Bad Feminist: Essays

by Roxane Gay

  One of the recurrent themes throughout The End of Men is that of female ambition—women are working harder, are more focused, and are willing to do what it takes to fulfill their responsibilities, both personally and professionally. At many colleges and universities women are the majority, while men are choosing not to enroll or not to finish their college degrees. Rosin doesn’t do enough, though, to explore why this trend has emerged. She highlights the fact that there was a time when men didn’t have to go to college—they could work in manufacturing or learn a trade and make a good living for themselves and their families. As more manufacturing jobs have gone overseas and the economy has collapsed, however, nothing has replaced these jobs. Men haven’t adapted. What goes unsaid is that women might be more ambitious and focused because we’ve never had a choice. We’ve had to fight to vote, to work outside the home, to work in environments free of sexual harassment, to attend the universities of our choice, and we’ve also had to prove ourselves over and over to receive any modicum of consideration. Women are rising but Hillary Clinton, a former secretary of state and potential presidential candidate in 2016, still must answer questions about fashion. CNN feels comfortable publishing an article suggesting women’s votes might be influenced by their hormones.

  And then Rosin discusses violence, the increase in female aggression, and notes that “women today are far less likely to get murdered, raped, assaulted, or robbed than at any time in recent history.” This is excellent news, but there’s a curious aside when Rosin continues: “A 2010 White House report on women and girls laid out the latest statistics straightforwardly, to the great irritation of many feminists,” but doesn’t provide any evidence of this supposed feminist irritation. It is hard to accept at face value that feminists would be irritated that there’s a decline in violence against women, as if the rise of women is somehow antithetical to the “feminist agenda.” Rosin goes on to cite several other statistics without acknowledging how much abuse and sexual violence goes unreported. The truth is that we’ll never have a truly accurate statistical count for the violence women, or men for that matter, experience. We can only make best guesses.

  Another advance Rosin touts is how the “definition of rape has expanded to include acts that stop short of penetration—oral sex, for example—and circumstances in which the victim was too incapacitated (usually meaning too drunk) to give meaningful consent.” This has been a critical improvement in acknowledging the breadth of sexual violence, but we also have to consider the many different kinds of rape we have learned about over the past few years as conservative politicians blunder through trying to explain their stances on sexual violence and abortion.

  For instance, Indiana treasurer Richard Mourdock, running for the US Senate in 2012, said, in a debate, “I struggled with it myself for a long time, and I realized that life is a gift from God, and I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something God intended to happen.” I’ve been obsessing over these words, and trying to understand how someone who purports to believe in God can also believe that anything born of rape is God-intended. Just as there are many different kinds of rape, there are many different kinds of God. I am also reminded that women, more often than not, are the recipient of God’s intentions and must also bear the burdens of these intentions.

  Mourdock is certainly not alone in offering up opinions about rape. Former Missouri representative Todd Akin believes in “legitimate rape” and the oxymoronic “forcible rape,” not to be confused with all that illegitimate rape going on. Ron Paul believes in the existence of “honest rape,” but turns a blind eye to the dishonest rapes out there. Former Wisconsin State representative Roger Rivard believes some girls, “they rape so easy.” Lest you think these new definitions of rape are only the purview of men, failed Senate candidate Linda McMahon of Connecticut has introduced us to the idea of “emergency rape.” Given this bizarre array of new rape definitions, it is hard to reconcile the belief that women are rising when there is still so much in our cultural climate working to hold women down. We can, I suppose, take comfort in knowing that none of these people is in a position of power anymore.

  The paperback of The End of Men offers a new epilogue. A great deal of the piece antagonizes the feminists Rosin imagines gleefully reveling in the suffering of all us downtrodden women. Rosin implores feminists to accept that the patriarchy is dead, which is so patently absurd that the hashtag #RIPPatriarchy quickly flourished on Twitter in response. In the epilogue, she picks a pointless fight with an audience that simply isn’t paying her any mind.

  Rosin is not wrong that life has improved in measurable ways for women, but she is wrong in suggesting that better is good enough. Better is not good enough, and it’s a shame that anyone would be willing to settle for so little. I cannot think of clearer evidence of how alive and well the patriarchy remains (see above).

  It’s a shame, really, because the epilogue and its tone do such a disservice to a reasonably good book. There’s also blatantly incorrect information like the suggestion that women compose a third of Congress. Women represent 18.3 percent of the 535 seats in the 113th Congress.

  We don’t need to get petty, though. The patriarchy, if that’s what we’re calling it today, is alive and well. The tech industry is consistently embroiled in one misogyny-related controversy or another. At TechCrunch’s 2013 Disrupt, two programmers shared the TitStare app, which is exactly what you think it is. Something so puerile is hardly worth anyone’s time or energy, but it’s one more example of the cultural stupidity that is fueled by misogyny. That same year, Harvard introduced Riptide, a project that will examine how journalism collapsed under the pressure of digital advances. Unfortunately, most of the people interviewed for the project were white men, offering, as usual, a narrow perspective on an issue that would benefit from a more diverse set of voices. Fix the Family, a conservative, Catholic “family values” organization, published a list of reasons why families should not send their daughters to college. The list is not satirical.

