulder to shoulder with people

and listening to what they have to tell you. Well, as indicative of when Trump was in power, and when you think about when we were all in lockdown, the movements that started to really get traction, like Black Lives Matter, there was a lot of activism happening at the same time. I mean, I feel like people built upon a coalition in the past couple of years. Would you agree with that?

I do, Although I want to point out that there were lots of people, um who were unsurprised by the levels of racism and misogyny and sort of corporate manipulation of power structures that were evidence made manifest by the election of Donald Trump. Right, there were millions of people who have been doing this work for their entire lives.

It's really like people whose daily existences had not yet felt an impact from those realities, who were surprised to learn these things and then did exactly this, like started to do some work. Right, We're like, oh, I want to I want to march. I want to get out there and show how angry I am. And there's there's a lot to be said about the Women's March and and the impact that it had both in its initial

forum and then it's next year and on. But one of the really important things about that is that it was taken over and run by activists who had been very engaged in a lot of fights, and not necessarily fights around gender inequity, right, And they insisted on the form that that massive protest took, which was a historic like at that time, the biggest single day protest in the history of the United States, and of course it spanned the globe, and the organizers insisted that the people

who were coming there as new to a fight, we're going to be standing their shoulder to shoulder and hearing about whether they chose to absorb it and to listen or not, right from people who had been in fights for more liberty and more dignity for more people over decades when a lot of the new people had not

been attention. And so then once you got this new population of population that also has access to a lot more power resources engaged, there was listening from coalition at least to some degree, and there was learning about systemic racism. These are the years in which we have revised views of American history, coming not just around questions of gender inequity, which we have around me too, but also the sixteen

nineteen Project published initially in The New York Times. Tonahuse Coates's work in the Atlantic about reparations the view of how these forces didn't just erupt in the past five years. Trump was a symptom of forces that have shaped this country since before its official inception. Right, and the people that have been fighting for decades were not surprised at all by this. Right, it was everybody else that was

catching up. I want to go back a little bit to Hillary because for somebody on the sidelines watching that election, I was mortified, first of all by how she was treated, but by how it was allowed, you know, weaponizing of words. I still get upset when I think about it, how the threat of a female president and the rage. It was like a tidal wave of for me, of fear, and nobody was sort of speaking up and saying, you

can't treat this woman like this. You can't say hang her or shoot her or all the kinds of things that were being said at the time. And it kind of happened and then it went away. So it comes as a surprise to a lot of people, not just you, that they say hang her and she should be taken out and shot, and that there are parades as I saw in my you know, a town where I spent a lot of time of like Hillary in a in a coffin on the fourth of July, just violent imagery.

And then this sort of sexualized detigration of Hillary. It comes as a real shock, like a bracing shock. And yet the thing that's invisible that we don't think about is actually, we've never had a email president before. Why, right,

So the inverse is invisible. Right. So it's like we think, we tell ourselves stories all the time about being in a post feminist world in which the very fact that Hillary Clinton can exist means that, you know, whatever stupid phrase about women can have it all is, you know, is being tossed around. And yet if you actually look at the history of who's been president in the United States, that list is entirely white men minus one and all men.

And yet we're surprised when the fact that there's an attempt by one to become president, of legitimate attempt, and in fact, she wins more votes than her opponent, and she has greeted with that level of rage. If that level of rage and hatred and denigration didn't exist, we would have had a lot more women running our political systems.

We don't. But even when you look at the female senators in congresswomen and the amount of stuff that they've gotten done, the stuff that a lot of women in political positions have pushed through is enormous, And yet we don't look at that at all. We don't look at

their success as something that could be a national success. Right. Well, I think it's more that so much of this country is built around a normalizing and imagining a full humanity of one kind of person, and it still is a is a white male, straight, this probably wealthy ish person, right, And like that's and that applies in every facet of our lives, like the you know, the books that we read.

