We Can't Win if We Only Fight Each Other

And other thoughts on closing my "Secret Hillary Facebook Group."

Nine years ago I started one of those “Secret Hillary Clinton Facebook groups.”

This week I closed it down.

If you’ve never closed down a Facebook group, Zuck does not make it easy for you. Before you can shutter, you have to individually remove each member. While at our height we had 5,000 members, extreme personalities, Facebook disillusionment and political fatigue had left us with only about half of that. Nevertheless, individually booting that many people still took me and the other moderators days as we fit it in amongst our normal lives.

You are struck by a lot of thoughts as you hit “Remove Member” 2600 times. (Technically 5200, as it’s a two-step process.) On a separate text thread, me and the other admins fan-girled and -boyed about some of the people who had joined our group. We had a number of actors, directors, musicians that we admired, but also journalists, legal scholars and politicians. The impetus for starting the group had been simple: I really liked Hillary Clinton and I was not only tired of the sexist bias with how she was discussed and critiqued, but I found that the vitriol coming from the (mostly) men against her was abusive and bullying. I side-barred a couple of friends and found they felt the same way. And so, in March of 2016 I put out a simple two sentence post on Facebook.

In one week we had 167 members. And it only grew exponentially. Initially the idea was that you could add whoever you knew who needed the group i.e. people who supported Hillary’s candidacy and were looking for place where a man who had never voted before wouldn’t accuse them of voting with their vagina.

It’s no surprise that I had many smiles going through all of the members’ names as I removed them, remembering interactions I had had with them personally, or sometimes just their personality in the group when we had all been more active. But also, I found it disconcerting that in the 21^st century, a time of so much unimaginable technological advancement, women still needed a safe place to hide from men, a place to have intelligent conversations about a woman more accomplished than any of these bullies would ever be. Which is not to say we didn’t have a lot of incredible male members, too; men who enthusiastically supported Hillary Clinton and were just as glad to be away from the tantrum throwing dickheads high on the smell of Bernie’s feckless old man farts. But you cannot divorce the gender aspect from this. And it filled me with sadness to think that this group wasn’t that much different from whispered conversations had in the Handmaid’s Tale, or a Suffragette’s sewing circle. Friends, I am bone-tired of fighting men on the right and the left for the basic dignity of having my gender judged by the same metrics they have always had the privilege to enjoy.