【eroticized aggression】

Ask Alyssa Milano what's next for the #MeToo movement,eroticized aggression and she'll say it's the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, a Constitutional amendment that would grant women legal equality.

The United States almost ratified the proposed amendment in 1982, but three more states needed to approve it. (Before an amendment becomes part of the Constitution, three-fourths of states must adopt it.) Now the ERA is back in the news — and so is Milano along with it.

The amendment is now one state away from ratification, and the liberal actress and advocate is pushing for one more legislature to approve it. The amendment recently failed in Virginia, but Milano has been joining forces with politicians and tweeting about the ERA.

"Half of our battle as women is that we are looked at as less than, and I think that's why so many abuses of power are able to happen," she says.

This isn't the first time in recent years that the ERA has captured the public's attention. Back in 2015, Patricia Arquette called for equal rights while accepting an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. But Milano, specifically, has a knack for helping various causes go viral these days. In addition to her viral #MeToo tweet in 2017, she made headlines for staring down Brett Kavanaugh during his testimony. When Milano tweets about migrants and children at the border, her followers -- and those holding the bullhorns in the social media sphere -- tend to listen.

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Mark Harvey, the director of graduate and undergraduate programs at the University of Saint Mary and the author of Celebrity Influence: Politics, Persuasion, and Issue-Based Advocacy, says the celebrities who are effective and have the greatest influence tend to have some unique experience that connects them to the cause.

When Milano advocates for something, she frequently gets personal. She's documented her travels to the border. She shared her experience of being sexually assaulted. To debunk the myth that HIV/AIDS could be transmitted through casual contact, Milano kissed a boy with AIDS on television when she was a teenager, and recently told her Twitter followers that the moment convinced her she could "use my voice to impact the world in a positive way."

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Milano credits women activists who came before her, but it's hard to ignore her celebrity influence. She has 3.5 million followers on Twitter and 2.1 million on Instagram. One of her tweets about the ERA (below) got thousands of retweets and likes. Her name shows up in CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Daily Newsheadlines about the amendment.

For Milano, the ERA is the next step to combatting systemic gender inequality.

"It would prevent discrimination on the basis of sex and gender, so it would help women with pregnancy discrimination, lactation discrimination, any workplace gender discrimination, paving the way for equal rights like equal pay for equal work," she says. "Hopefully [it would] also give policy makers and legislators a foundation to write new policy — [maternity] leave, women's healthcare — all of the imbalances we see that are gender-based."

That certainly sounds like something that should have and could have been ratified a long time ago. Indeed, research conducted in 2015 by the ERA Coalition, an umbrella organization advocating for the amendment, found that 80 percent of survey participants thought the Constitution already guaranteed men and women equal rights.

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So it can be game-changing when a celebrity like Milano, whose fans include viewers of popular cross-generational television shows (Who's the Boss, Charmed, and Project Runway All Stars), spends her time talking about a Constitutional amendment that the general population knows little about.

"We have found that for a younger audience, having people like Alyssa and Patricia Arquette has been helpful to our cause," says Carol Jenkins, the co-president and CEO of the ERA Coalition. (Milano is a member of the coalition's advisory council.)

There are obvious downsides to being a celebrity who gets political.

Milano feels her credibility, particularly since Donald Trump's election, is questioned on the basis of her success in Hollywood.

"I think that the Republican party made a statement in trying to belittle our opinions in the eyes of the American people, and sort of villainized us, giving us this title of being Hollywood elite ... [that] we have no idea what goes on in regular America," says Milano. "I think that not only did a lot of people believe that, but I think a lot of celebrities got very fearful of speaking out."

Milano, clearly, is unbothered by smear campaigns targeted at Hollywood stars, and she seems to know plenty about the countless challenges the average woman endures because of inequality.

The ratification of the ERA, she says, "automatically puts us in a more equal perception in the eyes of society."

If Milano can somehow make the ERA go viral and inspire a new round of support, she's going to help make history — literally.