Ruth Bader Ginsburg has become a beloved feminist icon. Immortalized in numerous viral tweets and memes, she is endearingly referred to as “Notorious RBG” and a real-life “superhero,” Ginsburg has recently been the focus of the documentary RBG and the film On the Basis of Sex, released in May and December of 2018, respectively. Both are glowing portrayals of Ginsburg’s early career in the 1970s as a sex discrimination litigator.

During this period, Ginsburg co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the ACLU and brought or participated in over three hundred sex discrimination cases and almost every major Supreme Court case on sex discrimination. This period in her career has made her so valorized that few understand the actual details of these cases and the sex discrimination legal standards that she left us with today.

The truth is that through the hundreds of sex discrimination cases that she litigated, Ginsburg systematically targeted and destroyed any and all affirmative action and public programs that favored women. Through her seminal cases such as Frontiero v. Richardson (1973) and Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld (1975)—some of her most famous “feminist” legal wins—Ginsburg left us with a legal standard that makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for federal, state, and local government entities; universities; and private institutions to create preferential policies for women.

Why would Ginsburg—who has become beloved for her viral feminist quotes—have devoted her pre-Supreme Court litigation career to destroying the preferential and affirmative action programs for women? White feminism.

Ginsburg ruthlessly litigated based on a white feminist legal theory called “anti-classification” theory, also known as “sameness feminism,” “sex-blindness,” or “anti-stereotyping” theory. Similar to the concept of color-blindness, sex-blindness is the belief that there should be no differentiation based on sex, even affirmative action and preferential policies. These white feminists, including Ginsburg, theorized that beneficial policies that differentiated on the basis of gender stereotyped women as weaker than men. Thus, they opposed these policies as sexist. It was an easy theory for white women to embrace, as sexism was often the only form of discrimination they faced, so the eradication of preferential sex treatment meant the eradication of their problems.

Ginsburg’s legal legacy is one that, against all reason, is predicated upon the inherently racist and classist belief that women should not receive any preferential treatment, at the devastating expense of the most vulnerable populations within the category of women who needed these preferential policies—poor, queer, and non-white women. Although it may not have been Ginsburg’s explicit intent to harm the most marginalized of women, part of the insidiousness of white feminism is that it convinces its believers that the white woman’s experience is the universal experience for all women, and that all women aspire to the social position of white men. In the end, it is not the intent, but the devastating impact that matters.

Ginsburg left us with a legal standard that makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible...to create preferential policies for women.
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Propelled by this sex-blindness theory, despite intense criticism by non-white women legal theorists, Ginsburg’s supposedly shining period in the 1970s as a litigator for the ACLU was in actuality a period during which she strategically litigated hundreds of cases that targeted and destroyed any policy that benefited women over men.

In Craig v. Boren (1976)—one of her most high profile “feminist” wins that launched her to fame—Ginsburg argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of her male plaintiff that an Oklahoma statute that required men to be older to buy beer than women was sex discrimination against men, and thus unconstitutional. The Supreme Court ruled in her favor. In Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld (1975), Ginsburg represented a white male widower before the Supreme Court and argued that Social Security regulations that permitted female widows but not male widowers to collect special benefits while caring for minor children was reverse sex discrimination. The court agreed, and she got the preferential Social Security regulation towards women abolished.

In Califano v. Goldfarb (1977), Ginsburg represented yet another white male plaintiff, arguing that the Social Security Act’s allotment of greater survivor’s benefits to female widows than male widowers was unconstitutional. In her oral argument before the Supreme Court, Ginsburg explained why sex discrimination against men should be regarded the same as sex discrimination against women: “[A]lmost every discrimination against males operates against females, as well…. I don’t know of any line that doesn’t work as a two-edged sword, doesn’t hurt both sexes.”

The list is endless. In case after case, Ginsburg executed a strategic plan to target and destroy any and all preferential public or private policy that favored women over men. According to “Ruth Bader Ginsburg ‘s Equal Protection Clause: 1970-80” by Wendy Webster Williams, a final tally of Ginsburg’s cases revealed that 4 to 1, Ginsburg represented male (likely mostly white) plaintiffs over female plaintiffs. Ginsburg systematically litigated cases that were nearly identical in pattern to advance her agenda. She represented white male plaintiffs, alleged that a law or policy that gave preference to women was reverse sex discrimination against her male plaintiff, and claimed that this differentiation on the basis of sex was thus unconstitutional. She did this with the explicit goal of decimating preferential policies towards women, because she, as a white woman, held the white feminist belief that any distinction drawn between men and women—even in the form of affirmative action—meant that (white) women could never be seen as equal to (white) men.

Interestingly, On the Basis of Sex even chronicles Ginsburg as she litigates one of her male plaintiff cases to destroy a preferential program for women. In the trailer, Felicity Jones, acting as Ginsburg, proclaims, “If the law differentiates on the basis of sex, then how are men and women ever supposed to be equal. . . This is sex based discrimination against a man.” The film portrays Ginsburg as a heroine as she proclaims that men can be victims of reverse sex discrimination.

The impact of the hundreds of cases that she litigated is devastating. The legal standard that she created, called “intermediate scrutiny,” requires courts to review any law or policy that classifies on the basis of sex, even benign ones that preference women, with heightened scrutiny and an inherent belief that any classification, even ones used to benefit women, are invidious and harmful. Intermediate scrutiny is an extremely difficult burden for affirmative action and preferential policies to survive. Thus, Ginsburg, through the cases that she brought during the height of her supposed feminist career, not only eliminated existing preferential policies for women, she largely destroyed the possibility of future beneficial policies to women.

Numerous high-profile cases after the 1970s were brought and continue to be brought to take advantage of the intermediate scrutiny standard Ginsburg instated. These cases were brought in order to destroy programs beneficial to women. For example, in Miss. U. for Women v Hogan (1982), the Supreme Court, based on the heightened legal standard of scrutiny that Ginsburg set, ruled that the nursing school’s affirmative action admissions policy for women was unconstitutional and forced it to accept men as well. In JEB v Alabama (1994), the Supreme Court, based on the standard that Ginsburg set, ruled that women can not strike male jurors based on their gender, because this was supposedly sex discrimination against men.

The impact of the hundreds of cases that she litigated is devastating.
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How many universities, government agencies, employers, and public and private institutions have and continue to refrain from creating preferential policies to preferentially admit, hire, or provide more resources to women? How many women out there, especially marginalized women, would have benefitted from preferential policies throughout their lives? Across all public and private entities, across all industries, the ability to create preferential policies to benefit women has been forever restricted by Ginsburg.

The issue is that, while privileged white women like Ginsburg were eager to destroy preferential policies for women for the mere symbolism of being considered equal to white men—the poor, queer, and non-white women who desperately need these programs far more than white women were left stranded.  According to “Feminist Disagreement (Comparatively Recast)” in the 2008 Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, white women legal theorists like Ginsburg believed that men could be victims of reverse sexism, and that the pinnacle of equality for women was not radically revamping of the structure of sex discrimination, but instead aspiring to be considered equal to white men. Ginsburg shaped the case law in a way in which affirmative action programs for women are all but eviscerated—all because privileged white women like Ginsburg chafed at the idea of being considered different from men and being given “special” treatment.

Ginsburg’s strategy of destroying existing and future potential preferential policies for women has been rightly criticized by legal theorists. Radical legal feminist and Professor of Law Catharine A. MacKinnon wrote in Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law regarding Ginsburg’s “feminist” litigation, “[M]uch of what has passed for feminism in law has been the attempt to get for men what little has been reserved for women.” Professor Judith Baer in Advocate on the Court: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Limits of Formal Equality, in Rehnquist Justice: Understanding the Court Dynamic wrote on Ginsburg’s sex discrimination cases, “So far men have been the primary beneficiaries of the new sexual equality doctrine. Ruth Ginsburg has given no indication that this outcome troubles her.”

Ginsburg’s disturbing legal history evinces a greater truth—middle and upper class white women like Ginsburg are able to advance to the upper echelons of society and obtain the privileges of white men that they desperately seek. According to Professor of Law Yxta Maya Murray in “A Jurisprudence of Nonviolence,” the white women who advanced this sex-blindness theory aspired to be thought of as equal to white men and attain the social and economic privileges of white men, which upper class white women eventually did—perhaps with little thought to the enormous harm that they enacted upon poor women and women of color, who faced other forms of violence and discrimination that would keep them from achieving equality with white men.

