“Like most people,” she says, “I am a mass of contradictions.” That she both sort of enjoys the books and is able to die laughing at Ana asking for a glass of “white Pinot Grigio” “because it is the laziest mistake possible” serves to deflect accusations of snobbery while simultaneously making her extremely likeable. It is frightening to consider how many women might be willing to pay that price. There is a happily-ever-after, but the price exacted is terribly high. There’s a man and a woman, and an obstacle that eventually they are able to overcome. Take the unexamined kink and posturing of Christian Grey, which, she writes, “reinforces pervasive cultural messages women are already swallowing about what they should tolerate in romantic relationships.”įifty Shades is a fairy tale. And actually, these things deserve the intelligent attention she pays them: they’re the most widely consumed narratives of our time.
Roxane Gay doesn’t care if you think she’s lowbrow. Lowbrow’s not even the right word, actually, but anyone who can say “BET is not a network I watch regularly because I am very committed to Lifetime Movie Network and lesser cable network reality programming” certainly and rightly doesn’t care what you think about her love of the Hunger Games or Fifty Shades series. Even the premise of the piece is funny in a David Foster Wallace kind of way: what else do smart people do in a flyover state but enter major-league Scrabble tournaments? In her chapter on competitive Scrabble, for instance, Gay confesses that she’s prone to taking games too seriously, to the point where she will “conflate winning the Game of Life to winning at life.” Her footnotes in that article are the kind of footnotes you wish you’d been allowed to leave in your college essays (“In all seriousness, Scrabble was invented by a man named Alfred Mosher Butts”). I am just trying - trying to support what I believe in, trying to do some good in the world, trying to make some noise with my writing while also being myself: a woman who loves pink and likes to get freaky and sometimes dance her ass off to music she knows, she knows, is terrible for women and who sometimes plays dumb with repairmen because it’s just easier to let them feel macho than it is to stand on the moral high ground.Ī foolish consistency being the hobgoblin of little minds, &c, it’s hard to argue. I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human… I am not trying to say I’m right.
Her brand of imperfection is a kind of manifesto in itself: She uses her wit to discredit the alienating (and false) ideal of feminism, which she argues is damaging.
“When I was called a feminist,” she writes of her younger self, “my first thought was, But I willingly give blow jobs … I was called a feminist, and what I heard was, ‘You are an angry, sex-hating, man-hating victim lady person.'” Instead, most of the time (to my shame) I’m more like the crowd at the Daniel Tosh set in the essay “Some Jokes Are Funnier Than Others,” a crowd that fails to stand up and say, “Enough.”īad Feminist is an excellent book for lots of reasons.
And while I would definitely have preferred it had Gay occasionally used the more contingent “ some men” to describe the masculine influence on the cultural evils afflicting women today, I’m nonetheless convinced that the scale of the problem justifies the rhetoric. It’s not like I’m unaware of my own gender parochialism - none of this is news to me. But I sure am now questioning why I’m not that little bit, or even TEN TIMES better at checking myself and others on subjects that I know to be important when the moment arises. As a white, male reader with a pretty fat tire of privilege under my belt, it’s an often-excoriating, albeit hilarious, read. Reading Roxane Gay‘s Bad Feminist (Harper Perennial, 2014) was a personally instructive experience.