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“It Doesn’t Happen Here, So We Don’t Have To Take It Seriously” PART ONE
October 2016. The Dutch edition of WE SHOULD ALL BE FEMINISTS had just been published. I was scheduled to go to Amsterdam on book tour, and had agreed to do a few press interviews by telephone before my trip.
The first was with a reputable journalist at a reputable newspaper who asked me about Beyonce, if I really believed her to be feminist, especially as she and I did not seem very similar in our concerns.
I said I did. I said I believed there were different feminisms, that all were valid, that we start from the same basic premise of equality but have different focuses, and that my feminism was different from hers. I said Beyonce focused on the idea of men doing right by women – which reflected the reality of the lives of millions of women all over the world, women who put men at the center of their lives.
I said I wished this reality wasn’t so. I wished women would not devote so much to men who did not reciprocate this devotion, because it created an unhealthy cycle of self-shrinking dependence.
This was obviously a criticism not of Beyonce’s feminism but of a patriarchal reality.
I said that I believed Beyonce, in the world of celebrities, was a cultural force for good. I said I resented how she was often policed by people (mostly journalists and academics, judging by their questions to me) who seemed to think that a commercial musician could not also genuinely believe in gender equality. I said that she was in charge of her life and her career and I found that admirable. I said I thought she was lovely.
A few days later the newspaper put up a short excerpt from the interview, in English, and gave it the headline ‘Beyonce’s Feminism is not my Feminism.’
See the article below:
(Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie has spoken little about the impact of having Beyoncé use a sample of her “We should all be feminists” TED Talk in the singer’s 2013 self-titled album.
But when she finally opened up about it to a Dutch paper this week, Adichie explained that the experience was less than flawless.
“I was shocked about how many requests for an interview I received when that song was released. Literally every major newspaper in the world wanted to speak with me about Beyoncé. I felt such a resentment,” Adichie told the Dutch, laughing at that last line. Her resentment came from how people felt she should be grateful for the plug.
“I found that disappointing. I thought: I am a writer and I have been for some time and I refuse to perform in this charade that is now apparently expected of me: 'Thanks to Beyoncé, my life will never be the same again.' That's why it didn't speak about it much.'”Though she makes sure to acknowledge that she admires Beyoncé greatly, and thinks she is a celebrity of the first order that provided a platform for feminism that is hard to match, she recognizes the difference between their feminism.
“Still, her type of feminism is not mine, as it is the kind that, at the same time, gives quite a lot of space to the necessity of men. I think men are lovely, but I don't think that women should relate everything they do to men: did he hurt me, do I forgive him, did he put a ring on my finger?” she says.)
It was click-bait. A cynical headline.
Headlines matter because headlines – especially in today’s world where many read with reduced attention spans – shape a reader’s approach to an article.
I wrote and complained to the journalist – a woman whose questions and demeanor during the interview had been thoughtful and intelligent.
I told her the headline was sensationalized and manipulative, that it deliberately misrepresented my intent, and that the excerpt itself was incomplete and lacked context.
She wrote back and assured me that the full interview, to be published in Dutch, had fully captured what I had said and would have a different headline.
The full article in Dutch was, in her words, “way more nuanced, as your opinions are.” The Dutch headline was, she said: ‘A crystal clear argumentation on complete equality.’
But of course the damage was done. How many people who read the English excerpt would read the full Dutch version?
And why would a Dutch newspaper, after conducting an interview I had been told would be published in Dutch, make the odd choice of publishing online a small, sensationalized English excerpt?
To be fair, the journalist probably didn’t write that headline, as many journalists don’t write their own headlines. An editor must have done so. And perhaps she didn’t make the decision of pulling something out of context and publishing it in English, while leaving out the rest to be published in Dutch.
I am not interested in naming names, because I am concerned not with individual journalists or editors but with a certain kind of corporate ‘anxiety journalism’ in which they are employed and whose rules they are compelled to follow.
The anxiety of getting as many clicks as possible. The anxiety of not being entertaining or controversial enough. The anxiety of fearing their own irrelevance in an age of youth-pandering, shallowness-rewarding advertising.
So that journalism becomes an exercise not in the service of truth but in the service of numbers. Especially when covering personalities. (Take, for example, the coverage of Madonna’s speech at the Women’s March. Most of the headlines, and even the news stories, were about her ‘blowing up the white house,’ when in fact her speech was about rejecting violence and choosing peaceful means of protest.)
Real controversies should of course be reported but invented ones are disingenuous. That headline ‘Beyonce’s Feminism is not my Feminism’ was about giving a false impression of antagonism. It was about seeking to create the illusion of an attack in order to generate publicity. And it traded in that most misogynistic of ideas: the ‘catfight.’
I do not believe in a magical idea of ‘sisterhood’ where all women agree with one another because they are women. Disagreements between women are normal. But I do strongly quarrel with the invention of animosity between women where there is none.
~CNA
“It Doesn’t Happen Here, So We Don’t Have To Take It Seriously” PART TWO
(This is a strange time to criticize journalism, by the way, because the unhinged American president has lied about journalists and turned journalism into an easy punching bag. Journalism is not just important but sacred. It is a necessity in any democracy, because it informs, it educates, and it sets the agenda.)
And so I arrived in Amsterdam, feeling a little wary.
I had been invited to appear on a TV show that my publisher characterized as one of the best in the Netherlands. The Dutch version of Meet the Press, I was told.
Donald Trump’s boast about assaulting women was still in the news, and the TV show host wanted to talk about it.
When I told him that Trump was the perfect example of male privilege, because a woman who behaved exactly like him would never be the nominee of a major political party, the host asked what this hypothetical woman would boast about.
I told him she would probably go around boasting about grabbing men’s penises.
And his reply was: “that would be great, wouldn’t it?”
I was stunned. So taken aback that I half-laughed before saying that no, I did not think it would be great.
He persisted: “No?”
Afterwards, I was annoyed with myself. Because I had allowed myself to be goaded; I had trivialized my own point. Simplistic comparisons of that sort are neither useful nor accurate.
If a person who is part of a powerful group assaults someone in a non-powerful group, it is not the simple equivalent of a non-powerful group member assaulting a powerful group member. Power differences matter.
And I was still stunned by those words: “that would be great, wouldn’t it?”
There was something flippant in his manner, a condescension that had convinced itself that it was humor. Feminism was a subject not to be seriously discussed but dismissively challenged in a way that would expose you as humorless if you were to object.
Sexism, his tone seemed to say, is foreign. Misogyny does not happen here.
The Dutch thinker Gloria Wekker, in her brilliant book WHITE INNOCENCE, describes debates about Dutch society as having a self-congratulatory national tone, because the Netherlands believes itself to be ‘a paradise of emancipation.’
WHITE INNOCENCE is a lucid unearthing of a nation’s image of itself. It is an illuminating collage of history, politics, and anthropology.
It helped me better contextualize not only the TV interview but that ‘catfight!’ headline.
I only wish I had read it sooner. I hope it finds the many more readers that it deserves.
~CNA
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