In her seminal article “Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory,” Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law Angela P. Harris wrote, “[I]n feminist legal theory, as in the dominant culture, it is mostly white, straight, and socioeconomically privileged people who claim to speak for all of us. Not surprisingly, the story they tell about ‘women,’ despite its claim to universality, seems to black women to be peculiar to women who are white, straight, and socioeconomically privileged…”

For decades, non-white women legal theorists have strongly criticized Ginsburg for gutting legally sanctioned affirmative action for women, and for her complete obsession with white women attaining the status of white men that has wreaked immeasurable harm on poor women and women of color. Black critical race feminist legal theorists such as Angela P. Harris, Kimberle Crenshaw, Dorothy Roberts, and Angela Onwuachi-Willig have long critiqued the brand of white liberal feminism that Ginsburg advanced as class-privileged, inherently racist, and harmful towards non-white, non-straight women.

Yet, few outside of the insular world of legal academia know of these critiques. The public continues to fawn over Ginsburg as our generation’s feminist icon as the poor, queer, and non-white women that were inevitably sacrificed by her white feminist ideals remain vulnerable targets of violence. Some of that is because most people aren’t reading through all her legal decisions, and the summaries, on their face, sound good. But perhaps the reason why these critiques remain obscure in the eyes of the public—while Ginsburg’s star continues to rise—is because the world is more than willing to love violent white women who throw non-white women, poor women, and queer women under the bus.

Ginsburg has become an enormous cultural icon, yet her brand of feminism is only beneficial to one type of woman—class-privileged white women. For the millions of queer, poor, and non-white women out there who have had preferential university admissions, healthcare, and public benefit programs inevitably snatched from them by Ginsburg and white feminist litigators’ work, we cannot afford to continue valorizing this brand of feminism. We do not have the privilege of being rich and white. We do not have the privilege of having our entire political orientation rest upon aspiring to be granted the same privileges of white men. We live at the crossroads of race, class, and gender violence. Who actually benefits from Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s legacy? Certainly not us.

Feminist comics fans have had quite the year: Wonder Woman broke box office records last year and Captain Marvel is set to premiere the Marvel Universe’s first female lead this spring. Even in bookstores, this year has seen hits like Comics for Choice and Bitch Planet that tackle overtly feminist themes. It’s a far cry from the landscape that feminist comic artists navigated in the ’70s and ’80s, when comics was an insular boy’s club of artists, writers, and publishers, and no one — not even feminists — would publish radical female cartoonists.

In 1972, realizing that no traditional, male-run comic book company would publish them, female comic book artists in San Francisco joined together to publish Wimmen’s Comix. The collective published 17 issues, the last in 1991.

One of the artists that Wimmen’s Comix published was the young Julie Doucet. At the age of 23, Doucet contributed “You know, I’m a very shy girl,” “The First Time I Shaved My Legs,” and “Tampax Again” to Wimmen’s Comix Issue 15.

But Doucet had bigger plans than publishing a few comics; she wanted to write her own strip.

In 1987, Doucet wrote the first comic of her eventual series Dirty Plotte (French Canadian slang for vagina) but due to its unrelentingly raw content — nudity, explicit sex, female carnality, violence, and of course, menstrual blood flooding streets like a rogue river — no one would publish it. She even asked a feminist bookstore to carry a self-published version. But no one would sell it. It was too uncomfortable.

That is until the Canadian comics publishing company Drawn & Quarterly — which describes Dirty Plotte as “quite simply one of the most iconic comic book series to have ever been created” — began printing her work in 1991.

(On October 2 of this year, Drawn & Quarterly published Dirty Plotte: The Complete Julie Doucet, a hardback, two volume collection of the full Dirty Plotte series.)

In the pages of her comic, Doucet’s self-inspired character “Julie Doucet” draws comics, masturbates with a cookie, dresses as a man, castrates one, cuts off her breasts, and sews a penis onto herself.

Julie skips cleaning her house, but pays special attention to her vaginal hygiene in the bath. She stresses about purchasing the perfect bra in a dream, even though the actual Julie never wore one.

For drawing such loud, provocative and seemingly vulnerable scenes, Doucet herself is rather quiet and measured.

This past November, she spoke on a panel at Comic Arts Brooklyn, an annual comics festival at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

The event—standing room only—was filled with an audience keen to hear Doucet speak with cultural critic Anne Elizabeth Moore, who recently published a book-length analysis of Doucet’s work, life, and contribution to the world of feminist comics called Sweet Little Cunt: The Graphic Work of Julie Doucet.

Several times during the panel, Moore tried to complement Doucet’s work and place her in a canon of influential comic creators — a woman from the audience even stood up to tell Doucet that the comic about Doucet’s first sexual encounter had a profound impact on her own coming of age — but Doucet shyly shrugged off the attention. Moore told Doucet that her art had fundamentally changed the world of comics; Doucet quietly laughed, “I wasn’t aware.”

It’s difficult to know whether Doucet is genuinely modest, or is keen not to take up too much space as a female artist exhausted by the dominance of men in the comic world. But it seems more likely to me that she was being honest: in the middle of the ‘90s, trying to draw comics about gender and sexuality as a woman, Doucet was just trying to get by. She didn’t and couldn’t know her comics would have such a profound effect on comics culture, and it seems, she might still not believe it.

Following the panel, the energy was palpable. I approached artists selling copies of Comics for Choice, prints of feminist figures, or zines about their or their female family members’ own experiences, and asked them who they looked to for inspiration. Many named Doucet.

When I interviewed Doucet over email however, she wasn’t sure if people like her comics more than in the ‘90s, but she was sure that the resurgence of feminism had an influence: “People seem interested in the gender theme comics in a whole different way, that’s for sure.”

Despite her celebrated success and rippling influence, Doucet stopped producing comics in the mid-2000s. She credits the comics “boys club” and the unreliable income with pushing her away from the medium.

And although Doucet recognizes the landscape has shifted for feminist creators, she doesn’t see herself reentering the comics world anytime soon:  “It feels like I don’t have any stories to tell,” she wrote me. It’s a strange phrase to hear coming from Doucet. After all, if her work was about almost everything—it was predicated on exploration. Her comics explored gender identity, sexuality, womanhood, power, and violence—what stories didn’t she have to tell?

Doucet hasn’t quit creating however. Instead, she turned away from text and towards images. She returned to printing—linocuts, woodcuts, and silkscreen printing—which she has originally studied at university. She published a book of collage and poetry called Elle Humor in 2006 and another titled A l’Ecole De L’Amour in 2007.  She even designed a cover for the Penguin Classics Little Women that looks like it could be a page from one of her comics. 

Doucet has shirked off the weight of the comic world, but her work continues to draw attention and glean recognition.  In 2006, she had a solo exhibition of her print work at the Galerie B-312 in Montreal; in 2007, she participated in the Biennale de Montreál; and in 2008, she appeared at the Triennale québécoise at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Most recently, in 2017, her comic work was featured in a retrospective exhibit at the Fumetto Comic Festival in Luzern, Switzerland.

“It was the first time I got to see the extent of all my comic and non-comic production,” said Doucet. “It was huge, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I hadn’t realized how much work I’d done in my life. That was very overwhelming.”

Julie Doucet's comics explored gender identity, sexuality, womanhood, power, and violence—what stories didn't she have to tell?
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Doucet remains a force in the comic’s world, especially now that Dirty Plotte has been republished. And she’s proving that female artists can be more than one thing. Just as her comics depicted Julie-the-lover, Julie-the-man, Julie-the-artist, Julie-the-woman; so her life is revealing Julie-the-cartoonist, Julie-the-print-maker, Julie-the-poet.

She wrote me that she’s started drawing again this year and has been working on a series of geometric cardboard structures, although she admits, “I’m not sure where I’m going with that.”

Doucet’s work continues to explore the infinite permutations of womanhood and artistry, but her role as Julie-the-publisher is perhaps the most radical to date. She started her own publishing house in 2013, Le pantalitaire, to publish her own work and has found herself full circle: from unpublished to publisher—from powerless to powerful.

The New York Times recently reported that “over the past four years, at least 10 people in South Texas have been victims of murder, attempted murder, kidnapping or rape” at the hands of United States Border Patrol agents. The agents — including one man who went on a 12-day killing spree targeting sex workers — are described to have “suddenly and violently snapped.”

This stands in stark contrast to President Trump’s repeated racist attempts to paint immigrants from Mexico as “killers and rapists.” Indeed the subtext of the Times‘ writing is that it’s not those who cross the border who should be feared, but those tasked with enforcing inhumane immigration policies against them.

