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Bad Feminist: Essays

Roxane Gay (Goodreads Author),

Bahni Turpin (Narrator)

3.94 · Rating details · 75,880 ratings · 7,905 reviews

A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched young cultural observers of her generation, Roxane Gay.

"Pink is my favorite color. I used to say my favorite color was black to be cool, but it is pink—all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink. I read Vogue, and I'm not doing it ironically, though it might ...more

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Published August 5th 2014 by HarperAudio

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Nov 14, 2013 Roxane added it · (Review from the author) · review of another edition

This writer certainly has a LOT OF OPINIONS. I mean...

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May 29, 2014 Rowena rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: feminism, essays

2.5 stars

Essays are one of my favourite literary genres and recently I've read some amazing essay collections that have introduced me to new ideas and new writing styles so perhaps I put overly high expectations on Roxane Gay's essay collection. Overall I'd have to say I was disappointed but this might have a lot to do with my high expectations and perhaps that I am not this book's intended audience.

The book started off quite well. I liked the introduction in which Gay discusses what it means 2.5 stars

Essays are one of my favourite literary genres and recently I've read some amazing essay collections that have introduced me to new ideas and new writing styles so perhaps I put overly high expectations on Roxane Gay's essay collection. Overall I'd have to say I was disappointed but this might have a lot to do with my high expectations and perhaps that I am not this book's intended audience.

The book started off quite well. I liked the introduction in which Gay discusses what it means to be a "bad feminist", an imperfect woman in a world in which women are expected to strive for (unattainable) perfection at all times. I was able to relate to the sentiment a lot of women have of wanting to steer clear of the feminist title because of its often negative connotations, and also because of not understanding what the theory was truly about.

There are a few reasons why this book didn’t do it for me:

1- This book is too heavy on pop culture, which isn't really for me. I'm probably the wrong audience for this book because, after all I don't watch reality TV or any of the television shows Gay critiques, I’m not interested in critiques of 50 Shades of Grey, Gone Girl or Twilight at all so it's not a surprise that I didn't enjoy those particular essays.

2- I think I was confused by the main thesis of this book. I expected all the essays to be on feminism, an alternative and more uniting (for our diverse, pluralistic society) type of feminism. This book was essentially a mixture of feminist essays, loosely-feminist essays, essays on observations of race, class and pop culture critique, and some memoir-style essays. I’m not even sure whether I can call the majority of them essays as they read like blog posts. Although I've learned a lot from reading people’s blogs, a paperback perhaps isn’t the right medium for this type of writing.

3- I wasn't challenged enough. I felt like Gay was trying to say, look I’m an academic but I’m still cool. I appreciate and admire postmodernist feminist writers when they write in their own styles and don’t feel the need to stick to conventional, dry academic writing styles, but this particular style just didn't engage me. I read a lot of feminist literature and I guess what I always look for when I finish books like this are new realizations, new ideas and things I didn't know before, but this was simply a rehash of the last two years of pop culture discussion on Twitter.

4- I was quite frankly uninterested in most of her essays. Some of the essays ended too soon; I had no idea where she was going with some of them and when I had finally figured it out, the essay had ended.

I can definitely see Gay's appeal, and the idea of her appeals to me as well. This is a world in which women are constantly being silenced or being called histrionic, strident, etc for having an opinion or talking about controversial issues that make people uncomfortable so I always support women who have found their voice and are able to express themselves. Gay does bring up lots of important topics, such as rape, racism,racial stereotypes, and abortion and these topics still need to be discussed and dealt with.

With all that being said, I did like quite a few of the essays. The ones on race were decent. Personally as a black woman in academia I enjoyed her discourse on the lack of black professors in academia and I have to say that it was not until graduate school that I ever had a black professor (or even black classmates for that matter) and that was a big deal for me.

Gay is definitely a passionate and fearless writer, It's too bad I didn't enjoy her essays as much as I'd expected to.

...more

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Aug 07, 2014 Julie Christine rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: social-political-commentary, read-2014, best-of-2014

I became aware of the “I don’t need feminism because . . .” meme several months ago. You know—those photos of young women holding up signs that read things like, “I don’t need feminism because I am capable of critical thinking,” or “I don’t need feminism because I am not a delusional, disgusting, hypocritical man-hater.” I shook my head, rolled my eyes, but still, these weird declarations chilled me. How did a socio-political movement founded on the principles of empowerment and equal rights ...more

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Sep 11, 2014 Molly rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Trite, trivial, narcissistic and vacuous beyond belief. There's nothing thoughtful or interesting here; the collection is one pretext after another for Gay to publicly exhibit her triviality and bad taste, forgive herself for it and demand applause. Readers are inveigled into service as Gay's indulgent confessors. The repeated routine is a) Gay admits to loving some god awful schlock b) Gay ponders her own courage in making this disclosure c) Gay discovers consuming this schlock is really both Trite, trivial, narcissistic and vacuous beyond belief. There's nothing thoughtful or interesting here; the collection is one pretext after another for Gay to publicly exhibit her triviality and bad taste, forgive herself for it and demand applause. Readers are inveigled into service as Gay's indulgent confessors. The repeated routine is a) Gay admits to loving some god awful schlock b) Gay ponders her own courage in making this disclosure c) Gay discovers consuming this schlock is really both personally virtuous and politically salient (which are indistinguishable). You suspect I exaggerate? I understate:

On Reality Television:
Reality television often gives the impression that like gender, the whole of life is a performance. The Los Angeles mansion or the tropical jungle or the fading rock star’s tour bus is the stage, and what a stage it is -- brightly lit, lurid, encouraging us to see the garish spectacle of life at it’s most artificially real. I watch it all -- the faux highbrow fare of Bravo, the booze-soaked MTV programming, the glossy competition shows on CBS, the sleazy exploitative fare of VH1 and even the off brand shows on lesser cable networks like Bad Girls Club and Sister Wives.

