social movements are among the hardest of all social behaviors to understand analyze and predict they are rare episodic in the church have absent flows that often did not accomplish what many in the movement originally wanted them to accomplish often the goals the strategy the vision of a movement as it moves along becomes more murky complicated factionalized and conflicted yet during those relatively brief and rare episodes where historical movements of social change do occur they can profoundly transform and affect the societies and individuals they become part of including of course those who are not supporters of the particular movement these individuals and groups might respond by trying to create counter movements which then could be met by counter counter movements that try to redefine the struggle creating separate periods or waves in the process it gets complicated the movement has been one of those profoundly important social movements that historically gone through what many recognize as for waves of feminism first wave feminism from the early twentieth century to around  nine focused on politics women's suffrage property rights and political candidacy it culminated in the ratification of the nineteenth amendment in one nine hundred twenty which secured a woman's right to vote the second wave from the one nine hundred sixty s one nine hundred eighty s is usually defined by its dedication to social and economic justice reproductive rights and aiming to reduce inequalities and sex family in the workplace it struggled to be intersectional that is they felt there was a need to examine the links and interconnected structure of society to include an analysis of race class gender and sexual orientation third way feminism from the one nine hundred ninety s to two thousand focus on the bracing individual ism and diversity attempting to redefine what it means to be a woman and empowering women to the find their own beauty rather than simply being objects of men's desires third wave feminism empowered trans individuals who are largely ignored by most feminists up to that point the contemporary fourth wave is less univers recognized but is said to concentrate on public discourse through public spaces the internet and social media examples are the meat to campaign body positivity movements sexual assault awareness and slut walks we are thrilled to have on the rack imagination one of the most prolific and powerful young voices of the movement today she's an author and editor a journalist who writes about women sex politics and the economy and her work has appeared in the new york times the washington post new york magazine the guardian playboy and rikki among many others she is the  girl drive crisscrossing america redefining feminism a road trip book of essays and photography about the state of young feminism across the united states she's worked for n b c national public radio good magazine the chicago tribune splitter magazine and writes a regularly published newsletter called fucking through the apocalypse she's edited in award winning anthology of her mother rock criticism out of the vinyl deeps as well as a more comprehensive collection of her work the essential island willis which one by the way the two thousand and fourteen national book circles critic award for criticism the daughter of two the most famous and prolific left we political scholar and activists america has ever produced ellen willis and stanley aronowitz our guest has become a major literary voice in her own right for her millennial generation and all her father was on the very first radical magic and show almost three and a half years ago and i'm so pleased to welcome today to the radical magination so thank you nomen it is great to hear that was a little long but there's a lot to a lot thinner duce you for and that i get to force waves correct more  r and tell us how you fit in on all this how you became interested in writing so much about young feminism this is as it's struggling with  but for our or the but for yeah help us understand this monumental struggle sure i mean i started becoming interested in feminism before it went to defiantly mainstream i'd say that was four or five years ago when all of a sudden it wasn't that crazy to call yourself a feminist and beyond say i was calling myself a feminist and lady gaga and taylor swift were calling themselves feminists but when i started to get interested in it it was two thousand six or two thousand and five two thousand and six when i was still in college i went to was leon university and at wesleyan it wasn't a it wasn't a dirty word but it was by no means universally accepted in the mainstream it was kind of at a l actually there was the me right it was i guess i mean sort of i can't really tell because i was as you mentioned raised by a second wave feminist ellen willis and so it was sort of in my blood and in the in the air when i was growing but if you're in new york and i was in new york and was really it's a pretty you know progressive leftist place but it's not like it was something that my friends and i talked about all that much but then in two thousand  my mother died and i really think of that as a flash point for my own feminism where i had to be kind of deliberate about it what it meant to me versus what it meant to my mother and all of the people who were reaching out to me after her death because i was sort of taking it for granted that i was a feminist but i didn't really know what that meant to me or my generation and this was at this point more than ten years ago i'm thirty four now but i was twenty two and she died and it was really the first time i had deliberately thought about it so you had conversations with her growing up about what about your her her mother your mother your mother's that was their mother's mother interesting question she was a housewife she or i guess a stay at home mom in today's parlance she was an educated woman who went to n y u on a scholarship for math of all things and just never had a career but seemed ok with it seemed relatively content i don't i don't necessarily think she had the famous betty for dan malays that a lot of housewives had during that period she had three children in the forty's and early fifty's and husband was a my grandfather was a was a cop and