Dick punch

The year in Lady Parts

“Full Frontal with Samantha Bee” premieres, February

Former Daily Show correspondent Samantha Bee crashed into the boys’ club of late-night political commentary with the roar of a fucking freight train. 

Whether taking down so-called pregnancy resource centers that spread false information about abortion or the staggering backlog of rape kits, Bee brought a righteous fury and biting comedy to 2016. 

In the wake of the Orlando shooting at Pulse nightclub in June, her sweet, near-cloying voice ripped through the bullshit with a ferocity stoked by tragedy and insisted she couldn’t deliver the usual words of comfort and affirmation that follow a national trauma. “Fuck it,” she said. “I am too angry for that.” 

In a year where the president-elect is praised for his ability to “tell it like it is,” Bee provides a much-needed catharsis by being unapologetically and vocally angry in a way that no other woman in politics is allowed to be. 

Harriet Tubman placed on the $20 bill, April 

As one maniac continued his rise to power, we at least got the satisfaction of seeing another removed from our currency. In a move that should have been one of the least controversial in this contentious, ugly year, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced that the gaunt, ghastly visage of famed genocidal monster Andrew Jackson would be replaced by former slave, abolitionist, and uncontested American hero Harriet Tubman.

It marked a step towards acknowledging America’s ugly past, while finally making room for a woman of color to occupy a space typically reserved for white, ethically flexible men. 

And look, anything that can get some Fox News pundits frothing at the mouth about “political correctness run amok” is typically worthwhile. 

Beyonce’s Lemonade drops, April  

In Lemonade, a visual album that is meditative, explosive, beautiful, and ugly, Beyonce married the personal to the political. 

Lest the film be dismissed as merely an epic takedown of a cheating spouse, an archival clip of Malcolm X breaks through early in the film with these words: “The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman.”

This interlude sets the tone for a film that is as much about repeated patterns of abuse, neglect, survival, and redemption of black American women as it is about personal betrayal. 

“Being a black woman is both empowering and painful,” Kimberly Richards wrote of Lemonade on Romper, “and the more art that aims to tackle the truth of our existence, as the greats—Ms. [Lauryn] Hill, Nina Simone, India Arie—have done, the more empowered we’ll be.” 

“Ghostbusters” remade, July

When it was announced that there would be an all-women Ghostbusters reboot, hordes of nostalgia-sick beta males flocked to Reddit to air their grievances, claiming it would irrevocably alter their precious memories or “rape their childhood.” 

Perhaps the histrionics also stemmed from the fact that the comedy-action film has long been a decidedly masculine genre, one where women are either out of the narrative completely or exist only in the periphery. 

Though the film lacks the lightning-in-a-bottle quality of the original, it makes up for it with heart and the easy, charming interplay between Leslie Jones, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, and Kristen Wiig. And, more importantly, a generation of girls was given a new kind of female action hero. 

“Grab her by the pussy” and resulting discourse, October

I look back fondly on those halcyon days when I believed that the phrase “Grab her by the pussy” would finally, mercifully be the death knell of Trump’s campaign. I remember poring over Facebook posts from one man after another who vehemently denied that what Trump said to Billy Bush on the Access Hollywood Bus qualified as “typical locker room talk.”

While I appreciate men calling out Trump’s words as transcending lasciviousness and entering the territory of outright predation, it wasn’t especially helpful for men to suddenly clutch their Boy Scout badges and claim that this sort of talk was foreign to them. If anything, it seemed like an attempt to deny the existence of rape culture. 

Recognizing what Trump said is normal is not the same thing as excusing it. It’s an ugly facet of masculinity that women deal with every day.

Hillary Clinton loses to Donald Trump, November

Boy, what a perfect punctuation point on this shit show of a year. I have to admit, I was wholly unprepared for the possibility of Clinton’s defeat. I woke on the day of the election positively brimming with optimism, hoping that this day would end our country’s most recent, unfortunate flirtation with insanity.

More so, I was hoping that the months and years of abuse that Hillary Clinton had withstood at the hands of the body politic would finally pay off—that it wouldn’t all be for naught.

Unfortunately, Trump’s America had other plans. His victory over Clinton served as a heart-shattering reminder that, no matter how qualified and eloquent a woman might be, people will still take a blustering, sentient garbage fire of a person over her, providing he has a penis.

For more from Claire, read her profile of comedian Fortune Feimster.