No one shines more luridly on this faux real stage than a woman. Whether it’s a modeling competition, a chance to compete for love, a weight loss show or a look into the lives of an aging magazine publisher’s harem, 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, marriage desperation, the inability to develop meaningful relationships with other women, and an obsession with an almost pornographic standard of beauty. When it comes to reality television, women, more often than not work very hard at performing the part of woman though their scripts are shamefully, shamefully warped.

Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV by Jennifer Pozner, is a very smart book that skewers reality television for its sexist, racist, and dehumanizing tactics in nearly every genre of reality television. While I think of myself as media literate and a feminist, I don’t know that any book I’ve read this year has made me as uncomfortable as Reality Bites Back for its incisive examination of what I have often thought of as harmless entertainment programming. I had to question what it says about me that I take so much pleasure in the drama of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills or the drunken, weave-snatching antics of Rock of Love or Flavor of Love, that, I, like many others, take pleasure in what Pozner brands, “the cathartic display of other people’s humiliations.” These shows exist because audiences need reminders of the wrong turns our lives might take.

On The Hunger Games:

I have found myself inexplicably drawn to these books, the complex world Collins has created, and the people she has placed in that world.

I am not the kind of person who becomes so invested in a book or movie or television show that my interest becomes a hobby or intense obsession, one where I start to declare allegiances, or otherwise demonstrate a serious level of commitment to something fictional I had no hand in creating.

Or, I wasn’t that kind of person.

Let me be clear: Team Peeta. I cannot even fathom how one could be on any other team. Gale? I can barely acknowledge him. Peeta, on the other hand, is everything. He frosts things and bakes bread and is unconditional and unwavering in his love and also he is very, very strong. He can throw a sack of flour, is what I am saying. Peeta is a place of solace and hope and he is a good kisser.

In December 2011, I didn’t really know much about The Hunger Games. Given my abiding interest in pop culture, I’m not sure how I missed the books.

I do most of my leisure reading at the gym. I hate exercise. Yes, it’s good for you and weight loss and whatever, but normally, I work out and want to die. I really do. I knew I was in love with The Hunger Games when I did not want to get off the treadmill. The book captivated me from the first page. I wanted to keep walking so I could stay in the world Collins created. More than that, The Hunger Games moved me. There was so much at stake, so much drama and it was all so intriguing, so hypnotizing, so intense and dark. I particularly appreciated what the books got right about strength and endurance, suffering and survival. I found myself gasping and hissing and even bursting into tears, more than once. I looked insane but I did not care. I was completely without shame.

Does any investigation follow these displays of pleasure? Any inquiry into these effects of consumer ecstasy, and the political, aesthetic or formal aspects of the works that provoke them? Nothing. Like a tween's book report, the shallow "analysis" is limited to descriptive characterization; the one relation Gay has to these fictions is identification and fantasy. Two centuries of political and aesthetic theorizing and literary criticism and nearly a century of the critique of mass culture have completely passed Gay by, and she remains in a critical infancy, celebrating her own every impulsive and naive reaction to the prods and stimulations of these processed snack entertainments. These products Gay exhibits herself consuming serve her as occasions and instruments for the most solipsistic autocommuning and self-exploration, tossing up an endless stream of clichés:

My love for these books, at its purest, is not really about Peeta or anything silly (though, still). I love that a young woman character is fierce and strong but human in ways I find believable, relatable. Katniss was clearly a heroine, but a heroine with issues. She intrigued me because she never seemed to know her own strength. She wasn’t blandly insecure the way girls are often forced to be in fiction. She was brave but flawed. She was a heroine, but she was also a girl who loved two boys and couldn’t choose which boy she loved best. She was not sure she was up to the task of leading a revolution but she did her best, even when she doubted herself.

Throughout the books, Katniss endures the unendurable. She is damaged and it shows. At times, it might seem like her suffering is gratuitous but life often presents unendurable circumstances people manage to survive. Only the details differ. The Hunger Games trilogy is dark and brutal but in the end, the books also offer hope—for a better world and a better people and for one woman, a better life for herself—a life she can share with a man who understands her strength and doesn’t expect her to compromise that strength, a man who can hold her weak places and love her through the darkest of her memories, the worst of her damage. Of course I love these books. The trilogy offers the kind of tempered hope everyone who survives something unendurable hungers for.

This is all a kind of advertising doubling as promotion of personal brand; "Roxane Gay" is developed as a vendible, celebrity attention magnet because of her consumption of these brands with a ostentatiously childish, naive appetite and trembling excitement that is repeatedly declared delightfully naughty in an innocent way. In turn the brands are re-energized and valorized by the spectacle of Gay's "quirky celebrity", self regarding, narcissistic enjoyment. ...more

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Mar 22, 2018 Emily (Books with Emily Fox) added it · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobooks

“Feminists are just women who don’t want to be treated like shit”

Well, Roxane Gay and I both have a favorite quote in common now and I'll also be calling myself a bad feminist because "I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all."

I went into this book not knowing much about the author. I feel in love with her just with the intro. I didn’t really connect with some of the stories (especially the first third) but things picked up towards the middle of this book and laughed out loud ...more

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Feb 26, 2015 Oriana rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: why-werent-you-better, read-2015

Well this was a huge disappointment. I had such high hopes for Roxane Gay! A Haitian American cultural critic with a master's and a nonperfect body type? Yes! I was sure she would eviscerate popular culture and social injustice with an incisive eye and a unique perspective. But nope. These aren't really essays; they're like unstructured wallowings, ramblings that just flit from thing to thing and never get anywhere or lead to any new thinking.

Yes, Gay takes stream-of-consciousness meanders Well this was a huge disappointment. I had such high hopes for Roxane Gay! A Haitian American cultural critic with a master's and a nonperfect body type? Yes! I was sure she would eviscerate popular culture and social injustice with an incisive eye and a unique perspective. But nope. These aren't really essays; they're like unstructured wallowings, ramblings that just flit from thing to thing and never get anywhere or lead to any new thinking.