in new york city all right they grew up in the bronx and then in queens that was my mom and her two siblings and they were they were i'd say liberal  grandfather had strange that sort of communism but mostly they were liberal they were voted for even as a as a police officer yeah i think yeah exactly he wasn't i think it was a little different back then when there were more there was more of  political stance when you were a cop mean he he was kind of he had an interesting story he was at one point a hobo and you know jumping the box cars during the not a right wing cop by anyway but we understand what it was to be a hobo and to be down and yeah he did they would just pick on yeah it was much i mean look i didn't know him as an adult but from what i can tell he had a good class analysis race not so much and also feminism not so much i remember very specifically it was kind of a joke in our family in our nuclear family about how you know he was politically  mother would get the salt and nothing very much about it and my grandmother your grandmother yeah i'm sure my mama wouldn't i mean i think from a pretty early age she if i'm remembering correctly because she has written about her childhood i think she was defiant of gender roles but didn't realize that it was a social problem she just knew she didn't want to be a housewife she thought that was boring she didn't want to do to manic chores she didn't want to end up like her mother ok but i think that seventy s porn and the sexual revolution how it affected and reflected what was going on with the sexual revolution this was not a thesis about like the pro sex feminists versus the anti porn feminists at all there were probably a few a few paragraphs in there about katherine mckinnon and andrea dworkin it was more about the the the narratives within the pornographic movies it was actually kind of a film social history more than anything else and i almost stumbled upon all of this feminist and sexual revolution literature and theory while i was doing it and i was a little bit confused i was kind of like wait a second like i thought pornography was like prose sexual it wasn't maybe she was on during the late seventy's but i was basically doing movies movies and the reason why i chose that this is a whole other tangent but let's start in this yeah i mean because it's about film history  also which is that for ten years there the the the laws were pretty lax when it came to pornography public displays of pornography so there were a lot of sort of like porn  wars you know a lot of building nights kind of trying to legitimize this actual cinema and i can't say that they ever got to that level but what was interesting about those those movies is that since they were publicly shown right before video but after they had sort of been liberated from these repressive laws not just in times square not when times there was really times square and does it live now yeah like you no things like porno sorry i was going to say things like porno chic but the new york times called it called this phenomenon porno chic where deep deep throat was was watched by the you know upper echelons of society and there was there was since the for real movies like two hours of an actual narrative you could tell how the social movements of the sixty's were incorporated in these narrative and also how porn  revolution actual revolution but also feminism and on rideable rights movement there was all this stuff about you know sexual orientation in there and so i just sort of thought that that was interesting i had seen it all again who was sort of the white yeah but that's but it's interesting that you say like oh did you have a feminist wakening then not really like i was kind of like oh this is an interesting history but i didn't really think about what it meant to me and then all of a sudden when my mom died that's really when i started to i wouldn't say awakening because i was always a feminist but it was a more deliberate chapter of my life as a family to begin forgive her words when you see your family what does that mean to you or what does that to you as that time what did i mean me at that time and i mean for me it just meant that you have an awareness of of how your life is a certain way because you're a woman and that a lot of it i unfair and that it that we should sort of overcome oppressive and restrictive gender roles and that like women and men and everybody in between should have the same rights and right but that's pretty standard for dinner so i think it's what is standard but for me it was standard because it was just sort of the way i grew up but shortly after my mom died my friend emma and i went on this road trip to  are fine with the word feminism it's like not even a problem right when we went on this road trip there were all kinds of answers to that question do you consider yourself a feminist what issues are insured are important to you when now is photojournalist is with was of the idea and just to explore in the interview and in and what was the purpose of the trip personal  what did you have in mind what were you trying to accomplish i think well i think we were interested in the topic of feminism but knew that we had grown up in this very  but i think beyond that it was the reason why we did this road trip as opposed to just calling a bunch of women just because we were twenty two and we just wanted to get out there and i think neither of us had really traveled across the country  and so forth like it's like now that i look back on it years later i'm like guys like we just should have gone out on the road like why did we have to like make it a book because in some ways it sort of ruined it because we were just really working the whole time oh i see you know and it was it was sort of externally ambitious of us and like in some ways happy that we did it but other ways i was kind of like wow like sometimes we were so focused on the work that we couldn't see the forest from the trees and just relax and that's actually in the book too so that means you should take it really took another road trip without right yeah yeah it's not a car you're still it wasn't a freewheeling bob dylan type of road trip that way i was on a few but i guess what all right because it may you have this incredible book and what did