That doesn't mean that we're not completely surrounded all the time by like brilliant, inspiring, sometimes high achieving, sometimes very powerful people who are not white men. Right. There's a difference between their being exceptions, even tons of exceptions, millions of exceptions, and they're being still attitudes that are baked

into how we are raised from birth. What is broadcast to us on television and on the internet and in our conversations and at bars and you know, over our dinner tables about who we have been taught can be a full human being, and who we are taught naturally has power in this country. And whenever there is a challenge to those baked in assumptions, people react really aggressively in ways that still managed to surprise us. And yet

we're absorbing all those lessons every day ourselves. You know, yes, and it's time for a short break. Okay, let's get back to it. So let me ask you a question. It's it's and you're in Maine and you're watching the Anita Hill trial. Was that like the big pivotal moment that quote unquote got you angry, that got you sort of involved taking this road as opposed to being a makeup influencer. I was never going to be a makeup in those you don't know, Rebecca, but I'm saying that

was the moment. In retrospect, I would say that was a moment of shifted consciousness for me. Um I have written about this story. My My mother was raised on a potato farm in northern rural Maine in a very right wing family, and I was up there is very close to my grandparents, and I was in high school and I was up on that fall weekend in October making apple cider at my grandparents farm, and the Anita Hill hearings were on, and they were very Republican and

they despised her. My parents were, um, you know, my my dad came from a family of like Jewish socialists from the Bronx, and my mother's politics had shifted when she was in college, and so I'd grown up in a left leaning household. But it's not like I was at the barricades kid at all. I had. I thought about these issues. I cared about politics, but I was not an activist high school student or anything like that. And I was sitting at that table watching those hearings.

And it would be totally dishonest for me to tell a version of that story where after that then I went out and got involved in activism. That absolutely did not happen. It is, however, the moment that I mean, I know the impact that it had on my brain and my sensibilities because I remember every second of it

with such clarity. I feel like those hearings carved my brain right in a way that I didn't That didn't immediately change my behavior, you know, but it made it made visible to me some of this stuff that we're

talking about that's just invisible. Had I ever really thought prior to that about the fact that a Senate Judiciary committee that was going to decide who sits on the Supreme Court was made up entirely of white men, at least one of whom, who is the great left wing hero of my youth, Ted Kennedy couldn't open his mouth because he himself had such a fucked up history and because his his nephew was at that point on trial for rape and Florida like okay, and I lived every

day in this country, and I did care about politics.

I read the newspaper. Wasn't that I was disengaged. And then those hearings, it was the beginning of like, how I now under stand the world, which provides clarity for me as just a constant, interlocking power structure, right, And those hearings made absolutely clear to me for the first time in a way that would leader absolutely shape my thinking as I began to write about this professionally, how power worked around gender and race and so that's how

it galvanized me. But it's not like, oh, I watched those hearings and then I went out and changed my life. That was not the case. You didn't paint a sign, right up, I did. I certainly did not. It's it's interesting you say that because I have two teenage daughters, and we were watching the kaban Off hearing together and I saw my at the time sixteen year old daughter get enraged and furious and asking George and I all kinds of questions about how how is this okay? And

how is he still there? You know? And I feel like you get re angered when you have kids that start seeing the world the way you did a while ago, and you talk about this a lot. It's sometimes it's a lens through righteousness and how do we fix it? And then there's like an overload fatigue, which I feel that a lot of women are feeling now, which is like I can't it's too much, it's too much, and we have a pandemic and Trump might be president again. I'm taking to my bed and I'm taking exam act well.

So there's there's things to fear from wins and losses, especially for the newly engaged, right because with losses, and I've been thinking about this this week, as you know, it seems, I mean, we won't know but like, very very likely that row will be overturned. This session, which I spent my life being told like would never happen, and that it was hysterical that I was arguing that it,

that it was imperiled. But with losses comes that feeling that you're describing, especially for those who don't have experience with losses, and I actually had a really fascinating experience

of this. I in I published a book about women's anger, and it was a historical look, but it was written in the two years between Trump's win and the mid terms, and I wrote it very quickly, and it tracked the sort of form that this new engagement and politicized anger took for a lot of women on the very roughly defined left. And when it was published happened to be

the week of the kabinet hearings. Okay, so so much of the story that I was writing was actually a story of, in that very short, compressed period, a series of surprise wins, if not full wins, like like ways that those who were very new to the public expression of anger, new to the very notion of working within coalitions of marginalized people, like They're gonna have a women's march, and it was massive, and out of the Women's March

