You should be a bad feminist

I wanted to quote this entire book.

So many passages had me screaming, yes, yes, yes. Gay hits the nail on the head in her collection of scattered essays going all the way from scrabble to movie reviews to society. She is definitely strongest when she takes something in society and picks it apart based on phenomena in literature. I imagine a lot of cannonballers enjoy reading book reviews and if so Gay is a tremendous joy.

She does battle with some inconsistencies, but it works because she’s aware of them. This is where her title comes from “bad feminist” means being aware of problems and trying to fix them, but sometimes falling short because blurred lines just has a really catchy beat.

I love her take down of pop culture, e.g. the tv-shows girls. The fact that it is sometimes made to be representative of “female” television is exhausting. Gay shows us that it’s okay to hate girls because it’s just a tv show and it isn’t and shouldn’t be representetive of all girlhood and all women tv-shows. The same goes for the diversity discussion on girls. It’s not that the discussion should not be had, it’s that it could be had for so many shows, not just girls.

The strongest points of the, sometimes too scattered book, was her literary critique. She chose to cover some very personal things that maybe weren’t covered in the strongest way. I don’t feel like she needed to share those personal moments with us. It did not seem to be cathergic for her and her critique and badassery gained nothing from it. I disagree that victims should share their stories, I’m not sure it changes people’s view of the crimes; either they are ignorant or they are already too painfully aware.

But, everyone should read this book. Especially high school students – they could need the healthy debate. It’s intelligent, funny and kinda like eating candy (but I suspect that’s because I read it during NaNoWriMo so anything other that writing was chocolate foam on a brownie to me).

I know there isn’t one true feminism, but “Bad feminist” comes pretty damn close.