Bad Feminist: Essays

by Roxane Gay

  Critics have been vocal about the sexual violence undertones in the song, and they’re not wrong. Robin just knows you want it, girl. He just does, so shut up and let him give it to you. Scores of men and women are, apparently, on board. “Blurred Lines” is Thicke’s most popular song to date. In his single “Give It 2 U,” Thicke doubles down on his bad-boy phase with lyrics that tell a woman what he has for her, including a reference to his endowment. In the wake of the criticism, Thicke is fairly unapologetic, saying, “Women and their bodies are beautiful. Men are always gonna want to follow them around.” I guess that’s that. Men want what they want.

  As much as it pains me to admit, I like these songs. They make me want to dance. I want to sing along. They are delightful pop confections. But. I enjoy the songs the way I have to enjoy most music—I have to forget I am a sentient being. I have to lighten up.

  Take Kanye West’s Yeezus. The album is compelling and ambitious, with sounds that are aggressive if not hostile. When Yeezus was released, I listened to the album on repeat. I wanted to love Yeezus, but I can’t because of lyrics like “You see it’s leaders and it’s followers / But I’d rather be a dick than a swallower,” from the song “New Slaves.” Kanye’s disdain for women overwhelms nearly every track—but then there’s a song like “Blood on the Leaves” that is so outstanding you can’t possibly dismiss the album entirely. We are constantly faced by this uncomfortable balance between brilliance and bad behavior.

  This is just music, right? These artists are merely expressing themselves.

  As a writer, I recognize the necessity of creative freedom. I have finally heard a couple of funny rape jokes—Ever Mainard’s joke about the fear instilled in women and the assumption of the inevitability of rape and Wanda Sykes’s joke about wanting a detachable vagina to better avoid rape while out and about. I still hate rape jokes, but I hate censorship more. I hate that I have to choose.

  Ken Hoinsky is a pickup artist who ran a successful Kickstarter fund-raising campaign for his book Above the Game, where he doles out his wisdom to help men who might be shy or awkward around the ladies. When a critical mass of people became aware of Hoinsky’s project, there was outcry because some of Hoinsky’s advice—well, it’s questionable. It blurs lines. Still Kickstarter didn’t cancel the project. Later, the company apologized. Moving forward, it promised not to allow the creators of seduction guides to use the Kickstarter platform. Additionally, Kickstarter made a significant financial contribution to RAINN. Hoinsky will publish his book and join a small legion of pickup artists who treat women as conquests rather than human beings, who believe that when a woman says no, she’s really saying maybe.

  Men want what they want.

  So much of our culture caters to giving men what they want. A high school student invites model Kate Upton to attend his prom, and he’s congratulated for his audacity. A male fan at a Beyoncé concert reaches up to the stage to slap her ass because her ass is there, her ass is magnificent, and he wants to feel it. The science fiction fandom community is often embroiled in heated discussions, across the Internet, about the ongoing problem of sexual harassment at conventions—countless women are telling all manner of stories about how, without their consent, they are groped, ogled, lured into hotel rooms under false pretenses, physically lifted off the ground, and more.

  But men want what they want. We should all lighten up.

  It’s hard not to feel humorless, as a woman and a feminist, to recognize misogyny in so many forms, some great and some small, and know you’re not imagining things. It’s hard to be told to lighten up because if you lighten up any more, you’re going to float the fuck away. The problem is not that one of these things is happening; it’s that they are all happening, concurrently and constantly.

  These are just songs. They are just jokes. It’s just a hug. They’re just breasts. Smile, you’re beautiful. Can’t a man pay you a compliment? In truth, this is all a symptom of a much more virulent cultural sickness—one where women exist to satisfy the whims of men, one where a woman’s worth is consistently diminished or entirely ignored.

  Or I could put it this way. Let’s say this is simply the world we live in. If there is a spectrum of misogyny with pop culture on one end and the disrespect for women’s boundaries in the middle, on the other end we have our nation’s lawmakers, who implicitly encourage this entire spectrum to thrive.

