One aspect of Trump's comments that has been largely overlooked, however, is his explicit admission of the way that power licenses his odious behavior:
When you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything...grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.The few responses to this have been telling. When Joe Biden decries such behavior as "an abuse of power", he isn't actually criticizing the power that lets people like Trump "do anything" - he's simply condemning its "abuse". And within capitalism, Kash CEO Kaz Nejatian insists, this is the approach we must take:
This is a decisively liberal feminism: one that takes hierarchies of power for granted. Within liberal feminism, the opportunity to abuse power must be defended, and even the opportunity to abuse women; if your "freedom" to acquire ungovernable economic power puts women at risk, so be it. Liberal feminism allows us to do things like "condemn" patriarchy, and shame it - but any collective action that actually mobilizes the arm of the state is prohibited, as this would be an imposition on "freedom". Contrast this to this second approach, proposed by Matt Karp:
Obviously, as Karp's own formulation suggests, the "extinction of the billionaire class" alone can't solve the problem of patriarchy; things like shaming have a role to play, too. But a feminism that exclusively relies on the latter because it prioritizes the preservation of billionaires over the preservation of women hardly deserves the name feminism; it's just capitalism with a "feminist" brand.