The Times also suggests the possibility that “the very nature of Border Patrol agents’ work—dealing with vulnerable, powerless people, often alone on the nation’s little-traveled frontiers,” contributes to their ability to get away with their crimes, as well their inclination to commit them in the first place. After all, many of these attacks occurred prior to Trump’s reign of terror — including under President Obama — which suggests that the way the United States approaches border control has long been deeply racist and dehumanizing.

We also know that law enforcement officers across the United States are trained to treat people inhumanely, especially Black and brown people, and this reality has also led to a well-documented epidemic of mass incarceration and violence, including sexual violence. In fact, the New York Times also reported this month that women working in the Federal Bureau of Prisons face a near constant threat of assault and harassment, often from their own co-workers.

This portrait of Border Agents could also be applied to the ever-expansive pool of mass shooters, who are also often described as having mysteriously “snapped,” although it’s well-documented that they are largely straight men — typically white — and almost always have a history of violence against women. Not so mysterious.

Every day, men throughout society are encouraged to dominate “vulnerable, powerless people,” including those traversing well-traveled areas, and they know that they are very likely to get away with their aggression — or even be rewarded for it. This is not coincidence. It’s due in part to patriarchy, a social system that not only values men over women, but the behaviors which we describe as “masculine” over those which we call “feminine.” It is — as race theory scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw emphasizes — inherently linked to white supremacy, capitalism, and other social systems rooted in ideals of dominance.

The very nature of Border Patrol agents’ work contributes to their ability to get away with their crimes, as well their inclination to commit them in the first place.
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And yet, none of the news reports above mentioned include the word patriarchy, sexism, misogyny, or any other reference to historically entrenched gendered oppression. Despite the array of blockbuster reports over the past two years unveiling sexual violence in various American institutions, we — especially men in power —  still seem far more comfortable discussing how the specific “nature” of certain environments lend themselves to rape than we are acknowledging that the very structuring of our society is the reason that these types of environments exist in the first place.

In Vivek Shraya’s new memoir, I’m Afraid of Men, the writer and artist never shies away from that bigger picture, beginning with a painstaking account of a day in her life as a trans South Asian woman living in Canada. We follow her as she faces a near constant barrage of sexism, misogyny, transphobia, and literal threats of violence as she walks out of her apartment, logs onto the Internet, does her job, and simply survives the day. Shreya underlines the ways in which the fear of men has been reinforced and affirmed throughout her life, from childhood onward.

In the Times article “Hazing, Humiliation, Terror: Working While Female in Federal Prison,” a prison employee named Jessica recounts something similar in relation to her working conditions:

Every single day something happened, whether it was an inmate jerking off to you, whether it was an inmate pushing you, whether it was a staff member harassing you through email, on a phone, following you to your car.

Both of these accounts echo the report on Border Patrol as well, in which one of the survivors, M.G., describes the moment when she, her daughter, and another woman from the same town in Honduras were first detained by the agent who would go on to attack them all:

“When I saw him, I said, ‘Thank God,’” M.G. said.

But they slowly began to worry as they sat on metal benches in the back of the truck. M.G. thought there was something strange about the way the man was breathing. At first, she tried not to show her fear to the girls.

“I pretended,” she said. “I tried to be strong.”

The acceptance of hypermasculine brooding, anger, and intimidation in our society means people become accustomed to, adept at, suppressing their legitimate fears in order to appease those in power. Not just in prison or while risking their lives to cross into a new country, but as Shraya writes, the fear of men “governs” the choices she must make “from the beginning of my day to the end,” from the way an email is written to deciding what to wear out the door. (Particularly as a trans woman of color).

None of the news reports mentioned include the word patriarchy, sexism, misogyny, or any other reference to historically entrenched gendered oppression.
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Ultimately, M.G. dragged herself out of the brush where she was left for dead and was able to alert another Border Patrol agent passing through. It seems to take such death-defying acts of heroism, or painfully-researched exposes in mainstream media, to even get us to face this violence. Yet, even then, there’s an avoidance of the deeper pattern.

The naming of patriarchy is largely discouraged by those in power because of patriarchy. As bell hooks has written:

Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation. Yet most men do not use the word ‘patriarchy’ in everyday life. Most men never think about patriarchy—what it means, how it is created and sustained.

To name patriarchy is to name the existence of historic gendered oppression, which is to name the existence of systemic bias against what we call femininity. And that is, in turn, an attack on the legitimacy of masculinity, the gender and sex binary, and how we are fundamentally taught to conceptualize power. In other words, naming patriarchy risks dismantling it.

In an essay for The Atlantic last year, Vann R. Newkirk II addressed the backlash against the increased use of “white supremacy” in the Trump era, responding to critics who argue that its usage has become overly broad. Newkirk clarified that this systemic “definition of white supremacy has long animated black activism,” including the work of Martin Luther King Jr., and efforts to reduce its scope have always been directly linked to the ever-expansive project of sweeping racism under the rug:   

The repackaging of Jim Crow into a “race neutral” set of policies didn’t just arise as a wink-and-a-nod deal in southern political backrooms a few years near the end of the civil-rights movement, but was a half-century-long project forged by thousands of lawyers and mainstream political leaders that costs millions of dollars, and was played out in every arena across the country from the Supreme Court to town hall meetings.

When we do tend to hear patriarchy these days it’s often in the form of the limiting phrase “the patriarchy” and it is similarly marginalized to “backrooms” where a certain group of powerful men apparently decide the fates of women. Indeed, some of the rebuttals to the existence of “the patriarchy” come down to the argument: but women are in those rooms too!

This diminishment and dismissal of the dominator culture in which we are swimming, happens in tandem with the avoidance of white supremacy and the fact that this society was in fact built upon white patriarchal violence. Despite the popularity of “intersectionality” as a buzzword—and the subsequent backlash to its use—we don’t often describe in detail the various systems of dominance, including capitalism and imperialism, which overlap to compound oppression.

Keeping these systems in obscurity serves a status quo in which indigenous women living in poverty, while carrying the generational trauma of genocide—on land targeted for environmental destruction—are still the most likely to be raped and assaulted (and usually by white men).

Extreme situations, like the dehumanization happening at our southern border or within our prison system, must be challenged, but isolating hypermasculine violence to particular conditions, independent of history, has also long been a tactic for avoiding cultural change. Or for dismissing unsavory problems as situational.

We’ve seen that in the way many have attempted to reduce Tarana Burke’s #MeToo movement to a white Hollywood issue. Or in the way people like Trump blame terrorism on Muslims, or dismiss the epidemic of rape in the military by suggesting that it’s unavoidable in those conditions, asking incredulously, “What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?.”  

The irony is that these attempts at narrowing the conversation always end up doing the opposite: If the situation is to blame, why are there so many different situations producing similar results? Why is it a given that men will attack women when in isolation? Why do we simply accept the terror of masculinity as a fact of life?

Connecting this all to patriarchy means a commitment to describing how aggression, violence, and dominance are normalized all around us. It requires our constant effort to link the idealization of masculinity to that of things like whiteness, thinness, ability, wealth, Christianity, cisnormativity, and the destruction of our environment. It demands a more complicated story.

Despite the popularity of “intersectionality” as a buzzword, we don’t often describe the various systems of dominance, including capitalism and imperialism, which overlap to compound oppression.
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At the end of I’m Afraid of Men, Shraya laments that “any ambiguity or nonconformity, especially in relation to gender, conjures terror. This is precisely why men are afraid of me. Why women are afraid of me too.”

What she yearns for is a world free of gendered expectations altogether, one in which we follow trans and gender-nonconforming people of color toward our “sublime” possibilities. Words alone do not ensure that safer, physical reality — a society without borders or prisons or hierarchies — but naming systems does force certain realities into the light. And perhaps dares us to look for a path.

CW: Mention of rape

A few years ago, a friend told me to start “living up to all the feminist shit” that I write about. We were drinking vodka martinis in a hotel bar in downtown Chicago—bracing for a chilly night out—when she started begging me to dump my then-boyfriend. She didn’t even know that he enjoyed hurting me during sex or that I couldn’t even brush my teeth before running errands without arousing suspicions of infidelity. She just knew I wasn’t happy and that she didn’t like the guy. Two months later, after saving up thousands of dollars and asking my folks if I could crash with them for a while, I broke up with him.  