  In 2013, state legislators in Texas, Ohio, and North Carolina, among others, trampled all over reproductive freedom—trying to limit when a woman can have an abortion and where abortions can be provided as well as redefining what a fetus is.

  A culture that treats women as objects, that gleefully supports entertainment that is more often demeaning toward women than it is not, that encourages the erosion of a woman’s autonomy and personal space, is the same culture that elects state lawmakers who work tirelessly to enact restrictive abortion legislation. Or is it that state lawmakers who work tirelessly to enact restrictive abortion legislation encourage their constituents to treat women as objects? Perhaps this is trickle-down misogyny—which came first, the chicken or the egg?

  On June 30, 2013, in the Room for Debate section, the New York Times asked, “Would support for abortion rights grow if more women discussed their abortions?” When I first saw the question, I bristled. Women shouldn’t have to sacrifice their personal histories to enlighten those who are probably uninterested in enlightenment. At some point, the greater good isn’t enough of a justification for such sacrifice.

  Here’s a woman’s story. Who she is doesn’t matter. She could be any woman—a friend, a sister, a mother, an aunt. Say she becomes pregnant. Say the pregnancy is unplanned but she’s financially and emotionally stable enough that she and her boyfriend decide, Let’s do this. Say she’s pro-choice but from the moment she realizes she’s pregnant, it feels like she’s carrying a baby. Still, she is staunchly pro-choice, always will be. Say if she didn’t think she and her boyfriend could give the baby a good life, she would have an abortion. Say she’s in the kitchen during her twenty-seventh week when she falls to her knees because there is a terrible cramping in her abdomen. Say she starts bleeding and it won’t stop. Say she and her boyfriend rush to the hospital. Say she loses consciousness. Say when she wakes up, the baby is gone because it came down to her life or the baby’s. Say she spends years feeling like the wrong choice was made. This is a story about reproductive freedom. This is a story about a woman’s life and the value of her life. Choices were made. Choices were taken away. Say this woman lived in a state where certain choices were sacrificed in favor of the sanctity of life. Say she died, and so much for sanctity. Who would tell her story then?

  And what if she doesn’t want to tell her story? What if it’s too personal, too painful? What do these confessions really do? Some people will be moved, but those are rarely the same people who support legislation to erode reproductive freedom. Immovable people will not be moved by testimony. Her story becomes an emotional spectacle, something for people to consider, briefly, before moving on to the next sad story. There is no shortage of sad stories when it comes to women and their reproductive lives.

  Robin Thicke sings about what he knows a woman wants. Fine. Daniel Tosh encourages his fans to touch women lightly on the stomach and film themselves doing so. Fine. Ken Hoinsky believes persistence is a virtue. Fine. Texas governor Rick Perry says, of Senator Wendy Davis, “She was the daughter of a single woman. She was a teenage mother herself. She managed to eventually graduate from Harvard Law School and serve in the Texas Senate. It’s just unfortunate that she hasn’t learned from her own example that every life must be given a chance to realize its full potential and that every life matters.” Fine. In Ohio, any woman seeking an abortion must get an ultrasound. If she has complications from an abortion, she must go to a private rather than public hospital. The state legislators pushing the various initiatives across the country are just looking out for women. Fine, fine, fine. Men want to protect women
—unless, of course, they want to grab those women’s asses.

  Lighten up. Men want what they want. Sometimes they make their desires plain with music to which I can’t help but sing along. Blurred lines, indeed.

  The Trouble with Prince Charming, or He Who Trespassed Against Us

  We all know the common fairy tale. There’s a man and a woman—needless to say, we rarely see stories about a woman and a woman or a man and a man—who must overcome some obstacle to reach happily ever after. There is always a happily-ever-after.

  I enjoy fairy tales because I need to believe, despite my cynicism, that there is a happy ending for everyone, especially me. The older I get, though, the more I realize how fairy tales demand a great deal from the woman. The man in most fairy tales, Prince Charming in all his iterations, really isn’t that interesting. In most fairy tales, he is blandly attractive and rarely seems to demonstrate much personality, taste, or intelligence. We’re supposed to believe this is totally fine because he is Prince Charming. His charm is supposedly enough.

