I was walking through the park this week and saw a folding table set up with a sparkly purple tablecloth, manned by a woman in a purple beret. “BUY WEED FROM WOMEN: Join the movement,” a large sign in front of the table read. That’s sort of odd, I thought to myself. And then a friend sent me a post from the editor in chief of Jezebel, the feminist blogging site popular in the 2010s that’s somehow still going, reminding its readers that it’s still “covering abortion rights” and “calling out celebs.”
At this point I had to accept it: Helen Lewis is right. Millennial feminism, which has apparently committed itself to breaking into male-dominated world of drug dealing, and canceling Gwyneth Paltrow, is past its “use by” date. Or at least it’s become a caricature of itself.
Lewis wrote about this in an essay this week about Lindy West’s memoir, Adult Braces. The book is about how West forced herself to embrace an open marriage that her husband insisted on—I will cheat on you and you will like it! Lewis’s point was that the memoir was the nail in the coffin for early internet feminism. “At the beginning, the movement felt intoxicating and liberating, but it soon became clear that sticking with millennial feminism would have required submitting ourselves to a voluntary lobotomy,” Lewis writes. “After all, Lindy West essentially did.”
