While you were working on Blurred Lines, the spotlight on campus assault seemed, finally, to be growing brighter. Would you have predicted the current state of affairs - the backwardness of Betsy DeVos. Trump?!
Well, Trump changed everything. If Clinton was president, we wouldn’t be in this spot. We would be talking about how feminism is getting boring because we would be sick of talking about women and their rights. Now, we are in crisis.
My reporting from 2014 to 2017 traces what happened in the culture at large, which is it became incredibly political. College sexual assault became a lightening rod across the political spectrum. A cohort of Gen X and boomer liberal women don’t like this movement for the same reason that people didn't like Oprah or Sinead O’Connor back in the day; they are offended by the quick way some students are grabbing the cloak of victimhood. And the alt-right has expertly used rape hoaxes as a stalking horse for larger themes of misogyny. At the same time, feminism is still trendy. This ended up being one of the most interesting parts of the book to me, watching the way all of these ideas got turned into politics.
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