The Tina Fey Problem On the tragedy of 2010s feminism

When I was 12, my mom enrolled me in a running group, Girls on the Run, to shock me out of my pubescent laziness. For an hour, 24-year-old coaches would lead us around the track in our pink, Girls-on-the-Run-branded T-shirts. They eventually broke us up into smaller groups once it became obvious that Danielle, who played club soccer, was going to lap Cecilia, who spent all of her free time watching 30 Rock. But, despite my nearly 20-minute mile pace, the program was empowering. After every session, I was a Girl on the Run. Not everyone, I thought, could claim that title.

When I wasn’t running laps inside a brightly-lit gym, I was working my way through a slew of 2010s sitcoms. First it was 30 Rock, which I started watching a couple years after its release in 2006. Then Parks and Recreation in 2009. In 2012, Mindy Kaling’s first solo show, The Mindy Project, was released. Come 2013, Inside Amy Schumer aired and only a year after that, I watched the newly premiered Broad City. I didn’t get around to Girls until later, but I did find the time to read Lena Dunham’s book, Girl. I also read Tina Fey’s Bossypants and Amy Poehler’s Yes, Please if you couldn’t tell, insufferable as a tween. I was also a Feminist.

Girls on the Run, 30 Rock memoirs I read are artifacts of the type of femi nism that was gaining steam in 2012. Over the next few years, this strain would come to define mainstream feminist media, pollinating airwaves with its girl-power branded messaging, until it met its fatal end following Trump’s election and the Women’s March in 2017. It was focused on putting everything—sexual deviances, traumatic responses, annoying tics, bodily malfunctions, professional disappointments—out on a pink tablecloth and calling for the world to come see. Its method of gaining popularity was to be loud and obnoxious. Beyond that, the comediennes didn’t have much of a plan. +++

Feminism in the 2010s packaged itself simply. It was distilled in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s rulebook, laid out in her 2014 TED Talk-turnedbook-length-essay, We Should All Be Feminists Adichie’s definition of a feminist encapsulates the politics of the time: a feminist is “a man or a woman who says, yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it, we must do better.” It was a simple message, one that made it easy for any middle school aged girl to wield the feminism sword without a coherent strategy or politics. “We must do better” was the slogan, but the process of betterment was left undiscussed. It gained its power only in its artic ulation, and it left all of its potential dangling in the modal verb. It was a great rallying call for the

In the first episode of writer Liz Lemon, played by Fey (who created the show), faces off against her new boss: Jack Donaghy, a Donald Trump-type NBC executive played by none other than Alec Baldwin. The next six seasons follow Lemon as she attempts to lead the writer’s room of an eclectic sketch comedy show, based on Fey’s time working as the first female head writer for Saturday Night Live. Through romantic travails, professional disasters, and a number of clumsy accidents, the compact sitcom had an impressive jokesper-minute rate, and it was well received upon airing. But as much as it was about a woman in a man’s world, it was also about a woman in distress. As Donaghy says in the first episode, Fey’s character, Liz Lemon, is as much a powerhouse as she is “a New York third-wave feminist, college educated, single and pretending to be happy about it, overscheduled, undersexed, who buys any magazine that says ‘healthy body image’ on the cover and every two years takes up knitting for … a week.” Liz Lemon eats cheetos apologize, she confesses her darkest secrets in a monologue. They include being “sexually rejected by not one, but two guys who later went on to clown college,” having “five donuts so far today,” pooping her pants “a little bit, at an all you can eat country buffet,” and going on a date with her cousin. This is what I’ll call ‘Feyian feminism,’ which will later be picked up by Poehler, who plays an outrageously optimistic public servant on Parks and Rec; by Kaling, who plays an egotistical narcissist on The Mindy Project; and by Dunham, who plays an insufferable Brooklynite on Girls. It is confessional through and through, and its impact arises only from its having been stated. The comedians of this era created a museum of embarrassing femininities, exhibiting various vaginal problems, sexual mishaps, and digestive issues to the impressionable viewer. But behind the installation, there wasn’t much programming. attendance in Washington. They joined the long lines of women in pussy hats holding signs like “We are not ovary-acting,” “Ninety, nasty, and not giving up,” “Vulva la resistance!” and “This pussy grabs back.” Here was the final breath of the Fey-ian political body. Millions of women threw their nastiness toward the White House. In return, Trump’s Supreme Court appointees overturned Roe v. Wade

Women in 2023 have fewer legal rights than the women of 2006. In certain ways, the cultural landscape has changed in their favor—the #MeToo movement transformed social norms that had worked against women, and in some cases women saw justice against their perpetrators, at least through the legal system. But 10 states have banned abortion since the series finale of 30 Rock aired. source ? Title IX protections on campus were scaled back during the Trump administration, and companies could now choose to deny basic reproductive healthcare coverage based on religious beliefs. The comedians of the decade leading up to Trump’s elec- tion may have managed to change the landscape of TV, but their feminism didn’t hold up in the fight against actual political threats.

What accounts for this failure? The very essence of the Fey-ian feminism that circulated in the mid-2010s was threatened by anything that didn’t fit neatly into its mold. The growing visibility of trans issues complicated the feminism which relied so heavily on corporeal signification. In 2014, TIME Magazine’s June cover story featured the actress Laverne Cox with the headline “The Transgender Tipping Point.” “Nearly a year after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage,” it reads, “another social movement is poised to challenge deeply held cultural beliefs.” Less than a year later, Diane Sawyer’s interview with Caitlyn Jenner in April 2015 brought the topic of transness further into the American mainstream.

