An Open Letter To Gloria Steinem On Intersectional Feminism

Dear Gloria,

I want to ask you what happened.

I held you up among my idols when I was a young radical. I read “A Bunny’s Tale” at 16 and was blown away by your courage and dedication. I met you once, at a luncheon for women in politics. One of my professors took our women’s studies class to hear your keynote speech. I got to shake your hand. I thanked you for everything you’d done to make my life possible.

So imagine my surprise, nearly two decades later, to find you stumping for Hillary Clinton by suggesting that the only reason millennial women overwhelmingly support Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination is that we want to impress men. It was so outrageously misogynist that you actually managed to shock Bill Maher. Your halfhearted apology a few days later called it a case of “talk show interruptus,” but you of all people should understand how much words matter.

“I don’t mean to overgeneralize,” you foreshadowed, “but men tend to get more conservative because they gain power as they age, and women get more radical because they lose power as they age. So it’s kind of not fair to measure most women by the standard of most men, because they’re going to get more activist as they get older.” Then you added, laughing at your own joke, “And when you’re young…