Much to the chagrin of my physically and emotionally abusive ex, I’ve always been outspoken when it comes to the rights of women and girls. Even when I didn’t feel like I could stand up for myself, I advocated for other women and non-binary people through my writing, my social media platforms, and my conversations with friends and family. But since leaving my ex, I’ve made up for lost time when it comes to “living up to all the feminist shit.” I quit my job and pursued writing full time, writing about things like college sexual assault and how Western feminists can help non-Western feminists without fetishizing them. I marched to protect Planned Parenthood. I drove across the country by myself—twice. I helped my sister deliver her youngest daughter, and I moved to Los Angeles with less than $400 to my name. Hell, just last week I even yelled back at a street harasser.

But of all the “feminist shit” I’ve done in the past three years, going vegan takes the cruelty-free cake. Nothing else has empowered me to set healthy boundaries and call out sexist bullshit like extending my circle of compassion to farmed animals.

Hear me out.

I know that a white woman making this kind of statement, perhaps especially in Trump’s America, might be upsetting—and I get that. Historically, the feminism of white women has been far from intersectional. Many white women voted for Trump, and reportedly less than half of white women voters in the U.S. believe Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations of sexual assault against Brett Kavanaugh. It’s also true that, although I started switching to veganism while living in a remote pocket of southeast Missouri, I now live in southern California, where affordable vegan food is widely accessible. But I think it’s a valid point that needs to be made, and women of color have been expressing similar sentiments for decades. In fact, vegan feminists like Angela Davis and Audre Lorde inspired me to stop eating meat back in 2016.

Nothing else has empowered me to set healthy boundaries and call out sexist bullshit like extending my circle of compassion to farmed animals.
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As a lesbian woman of color, author, poet, womanist, and vegan, Audre Lorde knew better than perhaps anyone that intersectional feminism extends beyond the scope of human female rights. In her own words, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle, because we do not live single-issue lives.” And while liberation icon Angela Davis hasn’t always spoken out on her vegan lifestyle, that’s changing more and more these days. As Davis reportedly said a few years ago during the 27th Annual Empowering Women of Color Conference, “I think it’s the right time to talk about it because it is a part of a revolutionary perspective—how can we not only discover more compassionate relations with human beings, but how can we develop compassionate relations with the other creatures with whom we share this planet.”

While going vegetarian, and for nearly a year afterwards, I thought being vegetarian was enough. But after learning about the many ways female farmed animals are brutalized just so humans can eat cheese pizza and omelets, I ditched dairy and eggs too. As someone who was raped quietly by their partner in a bed—who was pushed, pinned, and choked but never punched, kicked, or cut—I realized I could no longer participate in a system that enables consumers to absolve their guilt by minimizing someone else’s suffering. Pain is pain, and there is no acceptable way to hurt, forcibly dominate, or exploit someone.  

The idea that exploiting some animals for their milk, meat, and eggs is acceptable, while other animals are meant to be pets or to live in the wild, is the same sort of logic that sexism, misogyny, classism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, xenophobia, islamophobia, racism, ableism, and every other form of discrimination are based on. “Dominance functions best in a culture of disconnections and fragmentations,” as Carol Adams put it in The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Vegetarian Feminist Critical Theory. “Feminism recognizes connections.” Factory farming is not just harming animals; it is destroying the planet, exploiting the poor and communities of color, creating a public health crisis through the negative effects of animal-based foods, and quite literally feeding a worldwide culture of toxic masculinity.

Around the world, societies feminize compassion and masculinize eating meat. As Adams explained in The Sexual Politics of Meat, “Meat becomes a symbol for what is not seen but is always there—patriarchal control of animals and of language.” Indeed, during the 2016 election cycle, Donald Trump was criticized in headline after headline for treating women “like pieces of meat.” But well-intentioned or not, this sort of language only further promotes the idea that some bodies deserve to experience violence while others don’t. As Adams told Bustle back in 2016, “By challenging oppression on both sides of the species line, by saying that animals matter, too, and so we won’t eat them, we are also saying anyone who is compared to an animal matters and is due equal treatment.”

There’s also an undeniable link between animal abuse and violence against women. A survey of women in domestic violence shelters found that 71 percent had partners who had abused or threatened to abuse companion animals, and recent studies show that slaughterhouse work can lead to domestic violence, social withdrawal, anxiety, drug and alcohol abuse, and PTSD. A 2009 study by criminologist Amy Fitzgerald found that, in comparison with other industries, slaughterhouse employment increased total arrest rates, including arrests for rape and other violent crimes. According to PTSD Journal, “These employees are hired to kill animals, such as pigs and cows, that are largely gentle creatures. Carrying out this action requires workers to disconnect from what they are doing and from the creature standing before them.” That desensitization makes it easier for them to be desensitized to other forms of violence, such as domestic abuse.

Like every group of humans that has ever been labeled “other” or “less than,” farmed animals are used, bullied, and killed simply because society has deemed them undeserving of our love or concern, their bodily autonomy and desire for a happy life somehow “different.” It’s exactly why I feel like feminists have a special responsibility to stand up for all animals—we should be able to empathize with victims of violence our society silences.

Around the world, societies feminize compassion and masculinize eating meat.
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The meat, dairy, and egg industries profit off female reproductive systems, and billions of baby animals are separated from their mothers each year so we can drink their mothers’ milk instead. Starting at around 12 months of age, cows living at dairy factory farms are forcibly impregnated through artificial insemination, over and over again until the cows are too exhausted to go on, at which point they’re sent to slaughter. And when cows living at dairy factory farms give birth to male calves, those babies are taken from their mothers–who visibly grieve–and sold for veal.

Sadly, the egg industry isn’t any better, even if you stick with “free-range” eggs. “Free-range” hens are still debeaked, crammed into sheds, and pushed to lay up to 500 eggs annually. Just like caged hens, “free-range” chickens will never see their mothers or play in a pasture.

I never anticipated that “living up to all the feminist shit” would include going vegan, but eschewing animal products is one of the most feminist things I’ve ever done. It doesn’t undo all the times that family members, co-workers, “friends,” or boyfriends did things to my body that I didn’t want them to do. And it doesn’t change the fact that I spent years in an abusive relationship. But it is incredibly empowering to know that I’m not contributing to an industry that profits from abusing innocent bodies and exploiting the female reproductive system. No matter what kind of day I’m having, I know that I’m making a difference.

Being vegan has been easier than I expected. I’ve found that it’s completely possible to eat vegan for a week with only $20, and all my favorite recipes can be veganized. Plus, vegan options are common at most restaurants these days, and I still get to frequent some of my favorite fast-food chains, like Taco Bell, Subway, and White Castle. And most food banks offer a variety of plant-based staples, like rice, beans, soy milk, pasta, and canned veggies. But simply cutting back on animal products also helps animals, the environment, and human health.

Perhaps most importantly, going vegan has taught me a vital lesson about self-love: When you extend your circle of compassion to every single sentient being on Earth, it becomes easier and easier to stand up for yourself. It’s impossible to foster the belief that farmed animals deserve to live happy lives, free of deprivation, abuse, and harassment, without also acknowledging that you deserve the same. Rejecting the concept that some animals deserve peace, while others deserve pain, pushes you to value and protect your own well-being—whether that means leaving an unhealthy relationship, prioritizing self-care, or telling a street harasser to piss off.

From the top of Teletorn, the Estonian Television Tower, you can see Finland, just 80 km (50 miles) away. The water stretching between the two countries is dotted with islands where you can imagine hiding from the world and becoming the person you were always meant to be. Living in Tallinn, Estonia and doing stand-up comedy, I spent a lot of time island-gazing.

Across the Baltic Sea, just a bit out of view from the Teletorn, is the Finnish archipelago of Raasepori. An easy ferry ride from Helsinki’s downtown, the islands seem to belong to another time. Thousands of seabirds nest in the old-growth forest, maintained by Finland’s National Forest Service. The area’s rich history includes mining and Sammallahdenmäki, the first prehistoric archaeological site in Finland, with burial cairns from the Western Bronze Age culture in Finland.

Raasepori is a popular tourist destination, offering picturesque wooden villages and hiking, cycling and beaches. The appeal seems obvious. So when U.S. entrepreneur Kristina Roth, founder of Matisia Consultants, a consulting company on the 2015 list of 50 Fastest-Growing Women-Owned Companies Worldwide, learned from her Finnish fiance that one of the Raasepori islands was for sale in 2017, she bought it. And she planned to fill it with women.

