Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay (Amazon // Goodreads )
I bought this book over winter break and I am finally done with it. I had to take a break from reading it because I wasn’t really enjoying it, but the second time I picked it up, I was around 60 pages in, I finished it in a day and actually enjoyed it more than I was expecting to. I had thought that this review would turn out to be rather scathing but it’s going to be pretty appreciative, at least later on.
During the first 50 or so pages of this book I was constantly thinking the author had good ideas but terrible delivery. The language sounded repetitive and fragmented, like Hemingway, but without the literary grace. This first part of the book, which focuses on the author herself, felt as though the humor was forced and superficial with phrases like, “I consulted Dr. Google regularly.” At some point I even had a fear that my style of writing was similar to that of Roxane Gay’s and people would react similarly to how I wrote.
I got over this, however, during the second part of my reading and the subsequent parts of the book. Gay brings forward a good and succinct representation of the immigrant and minority experience in America. She has good critique of privilege. She became more relatable as I kept reading – subtly and in unexpected ways.
She covers a variety of topics (gender, sexuality, race, entertainment, and politics) and how they all intersect in different ways. My favorite chapter in the book was “How to Be Friends with Another Woman.” She has 13 rules overall, and she starts with, “1. Abandon the cultural myth that all female friendships must be bitchy, toxic, or competitive. This myth is like heels and purses – pretty but designed to SLOW women down.” Her humor and writing style started appealing to me in this chapter. Her snark and biting critique continue from here onward (my favorite is when she rips apart 50 Shades of Gray in a later chapter). She makes important points about how women interact with other women and she does it in a way that doesn’t feel like she’s preaching. In fact, to me, she becomes trustworthy in this chapter, when she tells us rule number 4, “Sometimes, your friends will date people you cannot stand. You can either be honest about your feelings or you can lie. There are good reasons for both. Sometimes you will be the person dating someone your friends cannot stand. If your man or woman is a scrub, just own it so you and your friends can talk about more interesting things. My go-to explanation is ‘I am dating an asshole because I’m lazy.’ You are welcome to borrow it.” She is honest and I don’t doubt it. She establishes this credibility.
Another chapter I enjoyed and learned from was “Not Here To Make Friends.” Gay talks about likability and how the concept of likability is applied only to women and is a manifestation of the double standard in society’s expectations of behavior from men and women. She talks about likability in fiction especially, and how for works written by women authors with women heroes, discussion always includes the likability of the heroine and how this usually colors the literary critique of the work. How when men fit the same categories unlikable women fit, they are called antiheroes and interesting, but when women are in this position, they render the work uninteresting and not an ideal read. This is definitely a trap I fall into – I care if the characters in a book are likable or not, but my experience so far has been extreme irritation and boredom with the male antiheroes in literature. I’ll change this outlook nonetheless, it allows for a more in-depth and complex approach to whatever I am reading.
Something I admire about Gay is that she’s not afraid to say she doesn’t know what to do to solve a certain problem. This isn’t really hard to do of course, some people own up to their lack of knowledge with pride and I think there is no need to overdo it. What sets Gay apart is that she doesn’t just repeat what problems we are facing and then declare she doesn’t know what to do. She manages to add detail and complexity to the debates we’re already having and sometimes proposes theories as to how we can approach these layered problems. But even when she has no idea, she has done something new. She has brought a fresh and eye-opening perspective to the table that can take us a step closer to finding the right way to deal with a problem. Through this, she is able to bring much-needed nuances to our discussions of things like “rape culture” and trigger warnings.
Some of the passages I liked in the book are:
“The problem is, cultural critics talk about privilege with such alarming frequency and in such empty ways, we have diluted the word’s meaning. When people wield the word “privilege,” it tends to fall on deaf ears because we hear that word so damn much it has become white noise.”
“What I remind myself, regularly, is this: the acknowledgement of my privilege is not a denial of the ways I have been and am marginalized, the ways I have suffered.”