Yes, Gay takes stream-of-consciousness meanders through race and class and reality television and sexual violence and Twitter and respectability politics and Scrabble and The Hunger Games. But there's no structure! In one essay she'll talk about Twilight and then she'll talk about rape and then she'll talk about fairy tales, without ever returning or making any broad claims that tie it all together. In another, she goes on and on about how bad Law & Order: SVU is for our society and perpetuating rape culture, and then she says, "I've watched every episode of this show multiple times. I don't know what that says about me." You don't? Why not? This is a book of personal essays! Why don't you ponder that a little bit and try to draw some goddamn conclusions?

I never felt challenged by her ideas, and I don't think she challenged herself to actually dig into them, either. In an essay about why the book is called "Bad Feminist," she rails against the idea of an "essential feminism," whereby all feminists can be grouped into one category that's defined by a fixed set of ideals and traits. And then immediately after that she explains that she's a "bad" feminist because she likes the color pink and refuses to learn how cars work and wants to have a baby. Did she not even re-read her own work before sending it off to be put in a book?!

I think part of the problem (plagiarizing myself from my own comments) is that, because of teh internetz, publishers are conflating "popular on Twitter" with "is able to write well." They're tossing off book deals to anyone with an impressive following, and not pushing writers to do harder work than they've already done online. As if having a talent for snappy one-liners is not the exact goddamn opposite of being good at thinking deeply about an idea and drawing surprising and interesting conclusions from it.

On a more personal note, another issue has to be that I read this so shortly after the fall-down-stunning Empathy Exams. Jamison's dazzling pieces—or really any essays done well—read like tightly constructed meditations, beginning-middle-end investigations, pursuing an attempt to solve a quandary or at least interrogating an idea and shaking loose some brilliance from it. But Gay's "essays" are all basically unsophisticated blog posts. They never got anywhere and just left me frustrated.

In conclusion: there are some really fantastic essay collections being published today. This is definitely not one of 'em. ...more

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Jun 12, 2014 Jessica Jeffers rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: feminism, favorites, authors-of-color, edelweiss

It's not very often that a book causes me to weep uncontrollably in public, but this book did. Roxane Gay moved me in a way that I haven't been moved in quite a while with this collection of essays, ostensibly umbrella'd under the topic of feminism. In reality, only about a third of the essays directly address feminism; Gay also addresses race, culture, and Scrabble competitions. It's equal parts commentary, memoir, and critical analysis. It's pretty phenomenal.

I don't even know where to begin It's not very often that a book causes me to weep uncontrollably in public, but this book did. Roxane Gay moved me in a way that I haven't been moved in quite a while with this collection of essays, ostensibly umbrella'd under the topic of feminism. In reality, only about a third of the essays directly address feminism; Gay also addresses race, culture, and Scrabble competitions. It's equal parts commentary, memoir, and critical analysis. It's pretty phenomenal.

I don't even know where to begin when it comes to expressing how much I love the way this woman writes. I could read her all day, every day. Even the essays whose theses I disagreed with, I loved the way they were written. Even the essays whose topics were beyond my realm of personal experience, I loved the way they were written.

Then there's the fact that I absolutely fucking love her take on feminism in the 21st century. I don't know if there's ever really been a time that feminism didn't have some form of "dirty word" connotations associate with it, but we're currently living in a time where the Women Against Feminism Tumblr portrays feminism as a philosophy meant to raise women up at the expense of men. The girls on that blog really need to spend some time actually reading feminist theory instead of just regurgitating what Rush Limbaugh tells them feminism is about because most of their claims so wildly miss the point, but that's a rant for another day.

The problem with feminism today is that there's no coherent central focus--other than the obvious equality for women. There's different schools of thought under the umbrella of feminism that espouse different points of view, and many of those schools are rooted in the cross-sectional experience of being a feminist and Something Else, whether it's a black woman, a lesbian woman, or a Jewish woman. Unfortunately, the voices that rise above the others and are seen as representative of all feminists are often white middle-class women, and those feminists don't represent Roxane Gay's feminism. The ways that she expresses her feminism clash with what she calls Capital-F Feminism in a way that's always made her feel like a bad feminist, and that is where much of this collection springs from.

She writes about the myriad aspects of her personal identity, combining race, gender, sexuality, life as an academic. I don't necessarily identify or agree with all of her points, but when she hits a nerve, she hits it HARD. The series of essays on sexual violence -- particularly What We Hunger For in which she talks about strength in women and her own experience as a victim of rape -- were phenomenally moving. The conversations that our country has had about the topic of rape in the last couple of years have been sickening and heartbreaking. I wish the piece The Careless Language of Sexual Violence had been included as an afterword to her novel An Untamed State because it forced me to completely re-think the way I thought about that novel and its representations of violence and sexual assault. Those pieces reduced me to a blubbering mess, sobbing on the terrace at my office building during my lunch break.

Roxane Gay is also the first person to make me want to read The Hunger Games series and the first person to make me feel okay for not liking Caitlin Moran all that much -- she's alright, but doesn't seem to understand that her experience is not necessarily representative of all women.

Some of the essays are a little overly academic in tone and that my turn off some readers, but this is a phenomenal piece of work. It's great to be reminded that feminism shouldn't be about women doing certain things (careers over domesticity, blowing off patriarchal standards of beauty by not shaving or wearing makeup), but about enabling women to make their own damn decisions about those things. I just wish those things weren't widely seen as contradictory to feminism, or "bad feminism." ...more

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Oct 08, 2016 Nat rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: feminism, nonfiction, essays, memoir, diverse-reads

I've been on the look-out to read more feminist books, but most of the ones I tried reading before focus heavily on either privileged males and/ or sexual assaults, which then leads to me feeling terrified to leave my home...

