In Gloria Steinem’s 2015 memoir, “My Life on the Road,” she writes about Florynce Kennedy, the great civil rights activist and lawyer, teaching her to deal with hecklers.
The two women lectured on college campuses together in the 1970s, and the crowds always included a few people determined to disrupt them. Kennedy’s advice?
“Just pause, let the audience absorb the hostility, then say, ‘I didn’t pay him to say that.’”
Nothing like a heckler, after all, to underscore what your movement is up against — and, quite often, to reveal the opposition’s moral character.
“Ultimately,” Steinem wrote, “they educate an audience.”
I thought about that anecdote during the recent great Matt Gaetz own. The Florida congressman delivered a remarkably loathsome — even for him — set of remarks at a recent summit for Turning Point USA, a conservative youth activist organization.
“Why is it that the women with the least likelihood of getting pregnant are the ones most worried about abortions?” Gaetz asked the crowd. “Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb.”
He continued: “These people are odious from the inside out. They’re like, 5-foot-2, 350 pounds, and they’re like, ‘Give me my abortions or I’ll get up and march and protest.’”
Olivia Julianna, a 19-year-old political strategist with Gen Z for Change, hopped on Twitter to push back.
“I’m actually 5’11. 6’4 in heels,” she tweeted. “I wear them so small men like you are reminded of your place.”
Gaetz fired back, tweeting a photo of Olivia and the words “Dander raised…”
Olivia, who goes by her first and middle name to protect her privacy, decided to take the spotlight Gaetz sent her way and point it toward a reproductive health care fund.
Rather than get caught up in an outrage loop — “He wanted me to be like, ‘This is horrendous, you’re evil, you should be canceled,’ Olivia told Teen Vogue — she urged her rapidly multiplying Twitter following to donate to a Gen Z for Change Abortion Fund, which splits contributions evenly among 50 groups providing reproductive care around the country.
Within 24 hours, she had raised $50,000. By the following day, donations reached $115,000. As of this writing, over $1 million in donations had rolled in.
Hillary Clinton tweeted her congratulations. Joy Ann Reid hosted Olivia on her MSNBC show. George Takei urged his 3.4 million Twitter followers to donate. Beto O’Rourke posed for a photo.
“This massive online mobilization should go to show that right-wing republican theatrics and outrage culture will no longer be tolerated,” Olivia wrote in an official statement after the fundraiser hit $300,000. “I think Gaetz is paying attention. Because the last time ‘Matt Gaetz’ and ‘Teenager’ trended together, it didn’t end so well for him.”
(The Justice Department is investigating Gaetz over whether he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old and paid for her to travel with him, the New York Times reports.)
It’s gratifying, to be sure, to watch a boss, fearless teenager outwitting a repugnant, body-shaming misogynist who uses the stripping away of women's rights to pick on people.
But the most powerful thing Olivia did here, to my mind, is reveal Gaetz’s short-sighted, narrow-minded, wrong-headed spin on abortion for what it is: a distraction that invites his acolytes — young people, in the case of the Turning Point USA crowd — to ignore the nuance and humanity and urgency of a topic and simply brush it away with some coarse language.
It’s a convenient, shopworn tactic. Remember the attempts to minimize the historic magnitude of the first Women’s March by maligning the marchers’ looks?
In Indiana, Republican Sen. Jack Sandlin found himself trying to explain how a meme that reads, “In one day, Trump got more fat women out walking than Michelle Obama did in 8 years” showed up on his Facebook page.
Anyway, Olivia wasn’t having it.
Abortion is a complicated, often heartbreaking, often lifesaving, deeply personal medical procedure that individuals arrive upon for a million different reasons. Reducing it to a dig on a woman’s appearance is so blindingly stupid it would be funny if the consequences weren’t so tragic.
(To get even a glimmer of a grasp of the topic they’re making light of, I’d urge Gaetz and his ilk to read “What Pregnancy and Childbirth Do to the Bodies of Young Girls,” a New York Times story published on July 18, in the wake of the news about a 10-year-old girl crossing state lines to receive an abortion after she’d been raped.)
By using her newfound, unwitting fame to raise money for the folks on the ground who understand, protect and work among the nuances and realities of abortion, Olivia effectively sidestepped Gaetz’s tired tactic and went straight to the heart of the matter.
That's power. And wisdom. And wit.
“Imagine bullying a teenager on social media and then she raises $50K in 24 hours to spite you,” Olivia tweeted the day after Gaetz shared her photo. “LOLLLLLLLL.”
Indeed.