you learn from what you find out oh man this is so long ago again it seems and there was a lot of energy that i was really inspired by we talked to a lot of of activists and a lot of how did you meet these people i mean you just went off the side of the road and went to a cafe or something and started talking to people bar or whatever how did you do that would be awesome but no i mean like that's like there were certain people you were well going to go see you had on the list or yeah so we we really i mean first of all i didn't have many journalistic skills at this point i was twenty three i had no idea really how to do reporting so we started with our own circles and then eventually it got like three or four degrees of separation away and i think it really lean  it really lean to like a city demographic rather than a role demographic just for like efficiency sake because we wanted to stop in one place and talk to a bunch of people but that's that's like you know we had this big excel  sheet and we then deliberately were filled in the gaps once we had those three or four degrees of separation away we then sort of were saying well we need like native american woman and we need like a poor on like a few mini road trips here and there right so there was no real universal voice of feminism you were finding out there right no in fact it was sort of like i would say disheartening because all overall it was it was heartening there were a lot of women who were really opinionated and really accomplished ambitious but the word feminism had really been doing like it was it was a loaded and charged word for some people it meant nothing at all now i feel like there's really through a variety of factors it's really just a word that that people have embraced again and that was not the case in two thousand and seven two seven nineteen it's except yeah and i think like in some ways people feel that it's been too mainstream that it's lost a little bit of its meaning but which is true would you want to granted yeah but but i do think overall that it's great that that people don't that you have you like don't have to say i'm not a feminist but anymore that's not a as much of a thing as it was twelve years ago when we embarked on this road trip wonder what that meant and explain that now when i tell you shiva you can imagine that was a whole other story there but in any case not to bum a sound here about the the road trip of sorts but there was a recent times article about a particular guest single women travelling around the world and the reasonable and directive them yes and that's just it's credibly disheartening to put it mildly i mean so what do you make of that i mean the danger of the end i mean in my time was hitchhiking all over the place oh yeah so while we were in hitchhiking i think we had fantasies of doing that kind of thing but we did think about the the danger element like we did well i mean because we didn't feel threatened but we thought about how it's really curtailed female roadtrip narrative throughout history where there's always kind of this dark cloud of danger threatening women on the road that said i mean i felt pretty safe we we were trying to think if we ever had a scare i mean we had some car trouble and i felt a little bit a little bit regretful that i didn't know more about cars and i think that's definitely gendered when you have car trouble and you don't really know how to change a tire or anything like that that certainly gendered but i didn't feel threatened and that might be because of the places we decided to go we were mostly in cities and it's where i think of cities is safer to see if there's more people around  i guess like at that point detroit was a little dicey but not in terms of i mean i did for some reason we didn't feel that way we were we were welcomed by people who knew us and r i didn't know who she was frankly until the nation assigned this piece to me i was twenty two this was a lot also a long time ago but yeah i thought that she was cool i mean i  again i wouldn't say that it's really hard for me to have idols and role models and things like that especially politicians because if you write well i mean she was amazing but for a politician but even have lots of just made lots of tactical decisions that that make my skin crawl i mean every putting their not putting was schroeder the hell in her that right that she she had a baby now so she interesting yeah and i just feel that like politicians in general right now are not my role models that said bella abzug is a pretty amazing one and she made the links that i think sensibilities she's sort of i recognise her feminism as sort of naturally feminist and part of a puzzle piece of a of a larger progressive ideology and not kind of how i feel i mean it's interesting that you ask about my recent work because for a while i was a little like after girl drive and after a period of time where i wrote a lot about women's issues i felt a little bit like that was limiting and putting me in a box and so i i became a generalist which i'm really happy about i mean first of all it's seeing various issues through a feminist lens but within this larger understanding yeah i mean for a while  yeah i mean so on yeah i mean i was doing last race yeah i was doing a lot of stuff about the economy and inequality and and education and all of that for years that wouldn't necessarily be consider it's a feminist issue at first glance i got you know why not well i don't know i mean i think anybody who actually knows what feminism is knows that they're all related but if somebody is a again a lay person to the issues they're thinking well what does that have to do with you know women's rights and nowadays i think young feminists know that it's not just women to it it's sort of there's like a gender spectrum and and that discussion is part of feminism too and it's generally only that though i think it's it's like i don't consider my son is i'm just defensive politics like you know trying to beat back all of this oppression i also want to say what you approach that how do you carry on the discussion with men and what's going on campuses because i mean you tell me i mean what what or what's your general use of journalis one of some of the figures that you can really tell us that you trust here