The State of Feminism

The thing that's really been on my mind is, I think this has just been a horrible year for women in every aspect. I'm working on a documentary right now, and I spent several days just talking to MAGA moms and liberal moms, and everybody was the same: they were just tired and lonely and exhausted and judged. They didn't talk about policy, they talked about how they felt and that nobody was carrying them. Nobody was seeing them. So I think in this moment right now, when I think about all the aspects of the work that I do that’s being touched: 13 states are outlawing Girls Who Code clubs; we have for the first time gotten more Black and brown engineers ever, and they're shutting that down; they deprofessionalized teaching and nursing; four-hundred-thousand Black women were pushed out of the workforce. All of this is an intentional strategy. And when we look around at the work that we all do, our organizations are underfunded, we're tired, we're not getting the support that we need.

So if anything, this feels like a moment where we have to invest more in women and more in our issues and more in our causes. And we have to find ways — and I know it's hard to do big tent — to reach out to those MAGA moms who I think we can get. Reach out to those young men, men that maybe in our lives that believe the same things that we believe, and figure out how we build the world that I think everybody wants to see.

Going back to this point about the [social media] algorithms, there are five companies that own everything that we see. We don't want to hate each other. We don't want to be this angry, but they're doing it because they're making money from it. So a lot of us are trying to lift each other's work up right now by using our 50,000 followers, our 500,000 Instagram followers, because our work is being shut down by Facebook and Instagram. So I think we have to spend that energy and that effort both on media and figuring out how we fight against the algorithms because that's the way you fight today. Yes, we march, but we also march on Instagram, literally digitally.

These remarks have been edited for clarity and length. Portions of these remarks appeared at Women’s Media Center.