“Too many people have become self-appointed privilege police, patrolling the halls of discourse, ready to remind people of their privilege whether those people have denied that privilege or not. In online discourse, in particular, the specter of privilege is always looming darkly. When someone writes from experience, there is often someone else, at the ready, pointing a trembling finger, accusing that writer of having various kinds of privilege. How dare someone speak to a personal experience without accounting for every possible configuration of privilege or the lack thereof? We would live in a world of silence if the only people who were allowed to write or speak form experience or about difference were those absolutely without privilege.”
“We put a lot of responsibility on popular culture, particularly when some pop artifact somehow distinguishes itself as not terrible. In the months and weeks leading up to the release of Bridesmaids, for example, there was a great deal of breathless talk about the new ground the movie was breaking, how yes, indeed, women are funny. Can you believe it? There was a lot of pressure on that movie. Bridesmaids had to be good if any other women-driven comedies had any hope of being produced. This is the set of affairs for women in entertainment – everything hangs in the balance all the time.”
“[…] women are often the brightly polished trophies in the display case of reality television. The genre has developed a very successful formula for reducing women to an awkward series of stereotypes about low self-esteem, marital desperation, the inability to develop meaningful relationships with other women, and an obsession with almost pornographic standards of beauty.”
“Disagreement, however, is not anger. Pointing out the many ways in which misogyny persists and harms women is not anger. Conceding the idea that anger is an inappropriate reaction to the injustice women face backs women into an unfair position. Nor does disagreement mean we are blind to the ways in which progress has been made. Feminists are celebrating our victories and acknowledging our privilege when we have it. We’re simply refusing to settle. We’re refusing to forget how much work there is yet to be done. We’re refusing to relish the comforts we have at the expense of the women who are still seeking comfort.”
“Perhaps we too casually use the term “rape culture” to address the very specific problems that rise from a culture mired in sexual violence. Should we, instead, focus on “rapist culture” because decades of addressing “rape culture” has accomplished so little?”
“How do you write violence authentically without making it exploitative? […] We cannot separate violence in fiction from violence in the world no matter how hard we try.”
“I knew things but I knew nothing about what a group of boys could do to kill a girl.”
“Just because you survive something does not mean you are strong.”
“This is the uncomfortable truth: everything is a trigger for someone. There are things you cannot tell just by looking at someone.”
“The illusion of safety is as frustrating as it is powerful.”
“I don’t believe people can be protected from their histories.”
“Despite our complex cultural climate and what needs to be done for the greater good, it is still an unreasonable burden that someone who is marginalized must bear an extra set of responsibilities. It is unfair that prominent cultural figures who come out have to forge these inroads on our behalf; they carry the hopes of so many on their shoulders. They stand up and are counted so that someday things might actually be better for everyone, everywhere, not just the camera - or radio-ready celebrities for whom coming out is far easier than most.”
“There are injustices great and small, and even if we can only fight the small ones, at least we are fighting.”
“Women’s fiction is often considered a more intimate brand of storytelling that doesn’t tackle the big issues found in men’s fiction.”
“Male readership shouldn’t be the measure to which we aspire. Excellence should be the measure, and if men and /the establishment/ can’t (or won’t) recognize that excellence, we should leave the culpability with them instead of bearing it ourselves. As long as we keep considering male readership the goal, we’re not going to get anywhere.”
“Many comedians are very proud of themselves for saying the things others are supposedly afraid to say. They are at the forefront of this culture of entitlement where we get to do anything, think anything, and say anything.”
“Time and time again, people of color are supposed to be grateful for scraps from the table. There’s this strange implication that we should enjoy certain movies or television shows simply because they exist.”
“I approach most things in life with a dangerous level of confidence to balance my generally low self-esteem.”
“I have always enjoyed board games. I love rolling dice and moving small plastic or metal pieces around game boards. I collect Monopoly sets from around the world. I will play any game so long as there is a possibility I can win. I take games seriously. Sometimes I take them too seriously and conflate winning the Game of Life with winning at life.”
“I had no idea what it mean to be likable, though I was surrounded by generally likable people.”
“Every from a young age I understood that when a girl is unlikable, a girl is a problem. I also understood that I wasn’t being intentionally mean. I was being honest (admittedly, without tact), and I was being human. It is either a blessing or a curse that those are rarely likable qualities in a woman.”
“Being good is the best way to be bad.”
