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January 31, 2022
Pessimistic
Rosemarie Ho
To demand women’s liberation feels bafflingly earnest in an era when there seems to be the tacit agreement among straight, college-educated women that heterosexuality is a failed project from which they cannot escape, despite their best wishes. They can only shack up with men who can either listen, fuck, earn money, caretake, or be emotionally available, but never all five at once. The theorist Asa Seresin calls this “heteropessimism,” a...
January 31, 2022
Editors’ Note | Good Lord
The Editors
A few months ago, The New York Times Book Review published a much-hyped coffee table anthology in celebration of its 125th anniversary. Ten years earlier, the occasion might have prompted unbridled celebration. But this was 2021, and the volume’s introduction takes pains to chronicle the Book Review’s past sins: the sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia on display in the output by its mostly white, mostly male, almost exclusively cisgender reviewers....
January 31, 2022
Maternal Bliss
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
If an alien were to learn about early motherhood in America solely through the media produced by American mothers, she’d reasonably conclude that it is either a blissfully transformative experience punctuated by the occasional diaper blowout, or a series of traumatic indignities redeemed only by social norms that some people call “hormones” and others call “love.” Before I got pregnant, I liked and wanted kids, but expected having them to...
January 31, 2022
Hot or Not
Andrea Long Chu
In January 2020, women began tweeting out selfies under the hashtag #HotGirlsForBernie, posing in bikinis or leaning suggestively towards their phones in low-cut tops. Countering years of baseless claims that Bernie Sanders had a “woman problem” — recall Gloria Steinem’s glib dismissal of his female supporters as merely boy-crazy — his female supporters used the meme to assert a distinctly socialist-feminist line. “if u wanna be hot, just be hot!”...
January 31, 2022
Feminism and Kitsch
Becca Rothfeld
I am the first to admit that contemporary feminism suffers from an optics problem, and I am the first to admit that an optics problem is no trivial matter. Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris Christmas ornaments, crocheted vagina hats, women at the helm of execrable tech companies urging us to “lean in” until we topple into the maw of misinformation: these are just a few of the “cringe” artifacts that...
January 31, 2022
A Defensive Posture
Elisa Gonzalez
For the last few years, I’ve privately called myself a “feminist-nihilist” or “nihilist-feminist,” which is both a bad joke and a halfway lie — if only because “nihilism” doesn’t actually mean what I mean. Nor do I mean apathy or indifference. My relationship to contemporary feminism resembles my youthful allegiance to a Christian god: something that must exist (for reasons that can be more or less defined as “better that...
January 31, 2022
Not Feminisms
Jess Bergman
Ding dong, the girlboss is dead! So claimed New York magazine’s The Cut in an apologetic eulogy published last August. But like Rasputin, the girlboss didn’t go quietly: attempts on her life date back as least as far as 2016, when Salon declared that, after Hillary Clinton’s electoral loss and the bankruptcy of Sophia Amoruso’s fast-fashion empire Nasty Gal, “it felt like the entire #GirlBoss era was uniformly rejected.” Other...
January 31, 2022
“Steered by the Reactionary” | What To Do About Feminism
Alexandra Brodsky, Andrea Long Chu, Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, Becca Rothfeld, Elisa Gonzalez, Jamie Hood, Jess Bergman, Rosemarie Ho
For a long time now, we’ve had the sense that feminism is in trouble. In the years before the pandemic, its most prominent battles — the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Women’s March, #MeToo, the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, “Nevertheless, she persisted” — were about figureheads. These days, symbols no longer seem adequate, or even all that meaningful. The professions (teaching, nursing, eldercare) that have been most overtaxed and underprotected during the...
January 26, 2022
“Justice at the Necessary Scale” | An Interview with Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò
Drift Editors
History is moving again. The past two years have felt like an avalanche of breaking news — from the onset of a world-altering pandemic, to a protest movement that upended the public conversation on race and the carceral system, to wildfires and larger-than-ever storms. Meanwhile, power and money continue their seemingly inexorable rise to the top, and the government (Democratic or Republican) advertises its bumbling incompetence on a near-daily basis....