However, Bad Feminist focuses more on Gay's opinions about “misogyny, institutional sexism that consistently places women at a disadvantage, the inequity in pay, the cult of beauty and thinness, the repeated attacks on reproductive freedom, violence against women, and on ...more

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Nov 18, 2014 Diana Stegall rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: feminism, sassy-lady-realness, read-in-2014

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when people talk about Roxane Gay. I went into this hoping to love this book, hoping it would be revelatory as promised or that I would be better off for having read it. But it was a slog to get through, and I can't recommend it to anyone who's spent more than a cursory 5 minutes on the internet reading cultural criticism.

It isn’t simply that she fails to offer nuanced critique, or that she contradicts herself - it's that these essays are horribly written. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when people talk about Roxane Gay. I went into this hoping to love this book, hoping it would be revelatory as promised or that I would be better off for having read it. But it was a slog to get through, and I can't recommend it to anyone who's spent more than a cursory 5 minutes on the internet reading cultural criticism.

It isn’t simply that she fails to offer nuanced critique, or that she contradicts herself - it's that these essays are horribly written. They're terribly, sloppily constructed. Fully half of the essays in this collection have my scribble in the margin: "What the hell is her thesis? Where is she going with this?" There's no POINT to it all, except to point out that racism and sexism still exist and are reflected and amplified by our pop culture artifacts. No duh? I guess if all she did was rehash these issues in a coherent, thoughtful and elegant way, that would be enough. I can recommend a beautiful piece of writing, even when it adds nothing new to the discussion. There's something to be said for elegant writing in its own right - but this book doesn't offer such writing. These read like the blog pieces they originally were.

This is a published essay collection! This was her big spotlighted debut! Considering the hype which preceded its publication, this book should represent the very best criticism she can muster: the most crystallized opinions, the most exquisitely unfolded trains of thought. If this meandering, pointless collection of dressed up Tumblr posts is the best criticism she can offer to a publisher, it's sorely disappointing.

EDIT: Folks can take umbrage at the last third of this essay (though I think if you're not ready to talk about your own history of sexual violence, you're not obligated to - but you can't mention that PRECISELY following an essay calling out other female writers for their failure to write explictly about their histories of sexual violence), but there is no denying the rest of this review is spot-freaking-on: http://www.bookslut.com/features/2014...

EDIT 2: Two years later, I'm knocking this book down to one star, because it still makes me angry to see it on bookshelves. I threw away my copy. This book represents the worst that 21st century criticism has to offer - thoughtless, incurious, lazy, and ultimately devoid of rigor. ...more

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Sep 18, 2014 Jen Padgett Bohle rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: feminism, lit-crit, gender-studies, memoir-esque, cultural-critique

An inconsistent collection of ultimately shallow essays. Gay is funny, personable, thoughtful, and obviously intellectual but her essays don't delve deep enough into her subjects. Furthermore, I realize that essays can explore topics without coming to any definitive answers or conclusions, but I want more than an introduction to a problem. I want long and winding explorations with a surfeit of allusions, copious amounts of pattern-hunting from history, deeper thoughts on why something is the way ...more

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Jul 11, 2014 Kristina rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: hated-em, non-fiction, essays-and-poetry, my-book, suck, disappointing, got-rid-of, popular-culture-criticism, hyped, want-my-money-back

I fucking hate Roxanne Gay’s Bad Feminist. It’s disappointing on every level and has nothing thought-provoking to say about anything. It’s full of obvious statements, juvenile essays about YA books she loves! and easy, breezy criticisms of other books. If you want to read about feminism, don’t start with this book. It was reviewed (and marketed) as a book about gender issues and feminism. Aside from the introduction, the topic of gender and feminism isn’t broached in any serious way until page ...more

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Sep 30, 2015 Whitney Atkinson rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: feminism, read-in-2017, audiobook

This was a very sophisticated book that blended memoir with an educational resource perfectly. I think the chapter that will stick with me most is the one about female characters having the quality of likability held over their heads moreso than male characters, and readers don't ever realize that. It wasn't something I'd never thought about before, and it made me think critically about my expectations of female characters. I'm just gonna let the quote speak for itself:

"In a Publishers Weekly ...more

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Jul 17, 2017 Diane rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: essays, brunch-club

This book solidified my girl crush on Roxane Gay. Earlier this year I had the good fortune to hear Roxane speak at a conference, and she was so smart and funny that I kicked myself for not reading her stuff sooner.

Bad Feminist is a collection of essays on a variety of issues, including gender, race, pop culture and politics. Basically it's a book for our times. The writing is sharp and insightful, but it also has wit and grace. There were a few essays in this book that were so powerful I could ...more

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Aug 06, 2014 Thomas rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: five-stars, nonfiction, own-physical, own-signed, feminism

I openly embrace the label of bad feminist. I do so because I am flawed and human. I am not terribly well versed in feminist history. I am not as well read in key feminist texts as I would like to be. I have certain... interests and personality traits and opinions that may not fall in line with mainstream feminism, but I am still a feminist. I cannot tell you how freeing it has been to accept this about myself.

In her collection of essays Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay blends anecdote, critical I openly embrace the label of bad feminist. I do so because I am flawed and human. I am not terribly well versed in feminist history. I am not as well read in key feminist texts as I would like to be. I have certain... interests and personality traits and opinions that may not fall in line with mainstream feminism, but I am still a feminist. I cannot tell you how freeing it has been to accept this about myself.

In her collection of essays Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay blends anecdote, critical analysis, and humor to create a set of pieces that feel human. She admits to not knowing all the answers, and to hear an empowered, intelligent, and independent woman say that feels so refreshing. She writes about a gamut of topics: feminism, race, pop culture, and more. She tears apart the abusive and unhealthy relationship portrayed in 50 Shades of Grey, she discusses how and why she loves The Hunger Games, she comments on the unhelpful way white directors portray black characters, and more. As a professor of English and an avid follower of pop culture, her ability to discern trends and patterns within the media shone through. This passage about the unnecessary prominence of likeable characters acts as just of her many thoughtful arguments:

In many ways, likability is a very elaborate lie, a performance, a code of conduct dictating the proper way to be. Characters who don't follow this code become unlikeable. Critics who criticize a character's unlikability cannot necessarily be faulted. They are merely expressing a wider cultural malaise with all things unpleasant, all things that dare to breach the norm of social acceptability.