i mean it sounds like sexual harassment is just epidemic proportions is that i think it is i think it is a i'm not trying to minimize that i think it's really important that we're talking about sexual harassment and sexual assault but i think when we talk about that it's easy to just assume this of defensive crouch and not present an alternative active vision of pleasure and mutual and to see as and sort of eradicate this model of women as gatekeeper and men as aggressor and when we talk about sexual assault and sexual harassment we still haven't figured out how to connect that to the conversation about good sex fulfilling facts i think that's one of the main problems that that has always pla for the like feminist conversation about sex and sexuality is that you have to be able to simultaneously critique abuse like rape  harassment while putting it in the context of sexual freedom and i think a lot of people think that they're mutually exclusive but younger people intuitively understand that they're not and yet we still haven't quite articulated  uing me like i'm in the process of trying to articulate those two things at the same time like what you do see younger people are somehow getting it more or when you see what you mean by that they're well i think that the third way so this is extremely reductive but if you're going to put it in like the most simple terms it's like for now the second wave was like prose sex feminists like my mom and like quote unquote hesitate to even say this like anti sex feminist that that assumes sort of like a victimhood about sex like we have to be protected from men's worse impulse and anger anger marketed sort of like commodified strains of that is like everything is ok sex is ok let's not critique women for putting their bodies on display we're talking about like girls gone wild feminism the high heel lipstick feminism and i think our generation is now just having like bits and pieces of both and if i can speak for myself i certainly have taken bits and pieces of both and all you know like i'm i'm certainly pro pro sex in the way that my mother is in the tradition but i'm also as i think she was to be fair very attuned to the impossible binds that were put in when it comes to gate keeper an aggressor or with sacks and that can manifest in all sorts of you know violence discomfort etc and then i also think that people just a little more explanation that the human as short sexual gatekeepers yes which ok who is put how what structure creates that and what does that do for the militia to men and what they may feel about that so i mean i think we still struggle with somewhat community here and right but but aside from the most progressive communities that still exist depressingly you know if they say you know and it's it's harmful because  for both sides right yeah of course it is because think about what happened this is like something that i've said so much better to say it again is that that moment during the height of me to where aziz ansari got accused of not rape but sort of going beyond the worst of havior during a bad day ok i think that's just the key to understanding this bridge between sexual pleasure on one hand and like victimhood and violence on the other hand which is you can still have sort of consensual sex and still feel icky and bad because clearly what disease ansari was doing was trying to get enthusiastic consent affirmative consent is its own complicated issue but i think at father it's saying you shouldn't want to have sex with someone who doesn't really want to have sex with you and there's just i think like little boys and little girls before they learn anything should learn that you shouldn't want to try to convince somebody to have sex with you who doesn't want to have sex with you and even if you do get a yes from her or him me or whoever does that person really want to be there because that is that person like dying to do it i think that's a really good rule to live by and a surprising amount of people on all across the political spectrum just don't live by that including women like they think like they sort of sublimate their own sexual desires and they manage men's instead and that's a terrible thing in other words their sex their their pleasure is subordinate true yeah our like fending off men's expectations are always trying to keep men's expectations and desires in mind like i don't think that there is a space after all this time and all of these decades for women to sort of person to their own desires and fantasies and also feel safe and i think i've in my personal life i've come across where it's like sometimes i'm trying to express myself  sexually and get and then and think i'm with somebody safe and then they sort of take advantage of the fact that i want to express myself freely because they think that's sort of a license to disrespect me and i think a lot of women feel that way too it's like on one hand we've been told like of course women like sex go out and get it and then there's still this feeling like oh well if that woman is liking saxon pursuing sex well she's a slut who you know can that can now be disrespected very many people of my generation realize that parallel to the feminist movement there was sort of this minor but visible men's liberation movement where men were trying to examine their own  participation in oppression and and and how they're a victim of gender roles too and how if they can't express their emotions or anger it ends up hurting people around them and hurting  people some individuals went pretty deep with it but whatever these consciousness raising sessions were they they weren't really interrogating like saw jenny and violence and and harmful energy like that in the power dynamic that men just inherently have over women are not inherently but sort of you know worked out at this point socially but i think like nowadays it's it's like gotten so much better men now know that massage any of that in the patriarchy is bad or at least some men know and yet sometimes they really have trouble applying those principles to their own life and their own behavior i mean during me too we've seen a lot of progressive men in fact that doesn't really seem like it correlates with politics really you know like there are some progressive men there are some like