Roth’s vision when she bought the island was to create a permanent home for the SuperShe Society, a project she started several years before. It began as a networking group and eventually included a lifestyle blog, events, and women-only retreats in luxurious locations like Bali. Roth was “bored out of her mind” by traditional women’s networking events and envisioned bringing together independent women for experiences that organically united them. Seeking an escape from a world filled with “tech bros,” Roth saw a chance to curate the peer group she’d always wished she had. Across the water in Tallinn, as I listened to men tell me after my comedy sets that they never thought women were funny but they guessed maybe I was okay, I could sympathize. But I found that the sort of community Roth wanted to build was only available for some.

Finland has a strong feminist history: women gained the right to vote in 1906 and the 1995 Equality Act mandated a minimum of 40% of both sexes in all publically nominated bodies, which doubled the number of women serving in these positions virtually overnight. Businesses with more than 30 employees are required to have an equality plan and to implement measures to promote equality.

I found that the sort of community Roth wanted to build was only available for some.
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Equality is so prized in Finland, in fact, that Roth’s SuperShe island plan generated an investigation on the grounds of discrimination, with the Finnish Non-discrimination Ombudsman Jukka Maarianvara ultimately ruling on the 4th of June, 2018 that the island resort’s policy of serving only women was legal, and opening the way for the resort to accept visitors as scheduled. The notorious Finnish bureaucracy also challenged Roth, who complained that “[her] experience as an outsider and investor in this beautiful country led me to reconsider future plans,” as “[she’d] wasted millions of euros on [Finland]. [She] had planned to make future investments in the Finnish archipelago and Lapland, but at this rate it’s not happening,”

Roth persevered, and according to the tourism manager of Raasepori, Ville Vuorelma, in an email to me on July 4, 2018, they “are really glad that [Roth] has found the unique Finnish archipelago. The Island opened on the midsummer weekend [June 23-24] and I’ve understood it’s fully booked for a quite some time, so it’s probably difficult to organize a visit there at the moment.”

Beyond simply being a woman (which includes anyone identifying as a woman, according to interviews with Roth, a policy that doesn’t specifically address those identifying as non-binary), Roth has a vetting process for those who would like to visit, and she hand-selects each visitor. “The number one, number one thing that’s important for me is that you have an amazing personality — like upbeat, cool personality — because you’re on [an] island… That’s what’s going to make it fun and exciting for everyone.” For someone who was bored in the uniculture of the bro-tech world, this is an interesting stance to take. Research shows that selecting candidates by perceived “fit” typically results in selection of those who are like the selector; by the report of one recent Super She, those visiting the island are varying degrees of successful, blonde and thin. Is that really the sole way an amazing personality manifests, and does it really sound fun and exciting?

Would-be SuperShes are invited to apply for membership through the website, with Roth personally reviewing each application. With an eye to seeing whether my own coolness credentials measured up, I applied for membership on March 14, 2018, and had my application approved April 2, 2018. In my application, I wrote that I was a stand-up comedian in the United States and Estonia and that I enjoyed making jokes for and with women and for that reason, a visit to the island would be restorative for me, all true.

However, a dazzling application didn’t mean I had immediate access to the island. Though Roth originally claimed that one-day trips to the island would be available for local visitors, as the opening date approached, no single-day options materialized. One-week reservations, at a cost of 4,000 euros ($4,669), proved prohibitive for visiting. From Estonia, with an average Estonian salary of 1,242 euros a month, a little jaunt to SuperShe would consume a quarter of the year’s wages.

By the report of one recent Super She, those visiting the island are varying degrees of successful, blonde and thin. Is that really the sole way an amazing personality manifests?
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They didn’t give up on me. On June 30, I received an email with an offer to take the last spot on a week-long retreat, saying it was “something wild” I could gift to myself. But alas, my budget could not accommodate the offer.

There is no question that putting money towards gender empowerment, including women’s networking groups, makes lives better for everyone. Women in male-dominated industries, like the “tech bros” Roth worked with, can be exhausted. (I should know: female comedians make up approximately 14.3% of performers and burnout is rampant.) We could all use some time on a private island, away from those who distract us or detract from us. It would be even better if there were interesting professionals there, with time to exchange ideas. But guess who can benefit most from mixing with powerful or connected women in leading fields?

Poor women.

Mentoring and being connected helps women get ahead, but most often it helps already privileged and connected women find more success. Arianna Huffington, for example, spoke at the Thrive conference in 2014, saying, “I have a group of women friends that I hike with,” Huffington told the crowd. “They were the first people I talked to about my dream of launching a blog called the Huffington Post, and one of them became my first investor.” (Huffington’s hiking buddy was environmentalist and multimillionaire Laurie David.) Women clearly yearn for this type of connection, if the 7,000 applications for SuperShe membership prove anything. But without any accommodations in place for those unable to pay 4,000 euros, this “women’s paradise” isn’t an exercise in feminist bonding. It’s a country club. Even Roth gets sick of it: most nights Roth heads to [her boyfriend’s neighboring island] for the night, returning before the SuperShes awake.

Opening a private island for you and your besties to party on is hardly a new concept; it’s only adding “no boys allowed” and calling it feminist that makes it remotely newsworthy. Positioning this as a step forward with “something to offer every woman” is borderline delusional.      

I don’t have any millionaire hiking buddies to invest in me or my comedy, unfortunately, and since the SuperShe retreat is out of my reach, it looks like I won’t be getting any soon. There are places to go in Finland for that woman-only support, though. I was lucky enough to experience it myself in March of 2016, when I attended Salin Comics Camp at Villa Salin. The Feminist Association Unioni manages the Summer House of Ida Salin, a villa once owned by a button manufacturer, and allows groups with a feminist bent to use the building for residencies and workshops. It’s not on an island, but there is a beach and of course, you can see lots of islands.

I wrote several of my favorite jokes at Feminist Comic Camp, and met women from across Sweden, Finland, and Estonia. I felt that special sense of comradery and that unintentional exhale of relief that comes from a situation where you feel kinship with everyone there, just as Roth envisioned.

Since the Comics Camp residency was free, including all meals, though, I was able to save for additional opportunities and staying in touch with the women with whom I connected. Roth is 100% correct when she says that spaces for women to connect are both needed and rare. It is simply a shame that they are out of reach for so many, and that’s no joke.

In a culture steeped in male violence against women, whether it’s physical assault or online harassment,  the concept of violent female revenge can sound exhilarating. Given the high rates of women murdered by male partners, and the simultaneously low rates of male rapists given jail time, it’s hard to not fantasize about a vigilante giving these men their comeuppance, or at least, a female figure that invokes the same fear in cis men that women face daily.

Feminists have been grappling with the complexities of these fantasies for decades. On one hand, it’s clear that more real-world violence is not the answer to a culture already poisoned by it, regardless of justification. But also, can we at least imagine unbridled revenge?!

The existence of, and potential for radical female violence is one of the many difficult subjects psychotherapist, author, and longtime feminist Phyllis Chesler tackles in her latest book, A Politically Incorrect Feminist: Creating a Movement with Bitches, Lunatics, Dykes, Prodigies, Warriors, and Wonder Women, The book itself traces Chesler’s journey from her Orthodox Jewish childhood in Brooklyn up until the present day, primarily focusing on her experiences during the heyday of the second-wave feminist movement. While it’s clear her writings come from a place of passion and respect, Chesler doesn’t shy away from giving a realistic picture of the movement’s in-fighting and the topics that caused derision between women vying for justice.

One of the most fascinating subjects in Chesler’s book is the movement’s division over the overtly violent rhetoric of Valerie Solanas, the woman who penned the infamous SCUM Manifesto and later attempted to murder Andy Warhol. In later years, a similar division would spring up surrounding the trial of serial killer Aileen Wuornos, a woman plunged into sex work as a teen, who later murdered seven men. Her first victim, Richard Mallory, was a convicted rapist Wuornos claimed she murdered in self-defense. Her narrative around the other victims shifted throughout the trial, regardless, the story of a serially abused sex worker reaping revenge on a violent man both enlivened and divided the feminist community.

Given the cartoonish conflations often made between feminism and man-hating, some feminist leaders, Betty Friedan in particular, did not support the notion of aligning with either Solanas or Wuornos, particularly because neither IDed as feminist themselves. Their anger was, let’s say, bad for the brand. However, Chesler and many others, felt empathy towards both women, kept an open dialogue with Solanas and later wrote the forward to a collection of Wuornos’ letters.

In conjunction with the release of her new book, I was lucky enough to interview her about how the feminist movement has evolved, why arguing is crucial to a movement, and the allure of violent female vigilantes.