Gay still stands out the most in her acceptance of imperfection. In her introduction, she writes that "feminism is flawed because it is a movement powered by people and people are inherently flawed" and that "we hold feminism to an unreasonable standard where the movement must be everything we want and must always bake the best choices." In this collection of essays, Gay accomplishes so much: she writes about the intersectionality of race and gender, she establishes a consistent, wry, and sharp voice, and she includes an entire chapter about Scrabble that made me laugh and want to read more, more, and more. But, even though she accomplishes so much, she recognizes her own contradictions and the contradictions inherent within the human condition. She strikes a rough and fitting balance by ending her book by admitting this:

I am a bad feminist. I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all. ...more

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May 03, 2017 Jennifer ~ TarHeelReader rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

5 stars for helping me expand my thinking and self-reflection. I'll be returning to this audio collection of essays on much more than "just" feminism.

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Dec 02, 2017 Nenia ⚡ Aspiring Evil Overlord ⚡ Campbell rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: mem-wars, nonfiction, feminism

Instagram || Twitter || Facebook || Amazon || Pinterest

Hey, you know what pairs really well with red wine? Books on feminism. BAD FEMINIST has mixed reviews among my friends, with some of them loving it and others hating it. As with any controversial book, that mixed reception only made me want to read BAD FEMINIST for myself. Because your favorite neighborhood snowflake here loves to read up on feminism in its many incarnations, to get the dirt on the latest schools of thought.

First off, BAD ...more

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Aug 12, 2014 Peter Derk rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: did-not-finish

Well...I gave up. I bought the audio for 30-some dollars and figured it might be a great listen. But I find myself dreading listening.

Part of it is the bleakness of the current landscape. That's certainly not Roxane Gay's fault. Every day is something new. Author Colleen McCullough dies, and in her obit someone basically feels the need to point out how unattractive the woman was, physically. Patricia Arquette makes a speech about how women should be paid the same to do the same work, and Fox ...more

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Jan 29, 2017 Christy marked it as to-read · review of another edition

HAVE to read something by this remarkable woman who just pulled out of her next new book contract as protest over the horrific contract given to the racist (Black Lives Matter as "legal hate group"), sexist ("feminism is cancer") Milo Yiannopoulos out of the Breitbart toxic waste dump that produced Trump's main thinker, Steven Bannon. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/m... This mentioned that Milo was given a promotion of $250K for his hateful vile, that was more than all five previous ...more

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Jul 12, 2018 Lucy Langford rated it really liked it · review of another edition

4****

Isn't it obvious I am a feminist, albeit not a very good one?

This book contains funny and insightful essays from the brilliant writer Roxane Gay. Through this book she is critical of culture from the view point of a woman of colour. She comments on the state of feminism, gender and sexuality, depictions of race in the media and the political climate which plays a role in all of these things. These are her opinions on this topic and I was ready to delve into them. Some of these essays really 4****

Isn't it obvious I am a feminist, albeit not a very good one?

This book contains funny and insightful essays from the brilliant writer Roxane Gay. Through this book she is critical of culture from the view point of a woman of colour. She comments on the state of feminism, gender and sexuality, depictions of race in the media and the political climate which plays a role in all of these things. These are her opinions on this topic and I was ready to delve into them. Some of these essays really resonated with me and were similar to my own experiences (for example, ones based on gaining weight, being 'fat' and getting criticised by parents).

While these essays are dealing with heavy topics that EVERYONE should read/ have some knowledge about, Roxane Gay does this in such a way that sometimes they're funny (I am sorry to the people in the library who could hear me laughing), shocking, and provide you with extra knowledge (especially as I am from the UK, I did not know much about police shootings in America).

Her essays were incredibly insightful. Some of my favourites dealt with recognising your own privilege (despite not always not wanting to face the facts), how their is a 'face' of crime, a cultural expectation (usually a man of colour) and if someone who has committed a horrific crime does not fit this cultural 'profile' then there has to be a reason WHY that person committed the crime (eg a bad upbringing, societal influences from others. This analysis is not provided for men of colour who fit the 'profile'), and the over-public involvement with female autonomy (such as bills restricting abortion, contraception).

We hold feminism to an unreasonable standard where the movement must be everything we want and must always make the best choices. When feminism falls short of our expectations, we decide the problem is with feminism rather than with the flawed people who act in the name of the movement.

Of course this book covers a lot about feminism and different aspects of it. It shows how there are such high expectations on the movement and high expectations placed on ourselves and other feminists, that when one thing fails the feminist movement is blamed as a whole, rather than just that one idea/plan. In her final essays titled 'Bad feminist', Roxane Gay highlights how she makes 'mistakes' and does not always fit in with the movement- however, she also states how she'd rather be a bad feminist than not be a feminist at all. I think this is empowering as it allows people to make mistakes and go through learning curves, and they can still be a 'feminist'.

Even from a young age I understood that when a girl is unlikable, a girl is a problem.

There are books written by women. There are books written by men. Somehow, though, it is only books by women, or books about certain topics, that require this special "women's fiction" designation. ...more

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Aug 27, 2014 KatieMc rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: barbie loving feminists

Shelves: librarybook, i-am-a-feminist

Spoiler alert: Roxane Gay is not a bad feminist. Nope, not bad. She is a thoughtful feminist. She more interested in making things better for women than being a so called good feminist. Most of all, she is a human feminist.

Bad Feminist is a collection of essays, some of which you may have read on Salon. She takes on many topics including reality TV, movies, books, gender, sex, news media, social media, politics and Scrabble. They are for the most part interesting, informative and entertaining.

