Shhh. What’s that sound? Listen very carefully. Can you hear it?
If you’re listening for any mention of women or gender or sexism or misogyny in the mainstream media post-election narrative, don’t bother — you won’t hear a damn thing.
That storyline has been written out of the narrative, replaced by narratives about how gee, Hillary Clinton just wasn’t the right candidate (who beat Bernie Sanders handily in the primary, but anyway), sad tick-tocks of internecine Dem party warfare (90 percent of people who prognosticate on such things assumed an HRC win, but anyway), how Donald Trump really tapped into a new revolution with his authentic straight talk (but God forbid anyone should mention racism or sexism or — what’s that phrase Steve Bannon? — white supremacy), how the white working class was ignored (because the working class is obviously all white, and why examine why affluent educated white men and women might have voted for Trump, right?), how fake news is the worst (it is, but who wants to examine why stories about Hillary Clinton being a monster might have taken hold?), how Russia hacked the election (enlisting the media’s help, so eager were they to paint Hillary Clinton as aforementioned monster) and finally, how it’s time to Come Together And Not Be Distracted By Identity Politics.
Well. You’ll hear something 2017: the sound of women getting loud AF.
Look: If you don’t think the 2016 election was chock-full of misogyny and sexism, I’ve got a degree from Trump University to sell you. (Here, you can catch up by reading a little Rebecca Traister – this, this, this – I’ll wait. Women are patient, ha ha ha ha sob.)
That matters, because it led us here. In the span of six weeks women have gone from losing the dream to losing Constitutionally-protected reproductive rights (in Ohio, as a definite harbinger of things to come) while the President-elect holds cheer-referendums on whether it sucks to be called “person of the year” instead of “man of the year.”
But since it’s 2016 and not 1958, that toothpaste is not going back in the tube so easily. Women who want to have lives and have careers and have babies if they damn well want to and not for any other reason decided by any other person are going to say so.
They — we — are going to be loud about it on Twitter, and on Facebook and Snapchat and Instagram Stories, and at a certain march on Washington next month. We’re going to be loud about it in print and in art. We’re going to start more podcasts, because cable news is still pale, male, and stale but examples like Another Round and 2 Dope Queens and Call Your Girlfriend have now provided templates. We’re going to start more newsletters, because examples like theSkimm and Lenny are successful and influential and are now models to copy, and in the meantime starting a TinyLetter is really easy (see Nisha Chittal’s This Week In Lady News) and a platform to build from (see The Ann Friedman Weekly). Samantha Bee provides a delicious role model for brilliant, scorching satire — and though it’s a little harder to whoosh up a late-night show, I will say that I’ll watch a Liz Plank video any time it drops.
Does this mean every single new tweet or podcast or TinyLetter or YouTube video will explode into viral acclaim? Of course not. But some of them will. Because there is an audience for it, and a market for it.
And because they’ll have help. I am the cofounder of a collective for professional women called TheLi.st which runs an active, engaged listserv, and since the election the number of active, engaged all-female communities I have joined has skyrocketed, including one coven and one She-Woman Misogyny Hater’s Club. The day after the election, IRL member clubhouse for women The Wing opened its doors to any woman who needed space. And there’s that march on Washington next month. Women matter, and that’s a message that they — we — will be hungry to send, and receive, and amplify.
Jay Caspian Kang’s piece warning that media companies would thin the herd of minority journalists in the Trump era was chilling, but there may be one bulwark against it: That content does well, and demand for it is only going to go up. Feminist media overlaps here, intersectionally (as it should), but for lack of a better term, I believe that 2017 will evince even more of a market for identity-driven media now that diversity of identity is being so blatantly challenged. (NB: This is not to dismiss Kang’s argument, at all; just a hope that media orgs will be driven by the bottom line more than kowtowing to the Trump regime. Just let me hope that for now please, thanks.)
I keep seeing this phrase: The Resistance. Well, you’d better believe that women are part of it, just as they are so often the canary in the coal mine for needing it.
So: If you are a so-called woke white dude tempted to mansplain the misogyny out of the narrative, please do think again. (And for the love of God, do not lecture us on why Bernie would have beaten Trump. Jews haven’t been feeling super comfortable lately, either.) 2017 will see a standing army of women who came out of a bruising 2016 campaign hardened and scarred and with a mandate not unlike a 2.8-million vote lead in the popular vote.
The mandate is to be loud. Listen for it.
Rachel Sklar is cofounder and CEO of TheLi.st.