Isaac: Do you think the internet has created greater understanding between feminists with different ideologies and priorities?

Chesler: I think if feminists of my generation had understood that people with ideas are always fighting with each other, and taking ideas very seriously, it would’ve helped. If you look at military history, you’ll quickly see that in every movement there was a falling out of line. What I never liked was incivility, or never speaking to someone again because you disagree on one issue. The ideological demand for saluting to one flag fully with your whole heart is somewhat totalitarian. We’re all going to have different priorities. Intersectionality is not new. We didn’t have a word for it at that point, we just understood that everything was related and that each woman chose her priorities.

I was thinking about how people talk about intersectionality like it’s a new issue. Looking at the history of feminism, the issue of intersectionality was always there.

Totally, but Kimberle Crenshaw had to coin the phrase for it to really enter the conversation on a mainstream level. Sometimes I’ll hear people condemn feminists for openly disagreeing, but I think disagreeing is fine, if only the women of my generation understood that. Sexism is like racism and homophobia, you have to actively try to unlearn it. Even if you’re a woman, you have to unlearn your own bias against women. We didn’t want to understand the “Mean Girl” stuff when I was younger, which is why I wrote about it in Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman.

There were many feminists at the beginning, I was one of them, who said “we have to praise and uplift women because we’ve been kept down for so long.” But since there are so many differences between individual women, there will always be fighting. I think your generation is much more accepting of that truth. But my generation felt like our hearts would break if other women betrayed us right after we found the language for sexism.

Since there are so many differences between individual women, there will always be fighting.
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I was really fascinated with Betty Friedan’s desire to keep Valerie Solanas out of the movement because of her violent radical rhetoric. Would you consider Friedan’s concern an issue of respectability politics?

Betty wanted the feminist movement to stay above reproach, to have an impeccable image. Valerie was a legitimate lunatic. She was brilliant, the SCUM Manifesto is brilliant, but she was serious—she wasn’t kidding. So, Betty was horrified by it, she was afraid people would start believing the feminist movement was full of lesbians who wanted to kill men. But Valerie stirred our imagination because she was so out there, she was our outlaw. She wasn’t actually a feminist herself, she thought that NOW was a lady’s luncheon. In a sense she was right, because we weren’t breaking up buildings or rioting at NOW, but we also passed some important legislation.

I was also fascinated to read that a similar dynamic played out later with Aileen Wuornos, that feminists were divided about whether to support her trial.

Wuornos had a worse childhood, she had one of the worst childhoods I’ve heard about. Valerie, like Wuornos later, thought feminist interests were a form of social climbing, that feminists wanted to get famous off of her. I got involved in Wuornos’ case because I wanted to expand the Battered Woman Syndrome defense to apply to sex workers. I believed that she killed the first man out of self-defense. She inspired an opera, two plays, books, a movie. I wrote an op-ed about her because while she wasn’t the first serial killer, she felt different, women tend to kill husbands or children and we don’t hear about it as often. This was about killing a series of strange men, white men, adult men, that was never heard of. I wanted to check her out, I had to move a lot of pieces to get her to call me from jail. I called her and I said “Lee I’m from a feminist government from the future and we need you” and she was on board.

Lee wanted to sell her story and make money, she was a capitalist, and I was an abolitionist. I had nothing but compassion for her. It’s interesting that women, feminists, lesbians, were thrilled by this notion of an action hero. There was this sense that she died for our sins, that we secretly wanted to reap the same violent revenge on men but never would.

Totally. I think there’s a natural fascination with the idea of female vengeance. I’m curious, with your experience writing about mental health and violence, do you have any theories on why there aren’t more female serial killers of Lee’s caliber?

When women kill in self-defense in a marriage or partnership, they go to jail. No one is visiting them, no one is marrying them like male serial killers. This is a very powerful punishment. Oftentimes women who are traumatized and abused as children who may be violent take it out on other women or children. But they’re statistically less likely to go up against men violently, and if they do it’s just one, usually a partner.

Women often turn violence against ourselves, women who have been incest victims are often angrier at the mothers who couldn’t save them than they are at the father who raped them. They feel the mother who looked the other way, because she needed the support of the father. Women are very tightly controlled, we get treated as lesser early in life, and then we become surveilled and manipulated by the sexual harassment that is completely normalized everywhere.

When women kill in self-defense in a marriage or partnership, they go to jail. No one is visiting them, no one is marrying them like male serial killers.
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We’re still fighting for a lot of rights that you were fighting for in the 1970s. What is one thing you’re surprised we’re still fighting for?

One is obliged to undertake the struggle, but not to complete it. You do it for your lifetime, and then the other generations come and pick it up. That is, if feminist knowledge hasn’t been systematically disappeared—which it has. Sadly, I think that our inability to stop pornography, torture pornography, has increased the normalization of it. That may make me a feminist of the unfun kind, I like fun, and I have fun. But I think not pushing for greater regulation of the content of porn was a loss and it was a very divided issue because feminists feared censorship and feared an alliance with right-wing forces that were also against pornography. But in my opinion, that was a loss on my watch. I wish we could have stopped the sex slavery of children and women featured in certain venues of porn, on our watch that traffic has proliferated and been normalized.

What is one thing you’ve seen progress the most?

I think progress has been made with LGBTQ rights. I always thought being gay was like being an artist, very bohemian. There’s a huge improvement in lesbian custody battles and gay male custody battles.

I would love to be able to say there’s been a proliferation of women’s thinking and artistry, quantum leaps. And yet it’s also been disappeared in my own life time, some of the most radical voices from the late 60s and early 1970s stopped being taught by the 1980s. When I ask younger women about Mary Wollstonecraft, Joan Stewart Mill, Matilda Gage, if you don’t start with that you’ve got nothing. There’s a couple of major historians of women’s—Mary Beard, Eleanor Flexner, when I discovered them I was so excited. We didn’t read Sojourner Truth, we read African-American men, we read maybe Virginia Woolf and George Elliott.

Not all changes are made by going on the street, that’s an important expression, it’s theater. Real change can be made that way, a lot of change is made in boring meetings and courthouses.

Looping back to the gendered culture of violence, and its effects on mental health, do you think the conversation about mental health has evolved and moved in the direction you were hoping?

We’ve moved away from institutionalizing people, but now we leaving them on the streets homeless. So, two extremes, both bad. I don’t know if my pioneering work that made a difference in the beginning is still being taught in medical school. Do battered women now understand that they’re battered? Yes. Is it understood that abuse causes PTSD symptoms? Yes. Do we have good services for rape victims and battered women? No. We pioneered the conversation about rape, there are rape kits now. The conversation about rape is more understanding and pro-woman, but rape victims are still seen as a drag. There’s this attitude of: “other people have dealt with this, why don’t you be quiet.”

We now understand a lot more about Trauma and Recovery—coincidentally the title of an excellent book I reviewed in The New York Times. The author, Judith Lewis Herman, dignified women’s mental illness by beginning the book with the combat veterans who were WWI shell shocked, and linking their manifestations of PTSD to incest and rape victims. Our work collectively began to give more dignity to women who have anxiety, insomnia, flashbacks, who are self-destructive. The same destroy their own cases in court because they can’t trust themselves. Is there more sympathy and understanding? Yes. Is there enough? No. I think one important progress is there are more memoirs by young women writing about their mental health experiences and their eating disorders, which are often intimately connected to sexual abuse. There are now feminist therapists, there are lesbian feminist therapists, there are lesbian therapists of color. It’s a good thing, but it’s still not enough.

It started a few weeks before my 21st birthday. I got an email from my pen pal, Kim, in Minnesota, asking if I could receive an international package in my country Kenya. I lived in a village where doors were unmarked and dirt roads led to bushes. I had no address. But the vanity that defined me at that age needed that package so bad. It was the first time someone showed interest in celebrating my birthday.

I was working in a cyber café where the only payment was being allowed to use computers and send emails. When Kim wanted to send the package, I asked the owner of the cyber café if I could use his post office box address. After much prodding, he gave a begrudging yes, with a threat that if I used his address to receive illegal things, he would throw me to his snakes. (Yes, he kept huge snakes as pets, but that is a story for another day.)

It took exactly 22 days for my package to arrive from America. From the day she posted it, I scribbled my anticipation in a rugged old diary that acted as my dream board.

Nothing under this earth will ever replace the feeling I got when I finally held the yellow package that was delivered to me at the cyber café. I raced to the toilet, the only place that had semblance of privacy, and delicately tried to open my gift. I could feel my hands shaking from excitement that rose from a place deep inside me.

