The same unyielding attitude that has made Rapinoe the feminist icon of the year has also made her a target. People are either begging her to run for office (“That sounds crazy and terrible,” she says) or calling her the face of everything wrong with America—brash, arrogant, privileged. No one is neutral.
“I don’t feel like a lukewarm figure,” she says with a laugh. Rapinoe really couldn’t give a shit about being liked. She is made to be memed, a natural-born headline grabber with a deep, matter-of-fact conviction often mistaken for cockiness. But the real Rapinoe is not the media frenzy that surrounds her. She is the immovable eye of the storm—the thoughtful, relentless, passionate force working her way into the center of our cultural conversation. “I’m right here in this moment,” she says, “facing it full on.”
The Advocate…And, And, And
Through all the insanity, Rapinoe has managed to own her own narrative. “She’s so confident in who she is that she’s actually able to change the way the world sees her,” says Christen Press, Rapinoe’s teammate on the USWNT and one of her partners in their new lifestyle venture, Re-Inc. “She writes her own script on her life—she decides what people think of her because she thinks it so strongly.”
What she thinks is that it’s time women—including herself—got their due. “We are always having to qualify our accomplishments,” Rapinoe says. “We always have to be like: Yes, we won, and we’re inspiring a generation, and we’re touring the country, and we’re social activists, and we’re really marketable, and, and, and!” The hate she’s gotten for celebrating is a perfect representation of the double standards that leave women wanting to pull out their hair. “We just did something amazing,” Rapinoe says. “Winning the World Cup is very difficult—it’s arduous, it’s a long cycle, it’s hard. And then on top of it, we inspired a movement that transcended the sport. Now we have to come home and fight a lawsuit to convince everyone that we’re worth a little bit more money? That’s bullshit.”
Rapinoe is among the most successful women in her field, and still her work is valued less than her male counterparts’. Despite the fact that the women are the best in the world, they are paid by the USSF only 89 percent of what they would be paid if they were the men’s team, according to calculations from the Washington Post. That’s barely better than the pay gap women face nationally. (The USWNT has a different pay structure than the men’s team, a key point of contention in the lawsuit. The gap exists in the maximum amount of money, including merit bonuses, each team has the opportunity to earn.) And that’s nothing compared with the pay gap in prize money—in the 2018 men’s World Cup, FIFA paid the winning team $38 million. The women split $4 million for their historic win. (For the record, the USSF supports narrowing the pay gap in FIFA prize money.)
The money is just one item on Rapinoe’s list of injustices to be solved. She’s a walking rallying cry, using her platform to call attention to systemic inequalities of gender, orientation, and race. “I’m the antithesis of no fucks given—I give all the fucks,” she says. “I just feel that it’s my responsibility to make the world a better place—we all have that responsibility.”