  The Disney versions of fairy tales, the ones with which we are probably most familiar, don’t offer much in the way of Prince Charming. In The Little Mermaid, Prince Eric has a great woman right in front of him but is so obsessed with this pretty voice he once heard he can’t appreciate what he has. In Snow White, the prince doesn’t even find Snow White until she is comatose, and he is so lacking in imagination he simply falls in love with her seemingly lifeless body. In Beauty and the Beast, Belle is given away by her father to the Beast himself, and then must endure the attentions of a man who essentially views her as chattel. Only through sacrificing herself, and loving a beast of a man, can she finally learn that he is, in fact, a handsome prince.

  The thing about fairy tales is that the princess finds her prince, but there’s usually a price to pay. A compromise is required for happily ever after. The woman in the fairy tale is generally the one who pays the price. This seems to be the nature of sacrifice.

  Consider the Twilight series. The four books are about vampires and werewolves and the sweeping love story between Bella, a young girl, and Edward, an old vampire. Really, though, the Twilight series is a new kind of fairy tale. Is there anything particularly compelling about Edward Cullen? He sparkles. He’s theoretically attractive but seems to have only one interest: loving Bella and controlling every decision she makes. We’re supposed to believe his obsessive control and devotion are somehow appealing. We’re supposed to believe he is Prince Charming, albeit flawed because he needs to drink blood to survive. Accepting Edward’s controlling obsession and vampirism is the compromise required of Bella. Eventually, becoming a vampire, becoming undead, is the price Bella must pay for her happily-ever-after. We’re supposed to believe she’s fine with that because Bella is the one who advocates so fiercely for Edward to turn her into a vampire. We’re supposed to believe Edward is worth that sacrifice.

  Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, and Fifty Shades Freed, by E.L. James, together compose a modern fairy tale with a dark erotic twist. The trilogy began as fan fiction—fiction written by fans of an original series without actually being a part of it—inspired by Twilight. While grounded in the fairy tale tradition and rising out of fan fiction, Fifty Shades is also the first series that could be categorized as erotica and that has been embraced by the mainstream—if you forget, of course, Anne Rice’s Sleeping Beauty trilogy.

  Fan fiction and erotica are not new, but there is something about the Fifty Shades trilogy that has piqued the popular imagination. The books are erotic, amusing in their absurdity, and disturbing in their cultural implications about just how much trouble Prince Charming can be.

  In Fifty Shades of Grey, a bright, young college student, Anastasia Steele, is forced to take the place of her student reporter best friend, Kate, who has fallen ill. Anastasia, or Ana, travels to Seattle to interview Christian Grey, a handsome, reclusive, and enigmatic billionaire, for the student paper. During their initial meeting, Ana stammers her way through an uncomfortable interview, distracted by Christian’s extraordinary good looks. Of course. He encourages Ana to work for him. They banter. True love is born, but there is a catch. There has to be a catch, an obstacle. This is the way of fairy tales.

  Over three books, Ana and Christian try to have a relationship, but they are impeded by Christian’s abiding interest in BDSM (or at least E.L. James’s fantasy version of BDSM), his unwillingness to engage in a “normal” relationship, and Ana’s desire for a “normal” relationship. There is all kinds of drama, and with each book, that drama becomes increasingly absurd but strangely addictive. A crazy former submissive! An older former lover and mistress who earns the nickname Mrs. Robinson! A sexually harassing boss with a chip on his shoulder! Family drama! Helicopter crashes! Arson! Oh my!

  When she meets Christian, Ana is, conveniently, a twenty-one-year-old virgin who has never even masturbated. Of course. Christian gets to show Ana the ropes, so to speak, in a very dramatic scene where he grabs her by the wrist and leads her to his bedroom to properly deflower her. The kinkiness can wait, but her vagina cannot. As he sweeps Ana off her feet, Christian says, “We’re going to rectify the situation right now,” which is surely what every woman wants to hear when she has sex for the first time. In a never-ending scene, Christian makes their first lovemaking encounter all about Ana. He makes her come by stimulating her nipples. They fool around some more, and finally, Christian can no longer control himself. He takes off his boxers and tears open a condom wrapper while Ana stares at his enormous cock, bewildered because she is so innocent and pure. Of course. Christian says, “Don’t worry . . . You expand too.” You haven’t lived until you’ve read such prose. Before long, Christian “rips through” Ana’s virginity, they both come, and her virginity situation is, indeed, rectified, pleasantly for all involved.