I made a hole in the envelope and peered inside. There were several multicolored bracelets, a photograph, and tiny samples of perfume. I could also see a sleek silver tube. I tore the envelope further and recognized the tube almost immediately. It was lipstick. My very first! I nudged it open, and it revealed a crimson red color that looked even richer when I moved from the toilet’s fluorescent light and held it against the scorching sun.

I made a swatch on my wrist. It glided smoothly to form a screaming red line. The color of my blood. It stood out like an act of defiance. I hastily rubbed it off; but I knew I was in love.

In my village, and according to my family, owning lipstick was unacceptable. The thought of wearing it was unimaginable. Women with scarlet pouts were something I had only seen in magazines. I marveled at the courage of those women, inwardly wondering if they had parents.

It glided smoothly to form a screaming red line. The color of my blood. It stood out like an act of defiance.
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My childhood is made up of memories of my mother whispering to me about “red lipped prostitutes.” Of village girls who left for the city and got introduced to sex, drugs, and lipstick.

“She started coloring her lips and everyone knew she will get AIDS,” I remember my mother saying under muted light from the paraffin lamp that lit up our kitchen. She was retelling a story she had heard at the market, of a girl who was found dead a few months after she left the village to look for a job in Nairobi. They blamed her death on prostitution and lipstick.

As my mother spoke, tears gathered around her eyelashes. I wondered if she was crying from the pain of the story, or if her eyes were getting irritated by the smoke from the wet firewood she was using to cook. Lipstick was a sin. No decent woman wore it, at least in the eyes of my mother and people around her.

The night after receiving my package, I hid the lipstick beneath a heap of clothes in my metallic suitcase. I could not sleep. I wondered if I would ever get a chance to apply it. When everyone was asleep, I groped through the darkness, opened my suitcase and rummaged through it with my fingers. There it was! My lipstick.

I opened it again and lifted it to my nose — it smelled like delicious bubble gum. I applied it in the dark, smacked my lips together and extended my lips to see if it could shine through the pitch darkness around me. It did not. I rubbed it off till my lips were sore. Then I went to bed.

Applying lipstick in the dark became my ritual. Whenever fear that my mother would notice remnants of the representation of immorality lingering in the cracks of my lips crept inside me, I would wash my mouth with soap.

Oh, I longed for the day I would wear my lipstick in the light of day.

I decided to dare, almost six months after she sent it to me. I tried it because I was tired of hiding. I was just fed up with not being able to express myself because of what my culture made me believe. I was young, I wanted to be different, and lipstick provided that. So I created an awkward pout with my mouth and clumsily drew an unsteady red line on the outlines of my lips. While staring into the cracked mirror that I held close to my face, I filled my lips.

I tried it because I was tired of hiding. I was just fed up with not being able to express myself because of what my culture made me believe.
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My heart was beating fast as I slowly pressed my lips together before applying another layer. The redness of my lips was a representation of rebellion and transformation for me. I stared at myself in the mirror, and fell in love with the contrast the red lips formed against my dark skin. The dark spots on my face and my bushy eyebrows seemed less pronounced from the dominance of the lipstick.

Then, I grabbed the hem of the leso (wrapper worn by women over their clothes to show decency) and slowly wiped it off. I had tasted liberation. I had worn lipstick during the day. It was brief, but it showed a defiance of rules that defined women. I was a part of a mini revolution.

My urge to do more was emboldened. Wearing lipstick became my distant and secret obsession.

The tiny silver bottle contained my freedom. Not being able to wear lipstick reminded me of my oppression. I wanted to do things that were forbidden, things women had been enculturated to believe they cannot and should not do. We were taught that women cannot serve and eat before men had their full share. I remember waiting for my father to finish eating, and it felt like forever. I would get so hungry waiting for men to eat. We were told we cannot laugh out loud, so all my life, I grew up stifling laughter because women were supposed to lower their voices. Looking at a man in the eye was considered rude; so I spent time staring on the ground while talking.

Any time I caressed the tube between my fingers, I was confronted with the reality of how much our culture had made women feel like they have no say in what they do with their bodies.

We were enchained. The only way I could break from those shackles was to wear my lipstick out.

One Saturday morning, almost six months after I received the lipstick, I did it. I wore faded blue jeans that I had gotten for 100 shillings (1 dollar) at a flea market, a white halter blouse, and lipstick. I was ready for the world.

My mama was working in the farm when I stepped out into the brightness of day, wearing red lipstick.

The world momentarily held its breath. As she saw me, she put down the seeds she was sowing, and walked towards me. I stood, waiting.

“What are you doing to me? What is that on your lips?” she asked. Tears choked her, and the more she talked, the more it became apparent that she was crying. Yes, the first time my mother saw me wearing lipstick, she cried.

“What will I tell people? Have you decided to be a prostitute?” she asked; her voice low and dejected. I stood motionless. She begged me to wipe it off.

I weakly told her that I will remove it when I come back. She watched me walk away with my lipstick still intact. I did not have courage to look back.

I felt so free. Lipstick to me was not a mere influence of the “Western world” or corrupt media. It was just me, being a young woman who wanted to try out something new without feeling like I owed the whole community an explanation.

She watched me walk away with my lipstick still intact. I did not have courage to look back.
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I was tired of being told what to wear, what parts of chicken women should eat, how loud they should laugh and what should go on their lips.

I wanted to paint my lips, because they were mine.

I wore lipstick that day, and the days after. Even when my mother said she will miss me when I die, because to her, lipstick and death were related, I still wore it.

Amidst stares and whispers when I walked past people in the village, I maintained my red lips. In no time, the stares reduced. People started accepting my red lips. My streak of red on my lips became normal.

I had gotten my freedom, and they had accepted it. My mother no longer clicked when I tried getting lipstick stains off my teeth.

I started asking Kim to send me more lipstick. When she sent me coral lipstick, my mother lingered behind me as I tried it on.

“I used to think all lipsticks are red. What is that color?” she asked.

I said: “They are in all colors you can imagine.”

She shook her head and smiled. I had won the battle.

I’m in panic

He wants to see my bare face

I really like him

Would it be okay to show it to him?

Oh, never (That’s right, that’s right)

Let’s keep what needs to be kept (Right, right)

Until you get all of his heart

Don’t ever forget this

–I Got a Boy, SNSD

Beauty in South Korea does not come in all shapes and sizes. It comes with a V-shaped face, a slender body, double eyelids, and pale porcelain skin.

Cis Korean women are expected to go to any length to achieve this perfect look—and they certainly do. South Korea has the highest per capita plastic surgery procedures in the world, and its beauty industry is globally ranked as one of the largest. Every major street and subway station is littered with stores selling sheet masks, Jeju volcanic creams, and the promise of perfection.

But some South Korean women, mostly those in their late teens and twenties, are declaring it’s time to “take off their corsets.” These women do not literally wear corsets; the movement references the restrictive, harmful, and gender-essentialist nature of corsets. 탈코르셋, or Tal Corset (tal meaning to take off), inspires women to cut their hair drastically short, destroy their makeup, and get rid of uncomfortable clothes. Anything that restricts how women express themselves, or asks women to conform to certain beauty standards at the expense of their own desires, is a “corset.” And these women are claiming that it’s time to throw them out.

Anything that restricts how women express themselves, or asks women to conform to certain beauty standards at the expense of their own desires, is a 'corset.'
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Getting a short haircut and forsaking makeup and bras is radical in a nation like South Korea. Like other East Asian countries, South Korea is still heavily influenced by Confucian ideals, which explicitly qualify men as superior, and command women to be obedient to their fathers and brothers when young, then to their husbands, and later to their male children. Though women no longer exist for the sole purpose of bearing a male heir, they are still expected to be passive, soft-spoken, and utterly feminine.

As a result, women’s behavior and appearance is fastidiously scrutinized. In fact, it is often considered rude for Korean women to show their “bare” face in public. South Korea also has the lowest score of any OECD country in terms of the gender pay gap. According to the 2017 OECD report, “women hold only 17% of seats in the National Assembly […] and only 10.5% of management positions [in the private sector].” The patriarchal Hoju System, which by law placed men as the head of households, was not abolished until 2008.

To make matters worse, feminism is still very taboo in South Korea. Anything even slightly related to women’s empowerment is often met with extreme, and sometimes violent, backlash. Female K-Pop idols have faced public uproar and boycotts from male fans for shockingly radical actions like reading a feminist book or having a “girls can do anything” phone case.  Female game developers claim male players surveil their accounts for any feminist activity. If any semblance of feminism is found, they often complain and protest until the developers formally apologize or leave the company.