right wing men and they're all kind of doing the same things and so i think there's a lot of on in this a stunt sibly kind of libertarian let's not libertarian but libertine institution and so i think that's been a real disappointment not that we didn't know that before i think like anybody i think any woman really knows that but that that's been part of the public discussion in a way that it really hasn't and that's great i think that's a good start you think the role of how much would you put emphasis on drugs and alcohol when it as part of that or or the confusion that comes about and how far to go and you know being able to say no in this event how much do you think that is coloring this this interaction i mean on campus i guess in particular yeah if you're putting yourself in that position and whatever getting high and so on and however aren't you i mean what happens there in terms of the rules and regulations when one person is semi wasted or both but when you tell a woman not to drink as a way to prevent getting raped that's advice that like you know i guess is practical but it's certainly putting the onus on her and certainly not tackling the real issue which is massage and there was actually just a study about that that was like and it was like seemed like an onion article or it was like the headline was something like study shows that like toxic masculinity not alcohol is the main factor in rape and it's like well i think that i think there's all that where does that rage particular and women seemed to give him a pass you know just him of course yeah well i think first of all women can be can have internalized massage any also in the same way like in same way any think a lot of white women in particular sort of make this calculus of should i should i vote for this candidate that's going to sort of uphold the status quo which includes power for  white people for rich people for all kinds of people who are so the racism trumps that i think in this sense it trumps it because racism has in some ways always been about protecting white women hood especially racism against black people and against immigrants the sort of the violent rhetoric around and around minorities in the implication for just hundreds of years has been like you have to protect your w and i think a lot of white women have internalized that and are saying well this is a better calculus for me to have some modicum of power to just vote with my husband and you know i mean that's an oversimplification but i think that's a huge a huge factor but i also think this is like what made me want to write about men's liberation and see like how far they'd come because i do feel as if there's a huge gap when it comes to people addressing men massaging this anger like there's nobody progressive talking to these guys like the people filling the gaps are like the m r i is and jordan peterson and paul along like an aggressive manner not even dealing with with these other men and i just feel like that's that's you know yeah well there's there's so much to go i wanted to get into the women's march some of the issues the very disheartening what do you make of that with what there are women dividing along lines that are just a necessary how can we stop this how can we overcome th behavior yeah why i think i might not be the best person to talk about the women's march in particular only because my position is that i'm not really sure why i was like it's now like a a yearly thing and it seems kind of silly like like to just have it like i don't know like the march on washington like like martin luther king's martin march on washington happened like one time and then that's like that's great that's that was the historic right and it was going to be a yearly thing yeah like i'm not really sure what's a yearly thing but in terms of then i semitism i think i think there's a baby bathwater situation i definitely think that was an issue and i understand why people are very upset about it but i don't think that it disquiet fully disqualified the women's march i don't think it should have been and it didn't see much of a problem is yeah i don't think it's but the thing is with like if i can talk about this generally i think like feminism has so much like in fighting it just sort of has this reputation for having a lot of in fighting it's partly because we're talking about such a huge segment of the population that it's really really hard to just get women in and like i mean and also like trans women and six women all together because we're talking about millions and millions of people we're not talking about ten percent of the population or five percent of the population it's like it's so hard to come up with one issue that really unifies women or like feminists you know so this is an israel we hope to have haven't i think a lot of women feel a lot of women of color feel really torn between like racial activism and like feminist activism and like feel very frustrated by people who don't understand that it cult like they collaborate with each other like people with sort of multiple marginalized identities often very frustrated about being put under this big mike take care of  limit myself to just writing about feminist issues and i think that was the whole reason why like i felt a little bit like i mean i'm interested in it right now because i'm trying i'm doing a lot of research about the second wave period and  i'm really concentrating on gender and sex but then there's this nagging feeling like there's so much that was left out then like is is not left out now in the current dialogue and like that's kind of why i left it for a while because then again i would always use my found us lens but i was doing a lot of other reporting on like on like the economy and politics and who's going to get and ideals and generational politics and things like that yeah gosh and we only have a minute or so l do see it also within a socialist framework yeah i really do i mean i think that's where my dad comes and yeah but a little more time on that but yeah no i mean seriously i think that the recession really radicalized me and my generation as like really exposing the harm of capitalism and i think like that a o c d generation has just been kind of like it's it's janice joplin i want to love somebody you can't do