came coalitions of new candidates who were winning primaries and unprecedented rates against incumbents. You had obviously the hashtag me too movement, and powerful people lost their jobs. All this stuff. Where was the sense of like, wait, if we're really

in gauged, we really can make change. And there were these sort of in that period, small iterations of victories that of course feel good and energizing, and especially because so many of the people who were new to these kinds of fights were coming from relatively privileged climbs right where there is a sense of power like if I put my mind to it, if I put my money

to it, I can make a change. I can get what I want, like steps forward, and like a sense of gratification, like it really mattered that I marched, It really mattered that I gave that speech in front of my school board. It really mattered that I told the story of harassment because there was a consequence, there was something happened because of it, and that that is really

energizing for people. And then my book was published the week of the cabinet hearings, and you know, they lost right, and so many of so many of those women, We're out screaming and saying, this can't happen, it can't happen. And then it happened. He was confirmed right, And I was out there on a book tour talking to people who were like, I don't even want to get out of bed. I lost. I one of the hardest things to absorb for those who are new to these kinds

of fights. Again, if we want all of them, we wouldn't be here, right. That so much of this work, so much of what it means to be engaged, to be awake as opposed to sort of asleep and unconscious of the amount of injustices in the world, so much of it, and staying engaged means losing over and over and over again, to to the point where we might not even see our victories in our lifetime. We let

me tell you, we will surely not ali right. And one of the things that I've really been looking at this week, and I'm I mean, but this is really

important for people here. I'm not going to live to see row reinstated, I mean, And that is like, you know, and this is this is dumb, This is dumb to cry about, because you know what, generations of people, generations of people gave their entire higher with way less power than me, okay, and way less comfort than me, who gave their lives right for voting rights, for reproductive rights, for labor protections, for environmental protections, all of which are

being stripped back right now because of the sort of inattentions of institutional power structures, including in my mind, a democratic party and the and the political press right that in attention to the gravity of what was at stake here over the past six decades, seven decades, okay, but centuries worth of people gave their entire lives energies to these fights and sustained loss after loss after loss after loss, and died with no expectation that there would be a

win any time soon. And when those rights and protections were finally one, they would never have been one had those people not given their lifetimes to that fight. Right There are many people alive right now who live through the victories, and I think that the horror for them of having happened to be born and devoted themselves to the fight at a moment where they get to see victory like I have witnessed you know what it feels like to win, to gain greater liberation and in a

tiny bit more justice. But a lot of what I, as somebody who's born in n I'm going to live through is the erosion of those victories. And yeah, the temptation to be like, Okay, I'm going back to bed, and especially for those who can live a comfortable life. And again there's a lot of the people who are new to these fights can go back to not caring. Right, it's more comfortable that way. It's a lot less sad, and it's a lot and it's a lot less horrifying. Yeah.

The other thing I wanted to add right now is that I've also noticed where when you think about reproductive rights, there's a huge, huge amount of people that, no matter what, weren't even getting the accessibility in the first place, still won't. So much of what we have understood, even about the history of ROW, there's been this sense that, well, as ROW stands, abortion is legal, but that is a fraction of the story, and that has been true for decades.

The High Amendment, which is a legislative writer that prohibits the use of government insurance programs like Medicaid from paying for abortion care, and which was first passed in six I think went into effect, has meant that for millions of Americans, abortion was all but illegal and inaccessible. And that's been true since just a few years after abortion was legalized. Right, there's a vast chasm between legality and accessibility. Then you add to that the thousands of restrictions narrowing

of possibility in states around the country. You add to that the kind of violent vilification of those who require abortion care and those who provide at clinic, bombings, providers being shot and killed, creating atmospheres of intense danger in

lots of areas in this country. What that has meant is that over the years that row has officially stood and abortion has officially been legal and safe, it has in fact been unsafe in many places, illegal and in many many places inaccessible, especially for the most vulnerable communities, especially for women of color, for poor women, for immigrants, for young people, for people in rural areas, for people in in red states. And that has been true through

my entire lifetime. And yet there hasn't been the seriousness of like, wait, these are people's lives at stake. It's the shape of their existence. It's their dignity, their humanity, their well being that has not been at the center of the conversation of millions of us who officially like