The vapidly grotesque feminism of Dunham and Schumer now faced a major challenge. By continuing to proceed as normal, they risked aligning themselves with the growing trans-exclusive radical feminist (TERF) movement that seemed to champion vaginas over everything else. Journalist Elinor Burkett wrote an op-ed New York Times responding to the 2015 Jenner-Sawyer interview. In it, she bemoans transness for the stereotypes and “boxes” it puts upon femininity. “People who haven’t lived their whole lives as women,” she writes, “shouldn’t get to define us. That’s something men have been doing for much too long.” For Burkett, gender is a laundry list of minutiae, an often very gross and uncomfortable checklist, that each person ticks again and again until she gets enough points to earn the Woman badge. Trans women, Burkett writes, “haven’t suffered through business meetings with men talking to their breasts or woken up after sex terrified they’d forgotten to take their birth control pills the day before.” These examples are, truly, 30 Rock episodes. Liz Lemon, in the episode “Jack the Writer,” tries to get an intern to cover up because the male writers are so distracted by her breasts. In “Cooter,” she has a pregnancy scare after a fling with an that published Burkett’s letter has recently come under fire for its antitrans rhetoric, with nearly 1,000 contributors signing a letter stating that the paper’s coverage of trans issues has been inflammatory and anti-factual at a time when trans rights are under attack nationwide. Practically in response, the Times published an op-ed by former Books editor Pamela Paul titled “In Defense of J.K. Rowling,” where Paul claims “nothing Rowling has said qualifies as transphobic.” While Rowling has insisted she respects the idea of transness, she has also maintained not only that there is an essential, permanent distinction between cis and trans women, but that institutions—like jails or psychiatric wards—should treat people according to this distinction. Perhaps a more articulated, nuanced feminism could have pushed against this tired, harmful narrative. Instead, old-school feminists like Paul, Rowling, and Adichie—who has made some Rowlingadjacent comments herself in recent years—are enabled to fill in for a feminism left vacant. When challenges to the mission’s very symbol—the vagina—and all that it could not accommodate were posed, its creators gave up on it altogether. They stood up from the table upon which they had thrown everything and farted as they walked away (as Julia Louis-Dreyfus does in Inside Amy Schumer, “The Last Fuckable Day”).

So what remains? Not a lot. As Andrea Long Chu put it in a 2019 n+1 article about her transition and the concept of womanhood, feminism today is in the unenviable position of being politically obligated to defend its own impossibility. In order to be for women, feminists must refrain from making any positive claims about women. The result is a kind of negative theology, dedicated to striking down the graven images of a god whose stated preference for remaining invisible has left the business of actually worshiping her somewhat up in the air.

The exclusivity and inflexibility of Fey-ian feminism was what eventually brought the movement to its knees. But the truly insidious effect of a feminism based on divulgence and confessions was that it left little else to be said. Up until recently, there were still taboos to be broken. But now the gas has been passed, the men have been sexually dominated, and the “cunts” have been uttered. The pussy has literally been shown (Girls, Season 5, Episode 7: “Hello Kitty”). So where do we go from here?

I do not lament that the tweenagers of today have no Tina Fey equivalent to worship; the type of feminism that is so focused on enumerating what is has no place in a politics interested in what could be. But I do miss the possibility of a conscious feminism in general. Girls on the Run had plenty of problems, beginning with its name and ending with its intentions, but it did at least create a space of potential feminist action for young girls. And, despite the screed above, I loved 30 Rock, The Mindy Project, Broad City, and the rest. They were great examples of what a feminist media could be like, even if they never managed to hit the mark. Still, an inclusive feminist world relies on there being a feminism in place.

In that same essay, Chu proposes an alternative for our impoverished culture. As she writes in response to cis women who might question

I don’t want what you have, I want the way in which you don’t have it. I don’t envy your plenitude; I envy your void. Now I’ve got the hole to prove it. I would give anything to hate myself the way you do, assuming it’s different from the way I hate myself which, who knows.

Fey, Schumer, Dunham, and the rest used a pile of vaginas and bad sex stories as their soapbox. They thought they could negotiate a new feminism by simply adding, at a rapid pace, to what was already there. But Chu says something else. She proposes a feminism borne from the void, from the gap between different women, by the gap within each woman herself.

Amia Srinivasan, a philosopher of sex, puts it similarly in a 2021 New Yorker article:

It is also true that many non-trans women know something of the heartbreak caused by a body that betrays—that weighs you down with unwanted breasts and hips; that transforms you from an agent of action into an object of male desire; that is, in some mortifying sense, not a reflection of who you really are. … What might a conversation between women, trans and non, look like if it started from a recognition of such continuities of experience?

These continuities aren’t one-to-one in the way Elinor Burkett would like it; it’s not a matter of comparing my white-pants-period story to your gross-guy-from-Tinder story. It’s a connection which arises from the disconnection we feel between, within, and beyond ourselves.

And perhaps that’s what Fey, Dunham, Schumer, and the rest were trying to get at: a way to articulate the places where ‘womanhood’ fails to fill in the gaps. Rather than searching for a new method, they tried to fill the hole with more of the same, but it only grew with the vulgarity of their jokes. For, as Chu and Srinivasan implore, it’s that gap which defines gender. The gap between what we feel ourselves to be and how we are perceived, the gap between our consciousness and the forms our consciousness clings to. Any feminism that depends upon an imagined connection where meaning transfers seamlessly from one body to the next, one experience to the next, is destined to fail. Any politics, generally, that attempts to connect experience as if experience itself were continuous has failed and will fail, too. A new feminism would make room for the discontinuity. It would depend on its eventual brokenness, like when you see yourself in a window and don’t recognize the reflection. Or like when you think back to yourself a decade ago, running around the indoor track in your 30 Rock merch, and wonder who that girl really was.