Lauren McKeon - No More Nice Girls: Gender, Power, and Why It’s Time to Stop Playing by the Rules

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F-Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism

Copyright 2020 Lauren McKeon

Published in Canada in 2020 and in the USA in 2020
by House of Anansi Press Inc.

www.houseofanansi.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: No more nice girls : gender, power, and why its time to stop playing by the rules / Lauren McKeon. Names: McKeon, Lauren, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190172657 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190172681 | ISBN 9781487006440 (softcover) | ISBN 9781487006457 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781487006464 (Kindle)
Subjects: LCSH: WomenSocial conditions21st century. |
LCSH: Womens rights. | LCSH: Equality. | LCSH: Feminism. |
LCSH: Sex discrimination against women. | LCSH: Power
(Social sciences) | LCSH: Social control.
Classification: LCC HQ1155 .M35 2020 | DDC 305.42dc23

Book design: Alysia Shewchuk

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.

O n November 8, 2016, I tried to pretend the TVs at my gym did not exist. Id shown up that night to my weekly class expecting to walk out sweaty and exalted. If America elected a woman as its leader (as all the pundits and polls suggested the country would), then, surely, Canada would follow. Anything felt possible. I imagined a cascade of broken status quos belligerent white men in crisp suits falling like dominos. But over the next hour, disbelief replaced excitement. At one point, our class melted away from our workout stations to pool, lost, around the TV. Women muttered shit, what, no, over and over again. That night, I couldnt sleep. I stayed seated on my bed, cross-legged, stunned. It didnt matter that I wasnt American, or that one of the wokest men on Earth supposedly ran my own country. Electing a blatant misogynist to one of the worlds most powerful positions symbolized something: we were fucked.

Since then, the question of women and power has undergone something of a renaissance largely because weve been forced to confront, once again, how much of it women still dont have. Quite literally overnight, many of us went from believing, with good reason, that wed never been closer to equality and power to reckoning with just how far away from both women truly were. In response, women woke up, gathered, and demanded change. All around the world, they protested. The momentum from the Womens March on Washington built into #MeToo and a very public reckoning with the everyday ways in which womens power and autonomy are constantly undermined.

Watching it all, I was galvanized. But I also felt as though I was stuck in a not-so-fun house of magic mirrors. Come one, come all! Watch as the road to equality shrinks, stretches, distorts! Sometimes it seemed as if our fury, powerful in its own right, could propel us anywhere we wanted to go: into public office, into the C-suite, into a world in which we had bodily autonomy. Other times, as the anti-feminist backlash grew louder, bolder, and more expansive, it seemed as though women were in our most precarious spot yet. I began to think of feminist power as a paradox: from some vantages, we seemed closer than ever to achieving it; from others, wed never been further away.

I have spent the bulk of my journalism career investigating the ways in which women navigate, and in many cases push back against, the expectations of the world around them. In doing this, I now realize, what Ive really been asking, consciously or not, is how women disrupt and reimagine power structures, how they gain power both in and over their lives. Many of the women Ive interviewed are pioneers in their fields, often ones dominated by men, and you could say they are subverting from within. Others are pushing at established power structures from the outside, rallying from the grassroots. They are all inspiring and amazing. But is what theyre doing