support abortion rights and access and the other thing. I want to say that this is where the reproductive justice movement has been in and too few on the on the left again, whether you're the Democratic Party, some of its strains of activism has not been good at making the very obvious and true case that in fact, abortion policy cannot be separated from questions of literal infrastructure, of housing, equality of social safety nets, the ability of families to eat,

to get enough food, to have decent benefits, to have good, strong unemployment benefits, to have good education systems, safe housing, a just criminal justice system that enable families across economic spectrum to make any kinds of choices, the framework of choice being just about abortion, which is a framework that I think is very flawed, and lots of people understand

its flawed. Who doesn't even begin to get at the number of factors and the number of interwoven policies that have been in place, and it hasn't permitted the cogent argument that should always have been made, and of course some people are making it, but you don't have a Democratic party making it, which is if you have an anti abortion right wing party that is arguing about the sanctity of life and forcing people to have children carry pregnancies to term, and yet not requiring that they get

protected paid leave from their jobs, not requiring that there's any form of subsidized daycare for those children who are brought into the world, not you know, building up a safety net where people have good snap benefits and increased access to food or to clean water, or too good a strong educational systems. Right, you don't do any of

those things. None of those things are being advocated. In fact, they're being fought against by the same people who are talking about the sanctity of life and the preciousness of every child and yet oppose the policies that would make life safer, kinder, more dignified. It's right wing hypocrisy, but it's also a left wing failure to understand and to communicate to voters and two would be activists, and to

human beings. But these things are all interconnected, and that there are moral imperative for those in the Democratic Party and on the left that's a failure of the Democratic Party. There you go, and we'll be right back. Great, let's get back to it. I'm going to quickly switch gears here only because there's so many things I want to

talk to you about. I want to get to the me too movement because one of the things I've noticed in social media is that there's a feeling of if I post something that's my activism, it pulls us away from the marches and the school board meetings and the community get togethers, because we can just put a post or a quote and call it a day, and that's being active. And so I'm wondering how you're feeling about

the me too movement right now, because it had a moment. Yes, Harvey Winds thean went to jail, but ultimately what does that mean? Nothing? Doesn't mean a lot, actually, but yeah, no, nothing. I should preface by saying that I was watching the Charlie Rose and the Matt Lauer as I'm married to a journalist. You know, he's sort of the last man's standing right now, and so it was sort of an interesting time to be watching everything from my bed, so

to speak. Unpack that, Rebecca, we're going to start with the bed um Okay, you know, it was always going to be a moment. I was shocked by how long the moment lasted. At the time, it was like I

couldn't believe. I think I wrote at the time that it was like a window had opened into which everybody could suddenly yell and through which everybody could see, like and it was like, oh my god, and I expected it to shut immediately, And I could not believe when sort of October moved into November, moved into December, moved

into January, and still people were telling their stories. And if you were a journalist who was covering this, the thing that you knew and I've I've described this before as kind of like because you you know, there was a period in my reporting life. I wasn't reporting the breaking news about it at the time. I was doing analysis of it, but I was writing about these topics.

And I was getting anywhere from between ten and a hundred emails every day in that period with stories from people, some of them about very famous people, and some of them about teachers and parents and relatives and friends who had abused or assaulted or her or har asked. And the view from where I was. It was like a horror movie, and it was like dipping your head beneath the surface of the ocean and feeling both like suffocated and getting a view of how big the iceberg is

underneath what's visible on top. It was horrible, but I was also shocked by how much of that iceberg became visible above the surface, right like it was. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe there was a sustained appetite for it. I couldn't believe because it's so uncomfortable to hear. It's uncomfortable for all of us. It's uncomfortable. The stories were ugly, they were painful, and they also implicated all of us, every single one of us, in one way

or another. And I wrote a lot about that at the time. But I always knew everybody I knew who cared deeply about these issues and these inequities also understood that a it was a moment and be that there would be a tremendously powerful backlash to that. And the question for me, looking right at this moment is how long is it gonna last? I don't know the answer to that. I could see it unfolding in a lot

of in a lot of ways. Um, this question that you asked about posting is really interesting to me because I actually am very open to there being a million different forms of activism for millions of different people. Right. I don't necessarily think that going to meetings or engaging in street protest is the right fit for everybody. I think for whom those engagements are the right fit, who have the resources to participate in them, should be doing them,

