Who’s Failing Feminism? Media Narratives, Young Women and Hillary

Stop asking me why young women aren’t voting for Hillary. I don’t like the premise of the question. I don’t like how it constructs a narrative in which lack of support for Hillary among young women is indicative of something off. Something is wrong with Hillary, or something is wrong with young women. Either way, in this dilemmatic construction, one of these groups of women (we can enlarge “Hillary” to be representative of her supporters, in this instance) is acting badly – as women and feminists.

The media has done its part in making this question a central component of its campaign coverage of Hillary. Simply Googling “Hillary Clinton young women” gives you a good sense of how the media is shaping, if not creating, a fraught relationship in which either Hillary is failing young women and their brand of feminism or vice versa. Phrases such as “Hillary Clinton is losing,” “Hillary Clinton lost,” “Hillary Clinton can’t win,” “young women reject Hillary Clinton,” and other various iterations are rife among search results, replicating and reproducing the idea that there is something rotten in the state of feminism.

In framing this issue as one of young women vs. Hillary, of young women vs. old women, the media creates a generational divide between women and feminists (the media is lax in differentiating between the two, so forgive me) in which one side is failing history, the other failing the future, but all seem to be failing feminism. Consider a New York Post title: “Hillary’s woes show that young women ‘get’ feminism.” In this construction, young women’s “getting” of feminism is predicated on them not voting for Hillary simply because she’s a woman. The inverse of this then infers that not only are women who are voting for Hillary doing so only because of her sex, but Hillary and her supporters also do not “get” feminism, and thereby are bad feminists, if feminists at all.

However, Hillary’s “brand” of feminism, despite being maligned as “retro,” “unappealing,” and “fake” (some articles even claim she “killed feminism”), is not always portrayed so adversely. Young women and their youthful naïveté are also accorded such treatment. Jon Soppel, in an article for the BBC, draws on criticism that alleges young women lack experience with sexism and thus appreciation for what “first-wavers” accomplished. Soppel asks, then, whether one of the major reasons for young women’s turning away from Hillary is their desire for something “shiny and new,” equating young women to shallow children grasping for sparkly things – and Hillary to a dusty toy of last season.

Such characterizations that pit one group of women against the other heighten and reinforce an idea that women – all women – are subsumed by their status as women. They are their vaginas and, as a result, act in lockstep with one another. But when the assumption of uniformity among women, their political beliefs and their understanding of feminism is challenged, the media narrative pathologizes, magnifies and looks to diagnosis that which is diseased. What this form of analysis fails to consider is: What if there’s nothing wrong? What if the contentions between different groups of women are part of a continuous dialogue that’s helped feminism evolve and strengthen over time, growing and broadening how we relate to the ascribed identity of women and its variety of interpretations?

bell hooks in a recent interview with the New York Times asserted, “My militant commitment to feminism remains strong, and the main reason is that feminism has been the contemporary social movement that has most embraced self-interrogation.” hooks further explains how feminism confronted its whiteness as a movement and its exclusion of women of color and their voices to evolve into an intersectional movement that seeks to understand and incorporate women’s layered and sometimes conflicting identities across race, class, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, etc.

By no means is this conversation finished, though. It continues among feminists, heightened by this election, but not evidenced by a media narrative that seeks to demonize, minimize, excoriate, infantilize, and censure women for being bad feminists and openly disagreeing with one another. This prompts me to wonder whether such media framings are part of a larger, more insidious narrative that tacitly dismisses, denigrates and disciplines women in the public sphere. When women are held up against one another to determine not only who’s the better feminist, but also who’s the better woman, specific narratives about women – how they should act, think, and yes, vote – are reinforced and further normatized.

Yet, as narratives of “Hillary fails young women” and “young women fail feminism” explicitly demonstrate, it isn’t just Bernie supporters or Hillary fans who lose in this formulation, it’s all women. When women, regardless of whom they support, are portrayed as bad women and bad feminists, and this is repeated time and time again, what message does this send? If such public disagreements among women render them incompatible with their gender, but that gender positions them as outsiders to political life, how can we do anything but assume there’s no room afforded women in political office, much less the White House.

So, do women have no recourse but to remain silent? No, of course not. The only way to obscure the negative, to drown out the haters is to get louder – and keep fighting.