  The books quickly devolve into passionate(ish) sex scenes interrupted by arguments about their different desires—Christian’s recalcitrance toward normalcy, and the ridiculous drama, both within the relationship and beyond.

  Whenever women do something in significant numbers, the media immediately becomes frenzied as they try to understand this new mystery of womanhood. If that something involves female desire (as if female desire is entirely uniform), the frenzy takes on a sharper pitch. Nearly every major publication has offered at least one “think piece” about the Fifty Shades series. The books have been labeled with the condescending term “mommy porn” because the trilogy has found a great deal of success among a certain demographic. Once that happens, we have to call it a trend, and then we need to write trend pieces that exhaustively analyze something that probably isn’t very worthy of analysis. Is it really newsworthy that a number of women have finally found something that turns them on, or is the response to Fifty Shades a depressing commentary on the state of modern desire?

  A great deal of the conversation about these books focuses on the erotic elements—there is so much explicit, highly implausible sex to be found in Fifty Shades, and it always ends in the most amazing orgasms ever. Ana and Christian have sex on an airplane and in an elevator and in a car. They have sex in several different beds and they have sex in Christian’s playroom, which Ana calls the Red Room of Pain—a dungeon so outlandishly equipped that, when she first sees it, Ana thinks, “It feels like I’ve time-traveled back to the sixteenth century and the Spanish inquisition.” Inside, she finds deep burgundy walls, a large wooden cross, an iron grid hanging from the ceiling, lots of ropes and chains and paddles and whips and crops and other toys, as if real BDSM is manifested solely in the extravagant display of toys.

  This analogy might help illustrate the difference between BDSM in the real world and BDSM in the world of E.L. James—Fifty Shades : BDSM :: McDonald’s : Food.

  I understand why these books are so popular, beyond the underlying fairy tale. There are hot moments. Chances are you will be turned on by something in these books. The trilogy tries valiantly to make the reader bel
ieve female pleasure is the most important part of a sexual experience despite Christian Grey’s dominant proclivities. In nearly all the sex scenes, Christian is meticulous about pleasuring Ana. He lavishes her body with all manner of sexual attention. The books are generous in detailing lady orgasms that make it clear Christian Grey is the best lover ever. It’s a nice little fantasy.

  When you look deeper, though, which is challenging in a trilogy with the depth of a murky wading pool, these books are really about Ana trying to change/save Christian from his demons—she is the virginal good girl who can lead the dark bad boy to salvation, as if, historically, trying to change a man has ever worked out well. At one point during their courtship, Ana thinks, “This man, whom I once thought of as a romantic hero, a brave shining white knight—or the dark knight as he said. He’s not a hero; he’s a man with serious, deep emotional flaws, and he’s dragging me into the dark. Can I not guide him into the light?” I wanted to take Ana aside and say, “Girl, you cannot lead this man into the light. Let that dream go.”

  After all the trials this couple faces, and after all the hot sex, we’re supposed to think this trilogy is about a young woman and her happily-ever-after. It’s not. Ana’s sexual awakening is a convenient vehicle for the awakening of Christian’s humanity. Fifty Shades is about a man finding peace and happiness because he finally finds a woman willing to tolerate his bullshit for long enough.

  Fifty Shades is engaging in that simplistic, formulaic manner of romance novels or fairy tales, but the books are terribly written in really delightful ways. I embraced the absurdity with open arms and laughed and laughed.

  Ana has no gag reflex, which is so very convenient. On those rare occasions she goes down on Christian, Ana has no problem orally accommodating Christian’s girth. She even swallows, so she’s obviously a keeper.

  Christian is one of those chatty lovers who, throughout all three books, spends a great deal of time narrating what he is doing, wants to do, and/or will do to Ana, adding at least an extra ten thousand words to each book.