So ...more

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Sep 01, 2014 Debbie "DJ" rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, non-fiction, cultural, political, feminism

It is awe-inspiring to go for a ride inside Roxane Gay's head and heart. She opens up the conversation on the word feminism, talks about her own shortcomings, and labels this word is affiliated with. She writes of her own thoughts about current events as well as past. Feminism is a demand for equal rights for women in all areas of life, yet it has become a word with endless connotations.

It is truly staggering to read how sexual violence against women is embedded in our culture. How conservative It is awe-inspiring to go for a ride inside Roxane Gay's head and heart. She opens up the conversation on the word feminism, talks about her own shortcomings, and labels this word is affiliated with. She writes of her own thoughts about current events as well as past. Feminism is a demand for equal rights for women in all areas of life, yet it has become a word with endless connotations.

It is truly staggering to read how sexual violence against women is embedded in our culture. How conservative politicians want control of women's bodies, and are succeeding through current legislation. Seven states require women to receive a transvaginal ultrasound before they receive abortions - a rape in and of itself. Thirty five states require counseling to varying degrees of specificity. Twenty six states require written material to be given. The restrictions just seem to keep on coming. Gay, states, " In 2011, fifty five percent of all women in the U.S. lived in states hostile to abortion rights, and reproductive freedom." Further, "If politicians can't prevent women from having abortions, they are certainly going to punish them." If the U.S. is founded on the principle of inalienable rights, these rights no longer include women. What freedom do women have if their very bodies are legislated? This is coupled with the fact that women live in a "rape culture." Where women no longer talk of "if" they will be raped, but "when."

Gay, through her many commentaries tackles multiple issues, including, reality T.V., the term "women's fiction," the Publishers Weekly interview with Claire Messud and her novel "The Woman Upstairs," rape stories on T.V., and Rosie O'Donnell's objection to the show Law and Order: SVU are but a few.

The issues Gay has written of are many. As a woman myself, a few quotes struck me as crucial:
"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."

"A lot of ink is given over to mythologizing female friendships as curious, fragile relationships that are always intensely fraught. Stop reading writing that encourages this mythology."

"Don't tear another woman down, because even if they are not your friends, they are women and this is just as important."

"Feminism is a choice, and if a woman does not want to be a feminist, that is her right, but it is still my responsibility to fight for her rights."

Thanks Roxane Gay for such a profound and timely book. This line is my favorite..."One of my favorite moments is when a guy, at a certain point in a relationship, says something desperately hopeful like, "are you on the pill?" I simply say, "no, are you?"

...more

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Jun 29, 2015 Nnedi rated it it was amazing

Fabulous. Great read. So much I could relate to, but also so much that I'd never thought about. I didn't agree with all of it, but I don't need to agree to grow and learn from an opinion. My only complaint is that it wasn't longer. I wanted more more more. Thumbs up.
Also, now I feel a little less conflicted about cranking up J Cole's 2014 Forest Hills Drive album (it's not the worst in terms of vulgarity, but it's got plenty that I have a problem with...yet it's so good). I see myself as more ...more

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Oct 09, 2018 Faye* marked it as dnf · review of another edition

DNF ~30%

You know how people sometimes say they feel as if they read a completely different book than everybody else? So, I guess what this book has done for me is that I finally know what that feels like.

The best way I can describe my experience with Bad Feminist is this: Imagine yourself outside, maybe in a park, on a crisp autumn day. Leaves are falling, the sky is a greyish blue but it's dry, the sun is just about to come out. It's cold but not too cold, sunny but not too sunny. The perfect ...more

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Sep 15, 2015 Becky rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: politicalish, humorous, non-fiction, tear-jerkers, reviewed, audiobook, highly-recommended, 2015

I finally finished this audiobook, after a kinda unofficial semi-hiatus from it (well, reading in general, to be fair) while on the plane to San Francisco, a town that some random guy on a plane once called "too liberal". So, appropriate timing?

If you're hoping for this to be an insightful or in any way analytical review, you're probably new to my reviews. I'm not really great at those. If you want that kind of review, there are many other people out there doing it better than I ever could. I finally finished this audiobook, after a kinda unofficial semi-hiatus from it (well, reading in general, to be fair) while on the plane to San Francisco, a town that some random guy on a plane once called "too liberal". So, appropriate timing?

If you're hoping for this to be an insightful or in any way analytical review, you're probably new to my reviews. I'm not really great at those. If you want that kind of review, there are many other people out there doing it better than I ever could. This review will be my usual jumble of random thoughts and opinions and stuff.

So, about the book. It was good, and important, but it was far from perfect. I picked up this book expecting it to be about feminism, and instead I got a whole lot of other isms and issues essays I hadn't expected. That's not really a complaint in and of itself, because I really enjoyed it, though I wish that it had been more focused... or maybe had a different title. Something like Bad Everythingist? LOL

Anyway. It made me think. Sometimes that was not a great thing, because these essays contained a plethora of concepts and ideas that made me slightly uncomfortable and guilty about not having realized before. I consider myself to be an intelligent, liberal-minded, empathetic person, yet I've never thought about my privilege, or how non-white characters are portrayed so stereotypically in movies and books, or about how invasive and demeaning it is for women to be expected to justify their reproductive choices, or the double standard that goes hand in hand with it, because men are never questioned on the same topic. Or why books by women are judged and categorized differently just because of the author's gender. Or why female characters must be "likable". I don't notice the "magical negro" trope in movies. I don't give much thought to music lyrics or the objectification of women in... everything. I don't question that there's a changing station in the women's restroom but not the men's. Men are parents, too, right? I tend to give a pass to comedians who say shitty and offensive things because they are comedians, and that's what they do, right?

This collection has shown me how narrow my experience truly is. And it kind of makes me ashamed of how unobservant I am.