and that that's like a moral imperative. The key is being engaged in the way that makes sense, right, and that's going to depend on your community, your economic position, your your nature, right, how you communicate the ease you feel in certain situations, because activism will not be sustainable if it's a matter of trying to fit yourself into a path that isn't right for you. Right. If you hate doing it, you're not going to stay engaged and

you're going to turn around. So all that is to say that I actually have like I have a lot more openness in my view to say some of the people who get pretty pretty seriously mocked for like putting those signs in their yards, you know, like this home, whatever there is, I actually think that that kind of thing in communities that are really read and restrictive can actually be a meaningful form of signaling solidarity. And that

signaling solidarity is powerful. It's always been powerful. That's how that's how political campaigns work, It's how activism works. Is you get you have hats, you have trinkets. So I'm much less cynical about that stuff. Here's where the problem is. It's when people who have resources to be doing other

things are us to posting. Posting can be meaningful depending on the context of the community you're posting from, right, So again, in a very restrictive community, the act of posting can be explosive and and you know, perilous, perhaps socially perilous, right in ways that I don't want to

just say posting is meaningless. It's not. But if all you're doing is posting, and all you're doing is posting to people who already agree with you, when you could be doing something else, and maybe that's something else is again like there's no one form of activism that fits.

Maybe that something else is reading. I say this a lot, and it actually goes back to your first question about what to do as a feminist right now, for me, one of the most changing, spurring, galvanizing acts is to learn the history that has preceded us, To seek the stories that you haven't been told, which is different from

seeking your own research on vaccines. Don't do that, but seek the We are not taught the history of the struggles from the margins in our school books right so it can be genuinely reading and learning history, watching good documentaries about things. Learn about a labor movement which is completely entwined with a with a women's movement. Learn about the history of the women's movement, the abolition movement, which we're both entwined and then brutally like severed by racism

within the women's movement in the nineteenth century. Learn about me. There's so much out there that we haven't been taught, and that in itself can help steer you toward things. Maybe it is maybe your participation will be through a sort of workplace unionizing effort, or maybe it will be

at a community center. Maybe it will be through doing rape crisis stuff, or or working for your community's community aid group like who knows, but but a lot of it can be shaped in your approaches and your understanding the dynamics around you and within your own communities can

be shaped by that reading. It also is I mean, all these things you're saying, especially the volunteering stuff is especially if it's an authentic want you know, to be educated on real history, to you know, participate, then it can be very effective. Yes, yes, well, and that's and so that's what I'm saying. If you're coming from a place where you have time, resources, money, capability, energy, and a desire to be engaged, and what you're doing is posting,

then that is problematic. Right. Yeah, that's what I would say about the posting, And so that is Yes, go read. It can be incredible like read and then talk, talk with your family, talk with your friends, talk with your coworkers.

Like you will find if you start reading about this stuff, that that the history itself will surprise you, will probably en read you and embarrass you, embarrass you and and inspire you to to make a future that's different from the past, right like um, and then to to share that you you know you can be inspired to then in turn talk about that and share those stories with the people around you. That's part of community engagement, It's part of its part of coalition. That's also goes back

to my point about listen to other people's stories. Right, are you mad about something? Go out and seek people who are mad about related things, and also listen to them if part of what they're mad about is you. That's a really important thing, um, I think, especially for middle class white women, is to understand that if you're mad, right, good, correct, But like, but there are probably people out there who

are mad at you. And then that doesn't necessarily like and and maybe for reasons that go to bad or whatever, but like, listen to that. Take it seriously, take it with the seriousness that you want your anger to be heard. So you know, as I said before, I have two teenage daughters, and I find that a lot of women we're trying to figure out how to empower our daughters and like you said before, have them finish our unfinished business.

What can our daughters do and our sons, what can the next generations do to kind of push the wagon up the hill. I do have two kids, have two kids who are younger their daughters, and I have thought a lot about it because I do think that there's this sense of like that the project is empowerment. This goes back to what we're talking about about how, especially amongst middle class white women, it often all the advice

boils down to like using your voice expression empowerment. And the one thing I will say is that I have become increasingly disenchanted with that line of advice, especially you know, in middle class families where young people, white boys and girls are going to have access to certain kinds of power.

