Millennial feminism, the strength of pop culture

THEThe turning point was marked by Beyoncé, with all the force of pop culture: her silhouette on stage under the large FEMINIST writing at the MTV Video Music Awards in August 2014. Until then, for Millennials and Generation mostly an insult. Synonymous with “man-hater,” extremist, a poorly dressed witch who burned bras (an image that has long haunted feminism). Just two years earlier, when a reporter asked Taylor Swift, another pop icon, if she was a feminist, she denied it: “I don’t think about things in terms of boys versus girls.”

When Millennial feminism is pop

Then everything changed: in the same days as Beyoncé’s proclamation, Taylor Swift explained: «As a teenager, I didn’t understand that saying I was a feminist meant saying that it is hoped that women and men will have equal rights and equal opportunities. The way it was phrased in culture and society seemed to me to mean “man-hating.” And now, I think many girls are having a feminist awakening because they understand what this word means.” Swift credited her friend Lena Dunham, the actress and director who created Girls, for making her understand that she herself had “a feminist position, without saying it.”

From Taylor Swift to Beyoncé

Beyoncé – who would shortly thereafter sign an article denouncing gender inequalities at work (“We must stop believing in the myth of gender equality. It is not yet a reality. Today women represent half of the US workforce, but the average female worker earns only 77 percent of what the average man earns») – in turn in concerts quoted Nigerian-American writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and his bestseller We should all be feminists.

A parity of paper

Born between 1977 and 1989, these four extremely successful women were giving voice to an experience common to their generation. Having grown up in the belief that feminism was superfluous, because gender equality was now guaranteed by law, they had to realize that no, it was not and is not like that: despite everything, despite success, there are things that women still can’t do, just because they are women.

More opportunities, but it’s the attitude that counts

Accustomed to excelling in their studies, when they entered the world of work many Millennials came up against reality: it is still males who make careers, in companies as in politics, and it is enough to be men to have the guarantee of obtaining more, in economic terms and work advancement. And at the same time to do less (at home and with children, for example). «Today a woman has more opportunities than my grandmother had in her time, because laws and policies have changed, which are important. But what matters even more is our attitude, our mentality» writes Adichie, explaining that a more inclusive definition of feminism is needed: «My definition of “feminist” is this: a man or woman who says yes. There is a problem with gender as it is conceived today and we must solve it, we must do better. All of us, women and men, must do better.”

The pervasiveness of violence

This generational experience has crossed others, which are also fundamental to building Millennial feminism: the demands of the LGBTQ+ community for example, and in particular of lesbian, bisexual and trans women, visible like never before. And then the anti-racist and immigrant movement, especially in the United States, which within a few years resulted in Black Lives Matter. In the end the new awareness of the pervasiveness of gender violence. The 27th Hour investigation into domestic violence, which relaunched the debate on the topic in Italy in the Corriere della Sera and subsequently led to the approval of new laws on the subject, dates back to 2012.

From feminicides to #Metoo

In those years, the Italian media began to talk about feminicides as a phenomenon with precise social and cultural causes, which could and should be prevented. In 2017, the #MeToo wave arrived, the movement against violence against women sparked by the New York Times and New Yorker investigations into producer Harvey Weinstein’s rapes in Hollywood. It became clear to everyone that if not even the most admired women in the world – the new contemporary divinities – were immune to gender violence, no one was. In the same year, Donald Trump became president of the United States after defeating Hillary Clinton and championing an idea (and practice) of women that was so unacceptable that the need for feminism was evident.

A common adversary

From the confluence of these experiences was born what is today called intersectional feminism (or even transfeminism) because it is placed at the intersection of different identities that correspond to the innumerable differences that exist between women. If the feminism of the 70s and the Baby Boomers claimed – and still claims – to speak on behalf of all women, Millennial feminism knows that there are many ways to be a woman. Including that – for transgender women – of being born in a biologically male body. That there is not a single founding experience of being a woman (not even motherhood) and it cannot be taken for granted that all women identify with the battles of white, Western, middle class, heterosexual and such by right of chromosomes .

Gender is not important

At the same time they know that all these identities have one thing in common: they suffer in the patriarchal system and its hierarchical structure of society that values ​​only traditionally masculine characteristics (i.e. masculine in a traditional way) and the division of society on the basis of gender. For Millennial feminism this means being consistent with the lessons of 1970s feminism and taking it further: historical feminism has made the concept of woman fluid, proving that women could do much more than what society expected of them. Millennial feminism also questions the experience of the body, claims the freedom to choose even gender and how to live it, in a complex relationship with one’s own psychophysical characteristics. Or even not to do it. There’s room for everyone. Finally, if for the feminism of the 70s the place of discussion was the self-awareness groups and the relationships born within the student left movement, for Millennial feminists the public scene in which to claim the political value of one’s private life was social media.

Millennial feminism, before being than doing

It is a feminism of being before doing, it is both its strength and its limit. For the rest his objectives are always the same, focused on the present: equality, equal opportunities, equal wages, reproductive and bodily autonomy, liberation from imposed expectations, self-determination. That is to say freedom from violence that limits the development of womenwhatever that means depending on the body, class, race, sexual orientation, ability, faith or origin of the women seeking it.

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