The essay dealing with The Help was especially disturbing. This was a book that I loved. I've read it several times, and own a copy. In hardcover. I loved it. But listening to Gay's scathing commentary about it made me see it from a different perspective, and, I admit that it's not a pleasant experience. I was ignorant of my own ignorance, and then had that ignorance hauled out an spread on the table and examined. As much as it was awkward for me, though, I imagine it had to be even more uncomfortable for Bahni Turpin, who read this audiobook, to read about the various ways that The Help was nothing more than a stereotypical white fantasy. She read the audiobook of The Help as well. Maybe she's just a super professional and a job is a job... but I know that I would have felt embarrassed. Hell, I do feel embarrassed and I only liked the book - I didn't perform it.

There were some essays in this book that were gut-wrenchingly brutal and honest, and I found myself nearly in tears a few times. It really never ceases to amaze me the depths of human shittiness. Just when I think we must have reached a bottom, someone gets out another shovel. The essays dealing with rape and rape culture in this book were heartbreaking and infuriating. I want to start handing out copies of this to every person I know just for those essays alone. But... this is nothing new. This is a debate that's like the Lambchops song... it goes on and on and never ends. It's baffling to me that it should be this way. It seems pretty fucking cut and dried to me. Do not rape someone. But everyone's got a justification for something.

Anyway. A tighter focus, and maybe a better format (better delineation between essays for the audio) would have definitely helped this book, but still, I am glad that I read it. I appreciated Gay's honesty about her humanity and her imperfections about these issues, and how she's come to terms with the fact that she can like a song like "Blurred Lines" and still see it as a problem for how women are objectified and treated by men who think they know what women need (read: a good fuck). It was worth reading for the perspective awareness I've (maybe? hopefully?) gained from it.

Oh, and her breakdown of 50 Shades of Grey? Priceless! ...more

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Jan 13, 2018 Lotte rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: a-non-fiction, ge-memoir, t-fuck-yeah-feminism, 2018-read, ge-essays, recent-favourites, 2018-favourites, t-pop-culture

Bad Feminist isn't the ultimate feminist manifesto and it doesn't try to be. It is incredibly successful, however, at what it sets out to do: pinpointing small and big injustices, analyzing constructs of gender and race in everyday life and popular culture and finally, calling for action and change.
Some reviewers seem to criticize that a) Roxane Gay references and talks about pop culture too often and b) she talks about her personal life too often — two aspects of this book I personally really ...more

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Sep 26, 2014 Ann rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: women-s-issues

I had high expectations for this book. The title is intriguing, the cover is attractive, and the back cover blurbs were promising.
But the best I can summon up for this book is a shrug of the shoulders and a “..eh”. This surprised me, because I usually love essays with a feminist slant.

So why didn’t I enjoy this book more? I had to think it over for some time and I came to the conclusion that there were two reasons. The first was that the discussions of various aspects of pop culture simply I had high expectations for this book. The title is intriguing, the cover is attractive, and the back cover blurbs were promising.
But the best I can summon up for this book is a shrug of the shoulders and a “..eh”. This surprised me, because I usually love essays with a feminist slant.

So why didn’t I enjoy this book more? I had to think it over for some time and I came to the conclusion that there were two reasons. The first was that the discussions of various aspects of pop culture simply didn’t mean anything to me. I do not watch Girls . I haven’t read Fifty Shades of Grey . I haven’t seen any Tyler Perry movies. I never read Sweet Valley High books as a teenager. I also don’t really care about Roxane Gay’s experience as a Typical First Year Professor. So about half of the essays in this book failed to reach me in any meaningful way.

The second reason is that the essays rarely made me think. Much of what was said was utterly reasonable and had been stated dozens of times before. Perhaps I have read too much feminist literature, but the statement that women make 77 cents for every dollar men make, has been trotted out so many times that it evokes nothing more than a yawn. Yes, one can become desensitized to even great and sad truths if one hears them too often. It was the same for statements about abortion and rape, or about the sadly limiting view of women in fiction and in the movies. All of it was truth, nothing was original. Some of the issues she chose to cover struck me as having been done to death. For instance, the complaint that pregnant women are subjected to receiving all sorts of unwanted attention, from strangers wanting to rub their bellies to unsolicited parenting advice. But rather than seeing this as an invasion of privacy, is it not possible – it is not conceivable- that strangers engage with pregnant women because they know they are (typically) in the presence of great happiness? People who would ordinarily not dream of speaking to strangers find themselves asking pregnant women about due dates and baby names because the response is often delivered with so much pride and joy –a happiness that just for a few moments can become contagious.
As I was plodding my way through this book I thought with some nostalgia of the days when I discovered Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Camille Paglia, Katha Pollitt, even Katie Roiphe. Sometimes I agreed with their positions, sometimes I disagreed. Sometimes I had the sense that they expressed in words what I had felt but couldn’t verbalize. Sometimes I experienced that wonderful sensation of reading something that seemed so unexpected, so out-of-left field, that I needed to stop and ponder it for a while before I could read on. I had none of that while reading Bad Feminist.

As I said : perhaps I am experiencing feminist-essay-fatigue?

That being said, I do feel that the author was honest and did not posture. For instance, she acknowledged her own ambivalence when criticizing The Help . On one hand, she felt that a white woman had no business writing about the black experience, but on the other hand she realizes that she, as a writer herself, would not like to be told her writing needs to be limited to her own direct sphere of experience. Roxane Gay’s writing style is engaging, clear and fresh, with only the occasional stylistic faux pas (like her overuse of repetition.