Introducing South Korea’s First Inclusive Sex Toy Shop
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Steady changes towards women’s rights have been happening for decades, but the efforts somewhat lacked movement. Then, in 2016, the horrifying Gangnam Murder shook the nation and awoke a feminist upheaval. On May 17, a man murdered a random woman in a public bathroom close to Gangnam Station. He reportedly did it because he had been scorned by women too many times. Enraged, thousands of women took to the streets, fed up with the violence of misogyny.

Feminism experienced another resurgence with the explosion of #MeToo, which has toppled down high-profile assaulters, including the aspiring (paywall) presidential candidate Ahn Hee Jung. There have also been widespread protests against spycam pornography, an issue South Korea has struggled with for years.

In the midst of all this, it is only natural for women to start pushing against other forms of oppression—namely, society’s patriarchal obsession with controlling how they act and look.

탈코르셋 캘리그라피 영상입니다! pic.twitter.com/0taZxpA24z

— 김명지 (@kim_noonsong) June 9, 2018

“I didn’t really get the whole concept of Tal Corset at first because I thought ‘corsets’ like makeup, long hair, and high heels were things you do for yourself […] but I got to understand the concept when I saw it as a society, not just from my point of view,” says Myungji Kim, a college student who writes feminist calligraphy.  

Her sentiments are shared by Fennie J*, a high school student. “When I first got to know about Tal Corset, there were so many things that I started to evaluate,” she says. “I wondered ‘is that also a corset?’ […] I finally realized that I had been pushing myself too much to meet female social standards by calling it ‘self-satisfaction.’”

According to these women, joining the movement has changed their lives for the better.

“I tried to lose weight until I almost fainted crossing the street […] as a result of an extreme diet I was on,” says 18-year old Sion Ji. “I have put myself into the tightest corset to meet society’s standards. I don’t do that anymore.”

Besides a healthier and more positive relationship with their bodies, women are also gaining a valuable resource: time.

Myungji Kim boasts that she went from spending an hour getting ready every day to just 15 minutes. And Sion Ji says, “I can now get enough sleep since I don’t need to wake up early to [get ready]. I can instead use that time to study more.”

Besides a healthier and more positive relationship with their bodies, women are also gaining a valuable resource: time.
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Despite the positive changes advocates of the movement exalt, not everyone agrees with its ideology. Most of the criticism comes from people claiming that telling women to not wear makeup or skirts is just trading one set of beauty standards for another. “[…]Are we taking off the corset or putting on another one? Calling yourself a radical feminist doesn’t justify criticizing people with a different opinion.” says @KIMBUNGEO on Twitter.

Yet others say that the movement is more about options. “By breaking off the concept of ‘feminine’ and wearing a [different] look […], I wanted to show [that] there are clearly more options for women,” says Myungji Kim.

Most of the women I spoke to said they felt supported by their family and friends. The public sphere, however, is a whole different beast.

How Conventional Beauty Standards Hurt Trans People
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“I realized that male workers in the service industry treat me differently,” says Sion Ji. “Before, when talking to male workers as a customer, they used to talk to me with a smile on their face, but since I got my hair cut short, they are not like that anymore.” Others said they had had instances of people on the metro commenting loudly and disapprovingly on their masculine look.

For Myungji Kim, things have been more extreme. “I openly engage in feminist activities with my face and name out there. Sometimes my pictures end up on random websites and I get sexually harassed and cyberbullied,” she says. “Some people have left me. Living as a feminist in Korea is really not easy, [it] means you can get fired, your personal information might be posted up on the internet without your consent, and it’s likely to affect your chances of being hired.”

This is one of the reasons many of the women posting about the movement hide their faces online behind carefully chosen angles or cute stickers. Interestingly enough, this pattern seems mostly prevalent on Twitter rather than Instagram.

#탈코르셋_인증#탈코르셋_후기
사실 머리자르고 조금 후회했다
더 일찍 자를걸 더 짧게 자를걸
예전에 어떻게 저리 업업하고 다녔는지 상상도 안됨
머리 감고 말리기까지 3분컷이다 pic.twitter.com/4ZfM13Hgto

— 재기민기밐기 (@formygr8life) May 13, 2018

Sion Ji affirms that she hid her face because of fear. She cites an incident in which a female YouTuber received threats for mirroring, or copying the language men use to attack women to in turn attack men. One of the people who threatened to kill her did so as he filmed himself going to what he thought was her house (from an address provided by netizens).

Fennie J has different reasons for concealing her identity. “If I didn’t cover my face, people would try to find out ‘who from where’ instead of [listening] to the message I want to send,” she said. “People would score my look and see [me] as an object, not a subject.”

The haters may be hating, but it seems like feminism, and Tal Corset, are here to stay. The word is spreading, the world is watching, and women’s lives are changing. As Fennie J  puts it, “This movement is a chance for all women, including me, to have more dignity.”

*Name has been changed as per the source’s request.

**Interviews and texts were translated by Jung In Lee. Interviews have been edited for clarity.

Women! They are both everywhere and nowhere. EV (clap emoji) ER (clap emoji) Y (clap emoji) THING (clap emoji) and yet nothing (shh emoji). Very prominent in current cultural conversation and somehow never in any of our marketing meetings. What we’re trying to say is, what even is a woman? Is this a woman? No, it’s a bare coat rack? Hmm, really makes you think.

POSSIBLE TAGLINES FOR WOMEN

Women: Not men but it’s fine!

Women: [Insert full lyrics to Katy Perry’s “Roar”]

Women: You gotta have ‘em! [Italian chef kiss gesture]

Women: Confidence in motion (Oh wait, that’s the slogan for Subaru. Oops.)

Women: Man, I feel like a Women!

PURPOSE OF WOMEN

(Can anyone help fill in this section? Should we ping Kathy in Sales for her input? Maybe something about how women are pure and special but also powerful? Is that even doable? Will finish later or remove altogether.)

LOGO FOR WOMEN

Women, as a whole, are so hard to define in a single image. Is it because women don’t exist as a monolith or is it because there are no women on our company’s executive board? Who can say? Our logo must encapsulate all women without excluding any women whose buying power we care about. Think Jennifer Lawrence or Emma Watson. Like, cool and white but also attainable and mostly white? It’s important our logo be small and take up no space but be sexy and noticeable when it removes its glasses and ponytail. It will have boobs but in a feminist way, if that makes sense.

COLOR PALETTE FOR WOMEN

Women don’t just come in pink anymore. They also come in light red, fuchsia, blush, holographic slime, and Instagram’s “pretty” filter. And is “flower crowns” a color? We’re hearing “no” but we think that should be open to discussion.

TYPOGRAPHY FOR WOMEN

Our primary font will scream, “online shopping pyramid scheme but make it empowering.” Our hand lettering style will be the kind that says, “My teachers gave me more compliments on my penmanship than thorough critiques of my essays.” Oh and probably lots of quotes in Helvetica.

ICONOGRAPHY FOR WOMEN

Shoes, makeup, and jewelry are essential but they must be paired with a well-known feminist icon. It’s not pandering if it’s Empowering, am I right, ladies? Some starter ideas:

• Rosie the Riveter but her fist is holding a small yet sensible clutch
• An Audre Lorde quote written in a lipstick shade called “Fresh Brazilian”
• That picture of Marilyn Monroe standing over the grate photoshopped with a speech bubble that says “Wage gap!”
• Stilettos with “Gloria Steinem” written all over them which cost $10,000

GLOSSARY OF TERMS USED IN OUR WOMEN BRAND STYLE GUIDE

Feminism: This is when a woman does a power stance but in an unthreatening way. She is also a #GirlBoss, which is not to be confused with a regular boss (male) or a Boss Baby.

Audre Lorde: She’s a feminism who does a lot of good quotes which are hopefully in the public domain.

Stilettos: Very tall shoes that make women look large but in a sexy way, not a scary way. Stilettos support the body weight on what is essentially a shoe heel carved from dry spaghetti. They defy the laws of physics. (Yaaas, Women in STEM!)

Gender Equality: While you won’t find this phrase anywhere in our style guide, you also won’t find it in most major countries around the world. So, if you think about it, we’re really being on-trend.

(clap emoji): A way for women to be loud without actually making any noise. It’s (clap emoji) about (clap emoji) time (clap emoji)!