For young feminists, 2016 primary signals end of identity politics

His opponent, Hillary Clinton, has struggled to gain traction with younger voters despite being the frontrunner in the Democratic race since announcing her candidacy a year ago.

Just minutes earlier in the same interview, Steinem had said that young women are more involved in activism and are more politically engaged than generations before. Arnesen was part of that vanguard. And when women under 30 find that she was against gay marriage until 2013, voted for the Iraq War and has a Super PAC largely supported by Wall Street, these factors outweigh her self-proclaimed feminist label.

“Now if I said that – “Yeah, they’re for Bernie cause that’s where the boys are” – you’d swat me”, Maher said. But especially for young women, there are social benefits to supporting Sanders – the Guy Thing, the cool thing – that don’t come with supporting Clinton. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Chelsea Clinton, and former president Bill Clinton listen to Democratic presidential canddiate Hillary Clinton speak at Manchester Community College during a rally on Monday. She was an advisor for Sen. Bernie Sanders because “the boys are with Bernie”. The reactions of Arnesen and others suggest that it could be backfiring, at least in New Hampshire, a state proud of its tradition of electing women.

“When you’re young, you’re thinking, ‘Where are the boys?” Albright-the first woman to become Secretary of State-correctly stated that the fight for true gender equality has not been achieved in absolute. Some have mixed feelings, having watched Clinton for the quarter-century that she has been on the national stage. “Now she’s not inspiring them and she’s giving them a kick in the trousers”. She not only said those words, but also stuck by them when Maher reacted with surprise. “But I do think that gratitude never radicalized anybody, you know”.

DeMichael is supporting Sanders in the primary, but she added that if Clinton “gets the nomination, you bet I’ll support her”. It isn’t to say that the women who say they like those things are faking it to impress boys.

In a column in the Guardian in which she collected these disparaging comments, Michelle Goldberg noted that because a majority of young, Democratic women were voting for Obama, “maligning and disparaging them is no way to recruit them into a movement”.

Steinem justifiably received a great deal of backlash after claiming in a recent interview with Bill Maher that young women are more likely to support Sanders because that’s what the boys are doing – though not almost enough backlash for making transphobic comments about Caitlyn Jenner and Martine Rothblatt in that same interview. Steinem has since apologized.

“People who have gone online to defend Hillary, to explain why they supported her, have been subject to vicious trolling and attacks that are literally too profane often, not to mention sexist, to repeat”, the former president said.

Others have alleged that there’s a real streak of sexism among Sanders’ supporters, who have been referred to as “Bernie Bros”. “And it’s a scolding message and it compounds the problem that Hillary Clinton has, which is that she’s not inspiring young voters”.

Ratajkowski told the crowd that she would like to see a female President, but that she wants the milestone to be “more than a symbol”. And we all want to see that. After the second wave, feminism means something more than supporting women.

Let me back up for a moment and acknowledge that it’s perfectly possible that millennial women are being swayed against Clinton by sexist forces that permeate our culture so insidiously we don’t even recognize them anymore. Clinton herself described the line as “lighthearted”, but pointed.