A shaken BuzzFeed writer has opened up about the moment the millennial news site’s worst nightmare came to pass and Donald Trump won the presidency.
Anne Helen Petersen painted a picture of “frantic” young writers refreshing Twitter in disbelief as results from swing states wiped out any hope of their heroine Hillary Clinton winning the day.
Petersen was drinking in the office on November 8th, expecting to watch the electoral map turn blue, when reality kicked in.
She had spent much of the day excitedly wearing an “I voted!” sticker, beaming at pro-Hillary New Yorkers and relishing the victory to come.
In the opening of her new book Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman, she describes how it all fell apart:
I’m sitting at the BuzzFeed office in Manhattan, where the tone has taken an abrupt turn from excitement to panic…
I cease my frantic refreshing of Twitter and stare blankly ahead. A plastic cup of white wine grows warm beside me. Donald Trump’s win become probably, then certain. My phone lights up.
“I’m so sorry to do this,” my editor says, “but we need you to write something.”
I had expected a relaxing, joyful rest of the week. I was exhausted from weeks reporting on the road. I could have cried. But instead, I opened up a new document, writing: This Is How Much America Hates Women.
Her snapshot of the moment the Trump hellscape became flesh serves as an introduction to the rest of her book, which is essentially profiles of famous women she likes – Lena Dunahm, Kim Kardashian, etc. – and how edgy they are.
Before she contracted SJW-itis, Petersen was becoming a respected authority on old Hollywood but she now rarely writes about film- or indeed anything else – without highlighting gender discrepancy.
Take her tear-soaked tribute to Hillary Clinton in her book, calling the 2016 US Presidential election a “startling rejection: not just of Clinton, but of the very notion of unruly women in general… Clinton’s treatment suggested a much larger cultural ill, one that had less to do with the specifics of her personality and more to do with the enduring structures of patriarchy- structures that had bearing on more than just the woman standing on the stage asking you to vote for her.
“It was one thing to dislike Clinton. It was quite another to ignore how her treatment was symptomatic of deep-seated, if often well-camouflaged, misogyny.”
Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman is out June 20, for $25. We bet you can’t wait.
