Sometime in the early aughts, the comedian Amy Poehler made a vulgar joke while sitting in the Saturday Night Live writers’ room waiting for a midweek read-through to begin. As detailed in Tina Fey’s 2011 memoir, Bossypants, Jimmy Fallon, who was also in the show’s cast at the time, jokingly recoiled and told Poehler to stop it.
“It’s not cute!” Fallon exclaimed. “I don’t like it.”
“Amy dropped what she was doing, went black in the eyes for a second, and wheeled around on him,” Fey writes. “‘I don’t fucking care if you like it.’”
I was brought back to Fey’s Poehler-Fallon anecdote when a friend shared the first of Melani Sanders’s “We Do Not Care” videos with me. Earlier this summer, Sanders, who identifies herself as a wife and mother, posted a short rant cum manifesto on Instagram, filmed in her car after a grocery run, in which she declared that she was not going to take it anymore.
What’s “it”? Well, societal expectations about female comportment, for one thing. She does not care, she announces, that she doesn’t have a “real bra” on.
Sanders did not—does not—care about a bunch of other things, as she made clear in subsequent videos. She does not care about shaving her legs, or grooming her chin hairs, or having edge control in her hair. She does not care about wearing matching clothes, or that her hair isn’t combed. She does not care about pointless small talk, about that flashing light in her car, or that her house is a hot mess.
Sanders’s first post reminded me a bit of Jane O’Reilly’s famous article, “Click! The Housewife’s Moment of Truth,” which ran in the first issue of Ms. Magazine, in 1972. In her story, O’Reilly examined her friends’ and neighbors’ feminist awakenings—“click!” moments—about patriarchal expectations regarding women’s unpaid labor, writing: “One little click turns on a thousand others.”
In Sanders’s case, her click turned on thousands of others; at least half a dozen women forwarded that first video to me, and I suspect this was how many others came to it. Each of Sanders’s videos is accompanied by thousands of comments, most by apparently delighted women who feel liberated by Sanders’s exhortations. (Sanders, who notes that she’s speaking for perimenopausal and menopausal women, often invites viewers to chime in with the things that they no longer care about, and seems to incorporate them in subsequent posts.)
Indeed, there is an element of call-and-response to the We Do Not Care Club, which Sanders herself has, consciously or not, encouraged. In that first post in May, Sanders used the first person. By the next day, she had switched over to the first-person plural. (“We don’t care what’s for dinner.”) A day later, Sanders just came out and said it: “We do not care about people-pleasing.”
Here’s the thing: When Sanders says she doesn’t care about “people-pleasing,” she’s saying, in effect, that she doesn’t care about pleasing men. This is, to my mind, the wonderfully subversive message that’s gotten lost in the initial flurry of discussion about the We Do Not Care Club. That the majority of her audience is women makes perfect sense, given that the we in “We Do Not Care” clearly refers to them. That, in turn, suggests that the implied “you” in Sanders’s statements is men, collectively.
Sanders’s digital rebellion speaks both to and for a silent majority of women who are tired of contorting themselves to appeal to, or appease, male expectations of who they should be, whether those men are romantic partners, strangers, or Jimmy Fallon himself. And though Sanders calls the We Do Not Care Club a “movement” with “members,” I think it’s more accurate to say that it is a revolt against misogyny.
Plenty of women seem to agree. Responses to her videos, I’ve noticed, frequently make Sanders’s implicit critique of male expectations explicit. (A representative example: “We do not care if you don’t like what you see, just look the other way!”) Commenting under a New York Times article about Sanders’s club, one woman wrote, “I do not care about the male gaze.” Another noted: “In my early 40s, I started to gain weight and I noticed how it made me invisible to unwanted male attention, and I liked it.”
Of course, plenty of the things that Sanders and her followers do not care about seem to relate to the female gaze. You could argue that whether or not a woman has a pedicure or gray hair is as much about pleasing, or not offending, other women as it is about men. (Tina Fey again: “Women dress for other women in order to let them know what their deal is.”)
Women may be dressing for other women, but aren’t we also dressing for men? After all, most women, whether or not we’re always conscious of it, are subject to some form of male appraisal about how we look and behave, which can in turn affect the way we’re able to move through the world. Even older women, who tend to go unseen by society and overlooked as vital, sexual beings, are reminded on a regular basis of the power of the male gaze—and how easily it can be revoked.
There’s a lot that is freeing about getting older, including not giving as much of a damn. And it’s important that Sanders says that her messages are meant for perimenopausal and menopausal women. Menopause is having a moment, and the We Do Not Care Club feels like a natural extension of the growing visibility of discussions about crepey skin and hot flashes and vaginal dryness. (In late June, Sanders was tapped as a spokesperson for the vaginal moisturizer Replens.) This is why seeing the 40-something Sanders reclining sideways on her bed wearing three pairs of glasses and marking off a list of things “we” do not care about that includes having chin hairs, unshaved legs, and cellulite that’s visible in short shorts is so captivating.
But the messages contained within the We Do Not Care videos are, in the end, applicable to women of all ages. They’re not just eruptions from a cohort of women for whom a lifetime’s worth of expectations have reached their expiration date, but permission slips with which women of younger generations can eagerly anticipate a more unencumbered future—and perhaps even freedom in the present.
They need it. Photo filters and AI are changing how we present ourselves to the public, raising expectations about having the smoothest skin and the plumpest lips. An ascendant MAGA aesthetic that plays up what the fashion critic Vanessa Friedman has called “a retrograde gendered paradigm” jostles with trad-wife and wellness influencers who project visions of polished (and predominantly white) womanhood. And younger generations (much too young, I’d argue) are adopting expensive skin-care routines in order to, as the journalist Elise Hu put it, “optimize one’s face” and address “the added burden of worrying earlier about wrinkles.”
These so-called Sephora tweens, inspired by online beauty influencers, appear to be succumbing to the opposite message that many of us with actual wrinkles are welcoming: embracing a more observable older femininity, replete with fine lines and emergent fat on our underarms—and, as Poehler would say, not fucking caring if others like it.
A few years ago, I wrote a story for this magazine about the power of saying no, in which I called on women to reject the socialization that begins in childhood and that nudges us to always be accommodating. I argued that we need to allow ourselves to refuse the things that are demanded of us, to erect and defend boundaries. This, I think, is why I, and so many others, have been so taken with the We Do Not Care Club. (One of Sanders’s recent posts has more than 50,000 comments.) Because if the first step is for women to give themselves permission to say no, the We Do Not Care Club is the no itself.
The post What We Gain When We Stop Caring appeared first on The Atlantic.
