One year after Mr. "Grab 'em by the p*ssy" was elected president in 2016, Time Magazine's Person of the Year was "the great silence breakers" of the MeToo movement.
This reckoning appears to have sprung up overnight. But it has actually been simmering for years, decades, centuries. Women have had it with bosses and co-workers who not only cross boundaries but don't even seem to know that boundaries exist. They've had it with the fear of retaliation, of being blackballed, of being fired from a job they can't afford to lose. They've had it with the code of going along to get along. They've had it with men who use their power to take what they want from women. These silence breakers have started a revolution of refusal, gathering strength by the day, and in the past two months alone, their collective anger has spurred immediate and shocking results: nearly every day, CEOs have been fired, moguls toppled, icons disgraced. In some cases, criminal charges have been brought.
One of the seminal moments for that movement came a year later when Oprah Winfrey gave this speech at the 2018 Golden Globe Awards ceremony.
But, Green wrote, Bannon believes the most powerful backlash to Trump is bigger than Winfrey, who’s been the subject of much 2020 speculation. He’s most concerned by the women-led wave of liberal, anti-Trump activism, fueled by the #MeToo movement.
“The anti-patriarchy movement is going to undo ten thousand years of recorded history,” Bannon told Green. “You watch. The time has come. Women are gonna take charge of society. And they couldn’t juxtapose a better villain than Trump. He is the patriarch.”…”This is a definitional moment in the culture,” Bannon told Green of the Hollywood awards ceremony.
In her speech, Oprah declared that, "For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dare speak the truth to the power of those men. But their time is up. Their time is up." That terrified members the patriarchy whose power over women depended on silence.
It is important to keep those days in mind as the president-elect - who has been accused of sexual misconduct or assault by at least 18 women and was found liable by a jury for sexual abuse - nominates several men to his cabinet who have been accused of sexual assault.
In defense of one of those nominees (Pete Hegseth), Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) said that "We've all had some indiscretions in our past and things like that." On the one hand, it is truly abhorrent for Roy to refer sexual assault as simply an "indiscretion." But he also says what a lot of us learned during the height of the MeToo Movement: sexual assault is practically ubiquitous in this culture.
Steve Bannon knew that, when women stood up and spoke out, the whole patriarchal culture was threatened. So the backlash against that possibility is now underway as the "p*ssy-grabber" tries to reinstate male dominance over women in ways both large and small.
They think we're going to keep quiet while they do that. Will we?
I think that if the incoming Trump administration tries for a national abortion ban and/or a national contraception ban per Project 2025's directives, there will be a new feminist movement. Many of my female Gen Z co-workers have already talked about replicating South Korea's 4B Movement here in the U.S. Steve Bannon has got to know, like he did in the previous Trump administration, that one can't poke the hornets' nest without getting stung. Apparently this is a lesson that Gen Z bros are going to have to learn the hard way.
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