Dannagal G. Young The return of the gatekeepers
An Xiao Mina 2017 is for the attention innovators
Tanya Cordrey The resurgence of reach
Rubina Madan Fillion Snapchat grows up
Amie Ferris-Rotman Вслед за Россией
David Chavern Fake news gets solved
Tim Griggs The year we stop taking sides
Priya Ganapati Mobile websites are ready for reinvention
Dan Colarusso Let’s make live video we can love
Mary Meehan Feeling blue in a red state
Claire Wardle Verification takes center stage
Nicholas Quah Podcasting’s coming class war
Jonathan Stray A boom in responsible conservative media
Melody Kramer Radically rethinking design
Gabriel Snyder The aberration of 20th-century journalism
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Earn trust by working for (and with) readers
Eric Nuzum Podcasting stratifies into hard layers
M. Scott Havens Quality advertising to pair with quality content
Nathalie Malinarich Making it easy
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Truthiness in private spaces
Maria Bustillos “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”
Laura Walker Authentic voices, not fake news
Jim Friedlich A banner year for venture philanthropy
Michael Kuntz Trust is the new click
Moreno Cruz Osório The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism
Rebekah Monson Journalism is community-as-a-service
Ole Reißmann Un-faking the news
Matt Karolian AI improves publishing
Steve Henn The next revolution is voice
Mathew Ingram The Faustian Facebook dance continues
Tressie McMillan Cottom A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis
Rachel Sklar Women are going to get loud
Lam Thuy Vo The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication
Almar Latour Thanks, #fakenews
Andrew Ramsammy Rise of the rebel journalist
Carrie Brown-Smith We won’t do enough
Julia Beizer Building a coherent core identity
Francesco Marconi The year of augmented writing
Olivia Ma The year collaboration beats competition
Annemarie Dooling UGC as a path out of the bubble
Liz Danzico The triumph of the small
Juan Luis Sánchez Your predictions are our present
Errin Haines Chaos or community?
Mira Lowe News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”
Joanne Lipman The year of the drone, really
Geetika Rudra Journalism is community
Carla Zanoni Prioritizing emotional health
Ariane Bernard Better data about your users
Katie Zhu The year of minority media
Erin Pettigrew A year of reflection in tech
Erin Millar The bottom falls out of Canadian media
David Weigel A test for online speech
Taylor Lorenz “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing
Richard Tofel The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us
Amy O'Leary Not just covering communities, reaching them
Swati Sharma Failing diversity is failing journalism
Jonathan Hunt Measurement companies get with the times
Sara M. Watson There is no neutral interface
Renée Kaplan Pure reach has reached its limit
Mike Ragsdale A smarter information diet
Robert Hernandez History will exclude you, again
Cindy Royal Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid
Mandy Velez The audience is the source and the story
Elizabeth Jensen Trust depends on the details
Adam Thomas The coming collaboration across Europe
Ryan McCarthy Platforms grow up or grow more toxic
Dan Gillmor Fix the demand side of news too
Ståle Grut The battle for high-quality VR
Javaun Moradi What can we own?
David Skok What lies beyond paywalls
Alberto Cairo Communicating uncertainty to our readers
Helen Havlak Chasing mobile search results
Libby Bawcombe Kids board the podcast train
Mary Walter-Brown Getting comfortable asking for money
Cory Haik Navigating power in Trump’s America
Liz McMillen The year of deep insights
Vivian Schiller Tested like never before
Michael Oreskes Reversing the erosion of democracy
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen News after advertising may look like news before advertising
Megan H. Chan Cultural reporting goes mainstream
Rachel Schallom Stop flying over the flyover states
Alexis Lloyd Public trust for private realities
Asma Khalid The year of the newsy podcast
Mario García Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward
Alice Antheaume A new test for French media
Amy Webb Journalism as a service
Doris Truong Connecting with diverse perspectives
Ken Schwencke Disaggregation and collection
Kathleen Kingsbury Print as a premium offering
Andrew Haeg The year of listening
Matt Waite The people running the media are the problem
Bill Keller A healthy skepticism about data
Samantha Barry Messaging apps go mainstream
Dhiya Kuriakose The year of digital detoxing
Emily Goligoski Incorporating audience feedback at scale
Ashley C. Woods Local journalism will fight a new fight
Andrea Silenzi Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis
Andrew Losowsky Building our own communities
Sam Ford The year we talk about our awful metrics
Aja Bogdanoff Comments start pulling their weight
Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel A rebirth of populist journalism
Sue Schardt Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love
Lee Glendinning A call for great editing
Bill Adair The year of the fact-checking bot
Sydette Harry Facing journalism’s history
Zizi Papacharissi Distracted journalism looks in the mirror
P. Kim Bui The year journalism teaches again
Reyhan Harmanci Bear witness — but then what?
Umbreen Bhatti A sense of journalists’ humanity
Burt Herman Local news gets interesting
Tracie Powell Building reader relationships
Emi Kolawole From empathy to community
Corey Ford The year of the rebelpreneur
Margarita Noriega From pinning tweets to tweeting pins
Jon Slade Trusted news, at a premium
Caitlin Thompson High touch, high value
Guy Raz Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever
Nushin Rashidian A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions
Kawandeep Virdee Moving deeper than the machine of clicks
Jeremy Barr A terrible year for Tiers B through D
Hillary Frey Forests need to burn to regrow
Millie Tran International expansion without colonial overtones
Keren Goldshlager Defining a focus, and then saying no
Scott Dodd Nonprofits team up for impact
Molly de Aguiar Philanthropists galvanize around news
Anita Zielina The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom
Tim Herrera The safe space of service journalism
Peter Sterne A dangerous anti-press mix
Sarah Wolozin Virtual reality on the open web
Sarah Marshall Focusing on the why of the click
Christopher Meighan Unlocking a deeper mobile experience