  These are relatively small things, though—symptoms, not the disease. These situations are irritants that pale in comparison to the more significant issues women face both in the United States and around the world. We could talk about the retraction of reproductive freedom in North Carolina and Texas and Ohio, or we could conjure up a lot of statistics about domestic and sexual violence or women living in poverty. If the patriarchy is dead, the numbers have not gotten the memo.

  Rosin suggests that feminists are holding on to a grudge, that feminists are willfully holding on to this notion of patriarchal dominance as if we would be unable to function if we weren’t suffering. I’m only one feminist, but I’m confident we’d be just fine if all were right with the world. Rosin writes, “The closer women get to real power, the more they cling to the idea that they are powerless. To rejoice about feminist victories these days counts as betrayal.” The flaw here is the same as the flaw in The End of Men—an all-or-nothing outlook, and an unwillingness to consider nuance. Some women being empowered does not prove the patriarchy is dead. It proves that some of us are lucky.

  It is far more important to discuss power than to exhaustively regurgitate the harmful cultural effects of power structures where women are consistently marginalized. We already know the effects. We live them and try to overcome them. But let’s talk about power. There are bright shining stars like Marissa Mayer and the other twenty women who are CEOs of the Fortune 500—a whopping 4 percent. In the updated epilogue, Rosin blithely references this number as if to say, Leave me within my delusion. I am busy. We can also talk about how no woman has ever been president of the United States and how, as of July 2013, there were only nineteen women presidents and prime ministers throughout the entire world.

  In some ways, Rosin—who in the book says she is neither a radical feminist nor anti-feminist—makes a clever rhetorical move. No matter how you respond, she places you in the position of seeming like you do, in fact, have
a grudge, that you are holding on to anger and unwilling to see the truth as she frames it. 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.

  In Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman, she suggests that, historically speaking, women haven’t accomplished much at all, that women have not yet risen. Moran says,

  Even the most ardent feminist historian, male or female—citing Amazons and tribal matriarchies and Cleopatra—can’t conceal that women have basically done fuck-all for the last 100,000 years. Come on—let’s admit it. Let’s stop exhaustingly pretending that there is a parallel history of women being victorious and creative, on an equal with men, that’s just been comprehensively covered up by The Man.

  According to Moran, women simply haven’t had the chance to achieve greatness the way men have because of a number of sociocultural factors that have favored male dominance.

  How to Be a Woman, a memoir cum feminist text, also approaches gender matters in a selective manner, one grounded in a narrow brand of feminine experience. This is a book where the main thesis revolves around asking if men are worrying about the things women worry about. It’s a catchy idea. One of the most oft-quoted excerpts is:

  And it’s asking this question: “Are the men doing it? Are the men worrying about this as well? Is this taking up the men’s time? Are the men told not to do this, as it’s ‘letting our side down’? Are the men having to write bloody books about this exasperating, retarded, time-wasting bullshit?”

  Who wouldn’t want to be on board with this succinct philosophy? There’s so much in this book that demands we reconcile casual insensitivity and narrow cultural awareness for the sake of funny feminist (albeit dated) thinking. Again, we have to deal with selectivity because while people love quoting the question “Are the men doing it?,” they ignore what Moran says farther down the page about her stance on burkas. “It was the ‘Are the boys doing it?’ basis on which I finally decided I was against women wearing burkas.” This is an odd, glaring statement because I’m not sure what Moran’s stance on burkas has to do with anything. Laurie Balbo notes in an article about an Egyptian news anchor choosing to wear the hijab during a newscast, “There’s no difference between forcing women to wear hijab and forcing them to not wear. The ultimate decision must be that of the individual.” Western opinions on the hijab or burkas are rather irrelevant. We don’t get to decide for Muslim women what does or does not oppress them, no matter how highly we think of ourselves.

  In How to Be a Woman, Moran also says, “I want to reclaim the phrase ‘strident feminist’ in the same way the hip-hop community has reclaimed the word ‘nigger.’” This is a baffling statement because there is simply no reality where the phrase “strident feminist” can be reasonably compared to the N-word. I am fascinated by the silence surrounding this statement, how people will turn a blind eye to casual racism for the sake of funny feminism. For the most part, lavish praise has been heaped on the book. The New York Times raves, “‘How to Be a Woman’ is a glorious, timely stand against sexism so ingrained we barely even notice it.”