And I think that doesn't mean that you want to replicate the messages of you know, diminution and degradation that do get voisted on white women, right, that's real, Right, they're all kinds of ways in which misogyny plays itself out and white women, but often in fact to get

them to serve and dependent on white patriarchal forces. So you want to keep your kids of all genders aware of the inequalities in the world and be straight with without being performatively self flagellating about the degrees of power that they have and where they need to fight for more power, and be real clear about that that it's not a simple equation, right, that it's not just about I'm going to send you out into the world to

fight for your own power. It's about actually, beginning from a very early age, to encourage them to work alongside and for other people whose voices have been less valued historically and in a contemporary world. It's about teaching them not only to use their own voices, which sure, yes, but also to listen to the voices around them. It's about teaching them not to rear back from anger their own or the anger of those around them who they

perceive are experiencing injustice. It's about teaching them to be clear eyed about how power works and how they profit from it and benefit from it, and how they need to fight for more of it, not only for themselves but for those who are more at the margins. How you do that via like, you know, I don't know. We'll see. Now. What do you think of the term, Karen? Oh, that's interesting, that's a I mean, it's a good question. I don't have a great answer for it. I'll be

the judge of that. Uh. It certainly expresses, you know, what I just talked about, because part of what I'm talking about is not just not just the anger between tribal opposites, but between allies. You know. Audrey Lord very famously wrote about the uses of anger and the generative power of anger between people who are ideologically aligned, between black women and white women. So I think Karen is a character and a caricature of a figure who does

produce frustration for very legitimate reasons. That said, it is also any time that you're trafficking in a cartoon, you're in very trading on stereotypes, and that that's very true too, and that it doesn't make the grievances any less real. Right, there is a reason that that character exists. That said, would it be better and sharper and more honest if

we didn't traffic in cartoon characters. Probably, But there's also a reason, Like I once wrote in my first book about two thousand and eight that the best distillation of the dynamics around Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin came from a Saturday at Live sketch, which I still believe to be true, the Tina Fee and Amy Poehler sketch. Because cartoons convey truth and they also convey bias, as does comedy. Right, Yeah, so there's not an easy answer. Karen's a cartoon, and

therefore Karen conveys some serious truth. She's also a cartoon. There is also the critique, which I take seriously, which is the focus on the failing and the racism and blinkered issues of white women very often does wind up

leaving white men off the hook. It happens all the time, yes, But to say that doesn't take away from the reality of why, And in fact, it's often because it's it's white women who think that as women they belong in a more vulnerable or aggrieved category than men, and yet replicate and profit from the very biases they'd like to present themselves as standing against. So that's why the cartoon exists and why it's so effective. If it wasn't effective,

we wouldn't be talking about it. Oh good answer. Now ask me something. You could ask me a question about everything. Oh well, I mean this is gosh. You know, what's the last book you read? Oh? A book called Secret City? What is it? Which is about the history of gay Americans in every administration? Oh wow, that's a good answer. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I could have said Marie Claire, but no,

um no. But Secret City. It's fascinating how how many gay or closeted people kind of informed policy and made decisions and yet had to stay in the shadows, so to speak. And these are real policymakers and real people that were, you know, the right hand to many, many, many presidents. So I thought it was fascinating. It's great. I haven't read it. Yeah, Rebecca, thank you so much. There's eight million things to talk to you about, but I'm so happy to have had this time with you

to talk about feminism and everything else. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. If you haven't read Rebecca's book, Good and Mad, do yourself a favor and get yourself a copy. And now to my daughters, I hope, I hope that they are listening, and I hope that they're paying attention, and I hope that they will listen and pay attention to people that don't have a voice right now. I think a lot of what Rebecca said is so

important for future generations. And now I'd like to end this podcast of Go Ask Gali with an Abigail Adams quote, Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husband's Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies. We are determined to foment a rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation. Thank you for listening to Go

Ask Alli. Be sure to subscribe, rate and review the podcast, and follow me on social media on Twitter at Ali e Wentworth, it on Instagram at the Real Ali Wentworth and if you have questions or guest suggestions, I'd love to hear from you, call it. Text me at three to three three four six three five six, or email Go Ask Alli podcast at gmail dot com. Yeah, Go Ask Gali is a production of Shonda land Audio and

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