Feminists of the past faced angry critics, letters to the editor and even protests. But the incessant, violent, sneering, sexualized hatred their successors absorb is harder to escape. For women of color, racial abuse comes along with the sexism. “I have received racialized rape threats that I don’t think I would necessarily receive if I were white,” Wilson says. “A lot of things about anatomy — black women’s anatomy.” She finds herself talking about the online abuse in therapy, she says. “There is trauma, especially related to the death and rape threats,” she says. Eventually, such sustained abuse ends up changing people — both how they live and how they work.
In her epochal book “Backlash,” Susan Faludi described the anti-feminist cultural messages of the 1980s as a “relentless whittling-down process” that “served to stir women’s private anxieties and break their political wills.” Today’s online backlash may be even more draining. It saps morale and leads to burnout. “You can’t get called a c--- day in, day out for 10 years and not have that make a really serious impact on your psyche,” says Valenti, who thinks about quitting “all the time.” Just how long can this generation of feminists endure?