  More than one review has noted the dearth of humor in feminist texts given, you know, that we love the narrative of feminists as humorless. As such, they are that much more appreciative of the humor in Moran’s book. Once again, we can overlook cultural ignorance so long as we’re made to laugh. Time and again Moran undermines her ideas by thinking she should apply her outlook to cultural experiences she knows nothing about. She blithely writes, “All women love babies—just like all women love Manolo Blahnik shoes and George Clooney. Even the ones who wear nothing but sneakers, or are lesbians, and really hate shoes, and George Clooney.” Again, this is funny, but it is also untrue, and to try to generalize about women for the sake of humor dismisses the diversity of women and what we love. Moran undermines herself by privileging feminism as something that can exist in isolation of other considerations. Her feminism exists in a very narrow vacuum, to everyone’s detriment. It’s a shame because the book could have been so much more if Moran had looked just a bit beyond herself. Given the popularity of How to Be a Woman, I can’t help but feel this was a missed opportunity.

  But then there is writing about gender that is unapologetically sprawling, that reaches both backward and forward and tries to explode the vacuum of cultural conversations. We should start at the end of Heroines where Kate Zambreno writes, “For my criticism came out of, has always come out of, enormous feeling.” What intrigues me most about Zambreno’s writing is how it so richly embodies the ethos she espouses. In Heroines, Zambreno has created a hybrid text that is part manifesto, part memoir, and part searing literary criticism. This hybridity is the book’s strongest feature, and the way she moves among these different ambitions works very well. Not only does she try to elevate the conversations we have about gender, she leads by example.

  Her criticism rises from emotion. It is appealing to see a writer so plainly locate the motivations behind her criticism. All too often, criticism is treated rather antiseptically under the auspices of objectivity. There is no such distance in Heroines. Zambreno revels in subjectivity.

  Zambreno shifts between the personal and the political at a brisk pace, but the narrative style works because it so clearly embodies what Zambreno calls for at the end of the book when she says, “A new sort of subjectivity is developing online—vulnerable, desirous, well-versed in both pop culture and contemporary writing and our literary ancestors.” The nature of the book also rises out of how much of the book comes from her blog, Frances Farmer Is My Sister, where Zambreno chronicles certain aspects of her life and her cultural and critical interests.

  They say every writer has an obsession, and in Heroines, that obsession is reclamation or, perhaps, breaking new ground where women can be feminist and feminine and can resist the labels and forces that all too often marginalize, silence, or erase female experiences. Zambreno discusses her personal life and romantic relationship, the challenges of acclimating to Akron, Ohio, where she moved with her partner, what it meant to follow her partner, and intersperses these personal observations with examinations of women writers and artists who have, in various ways, been marginalized, silenced, or erased.

  Heroines is not a perfect book. There are silences, particularly surrounding race and class and heterosexual privilege. What does it say when the majority of a woman’s heroines are white, heterosexual women? No book can be everything to everyone, but it would have been nice to see what Zambreno, with such electric thinking and writing, would do if she extended her reach, if she exploded the vacuum of cultural conversations even more.

  I was conflicted about Junot Díaz’s collection This Is How You Lose Her. There is no denying Díaz’s talent. The man writes exceptionally well. His stories are vivid and memorable, intelligent and intense. He understands how to work within the short form and brings a real elegance to the structures of his stories. Díaz grounds his writing in a rich cultural context and is able to capture the authenticity of his characters by allowing them to be unapologetically flawed. These nine interconnected stories follow Yunior, his family, the women he has loved, lost, and scorned, and how, in the end, he ends up alone, amidst the ruins of his misdeeds. I have been conflicted about this book because I loved these stories, the richness of the details, the voice, the way the stories pull the reader from beginning to end. These are stories with gravity. They hold the reader in place.

  “Otravida, Otravez,” about a woman who works as a laundress and is in a relationship
with a married man, Yunior’s father, speaks so beautifully to the immigrant experience, to the choices women make in love, to what they tolerate from men, to how closely they hold their hopes. “Otravida, Otravez” is, without a doubt, one of the finest stories I have ever read.

  There is, indeed, something to admire in each story. In “Invierno,” I could not forget the description of a long, desolate winter when Yunior, his brother, and their mother are first brought to the United States, what snow felt like on Yunior’s bare head. In “Miss Lora,” Díaz makes it easy to sympathize with both Yunior, sixteen and mourning the loss of his brother, and Miss Lora, the middle-aged woman he has an affair with. The collection ends with “The Cheater’s Guide to Love,” a story filled with regret and sorrow as Yunior details the years after his fiancée breaks up with him because of his serial cheating. The story is naked, intensely confessional, a rending of the self, Yunior trying to purge himself of his wrongdoings.

  Then there is the sexism, which is at times virulent. In an interview with NPR, Díaz says he grew up in a world where “I wasn’t really encouraged to imagine women as fully human. I was in fact pretty much—by the larger culture, by the local culture, by people around me, by people on TV—encouraged to imagine women as something slightly inferior to men.” The influence of that world is plainly apparent throughout This Is How You Lose Her. Women are their bodies and what they can offer men. They are pulled apart for Yunior’s sexual amusement. There’s nothing wrong with that, the fact that Yunior is a misogynist of the highest order, that he is a product of a culture that routinely reduces women, that he is unable to remain faithful to his women, that none of the men in this book is very good to women. This is fiction, and if people cannot be flawed in fiction there’s no place left for us to be human.