In view of the abundant praise this book has received, I can only conclude that either or both of the following hypotheses must be true :

1. There is such a shortage of feminist essays that this book is really filling a gap
2. I just don’t get it.
...more

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Oct 28, 2017 Malia rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

“I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
3.5 stars
I am torn rating and reviewing Bad Feminist. On the one hand, there are some truly excellent chapters with eloquently executed points and compelling arguments. On the other, (and Gay is aware of this) the author's bias comes through very strongly, which at times, for me at least, weakened her reasoning and felt powerfully one-sided. That being said, I enjoy this author, and that is saying something “I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
3.5 stars
I am torn rating and reviewing Bad Feminist. On the one hand, there are some truly excellent chapters with eloquently executed points and compelling arguments. On the other, (and Gay is aware of this) the author's bias comes through very strongly, which at times, for me at least, weakened her reasoning and felt powerfully one-sided. That being said, I enjoy this author, and that is saying something because I read so little non-fiction. She has a strong voice and even if I disagree with her in certain respects, I am happy to hear her logic and to see her point of view simply because she is so very eloquent and adept with language. Whether or not Gay and I are completely of a mind, her ideas and especially certain point on which I felt we disagreed, will probably remain in my mind for some time longer. We come from different worlds and yet the same one, too, and so it is interesting to marry her ideas and experiences with my own and see how we both stand on the same side of many issues, while perhaps unable to fully see the reason supporting other ones. I mostly liked that she wrote on a great range of subjects, though I did not feel they were necessarily successfully tied to feminism as the overarching concept. The book is heavy on pop culture references and thus not the most challenging or original assessment of the subject. It was at once personal and opinionated, and yet not remotely as intimate or involving as her newer book Hunger.
I liked that she, as a self-declared "bad feminist", acknowledges and allows for the "complexities of human individuality" when it comes to feminism. She allows for a the fact that there is no one kind of feminism, or one right feminism. She also discussed the fact that the label "feminist" can be complicated and, in fact, counter-productive. I thought this was very intriguing, because it seems to be that only in recent years has it become popular again for women (and men) to adopt this label proudly, without having to add qualifiers like, "but I don't burn bras", "I don't hate men". I know if I had called myself such, say in high school, I would have been labeled as a man/boy-hater and probably a lesbian at that. I wonder in how far this has changed? Even in college, the term was used as an area of study, not a noun many adopted to associate with themselves, and I should mention I attended a very large, liberal university.
There is so much to talk about with this book, but I will stop myself here. I belong to a feminist book club, but I didn't join in time to discuss this book, unfortunately. Our Shared Shelf is currently reading Gay's other book Hunger, so I look forward to reading reactions to that one which I actually found more compelling than Bad Feminist.
Overall, this was not a bad book at all, and offered a lot of interesting commentary, but neither was it as revolutionary as it is touted to be. Nonetheless, the positives mostly outweighed the negatives and I look forward to seeing what she writes about next!

Find more reviews and bookish fun at http://www.princessandpen.com ...more

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Mar 16, 2019 Emily B rated it liked it · review of another edition

An interesting book of essays that are worth reading. I liked how the author explored a range of different subjects with different levels of seriousness and humour, using both popular culture and current serious events.

I definitely learnt a lot from reading this book and I would say it opened my eyes to things I had not considered before.

However some of these essays were not as impactful to me due to living in England and not America. I often had to look up people or events that were mentioned ...more

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Sep 08, 2014 Sarah rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: kindle, non-fiction

Ugh. I don't understand why people like this book. It was a struggle for me to get through, both because of the terrible, stream-of-consciousness writing, and because she doesn't appear to be saying anything new. I feel like anyone who has even remotely thought about women's issues has had all these same thoughts, and others have said them better.

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Jan 13, 2017 destiny ♡⚔♡ [howling libraries] rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction, adult, owned-ebooks

Where do I even begin?

As a proud feminist who loves a good humorous take on life and everything that feminism touches, I was so excited to pick this book up! It was at the very tippy-top of my Amazon wish list, thanks to the rave reviews I'd found everywhere. Sure, it had a few negative ones, but what great book doesn't? When it went on sale as an ebook, I snapped it up faster than you could blink and got started! Socially aware belly laughs, here I come! ...right?

No. Faux pretentiousness aside, Where do I even begin?

As a proud feminist who loves a good humorous take on life and everything that feminism touches, I was so excited to pick this book up! It was at the very tippy-top of my Amazon wish list, thanks to the rave reviews I'd found everywhere. Sure, it had a few negative ones, but what great book doesn't? When it went on sale as an ebook, I snapped it up faster than you could blink and got started! Socially aware belly laughs, here I come! ...right?

No. Faux pretentiousness aside, this book was genuinely one of the least enjoyable titles I have picked up in years. The essays are poorly formulated, the writing skill is just lacking, and the thought processes are almost impossible to follow. Not only is each essay completely self-contained and irrelevant to the next one, the essays themselves jump from one topic to the next as if there was no planning, drafting, or editing efforts put in whatsoever.

Gay begins the book by explaining what the term "bad feminist" means: essentially, that she is an imperfect feminist who doesn't want to be put on a pedestal. This is a fantastic opener, because who isn't a "bad" feminist, by that definition? Unfortunately, the book almost immediately went downhill for me, when she went on to put other feminists on a pedestal and rip them to shreds (Caitlin Moran, case in point, whose sense of humor is clearly unforgivable by the author's own standards).

After much rambling and pettiness regarding other feminist icons, she goes on a tangent with a slew of essays that have no relation whatsoever to feminism; sure, the idea that you accidentally stumbled upon competitive Scrabble is cute, but why not save it for the book of essays that you didn't claim to be related to important social issues? I ended up skimming several essays in a row because the writing was just jumpy and not well thought out, and to be frank, the stories and viewpoints were uninteresting and formulaic. "Here's this thing that I like, here's why I feel like I shouldn't like it, and here's my defense for why I like it, anyways." Does anyone actually care about pages upon pages of your justification for being obsessed with Sweet Valley High?

The final nail in the coffin for me was, after the author wrote at great lengths about the dangers of rape culture, and even despite her own claims that she can hardly see groups of men standing together without shuddering, she chose to go into an unexpected, detailed retelling of her own childhood rape. As a survivor myself - much like many readers of this book, no doubt - I would expect another survivor, especially one who claims to be so aware of the problems of triggers, to at least give some form of warning before launching into what was a difficult and unrewarding tale. On the same note, she admits to having written such explicit rape scenes in her works of fiction that she worries about her own mindset, and wonders if she has crossed the line from brutal truth into exploiting rape victims everywhere. I refuse to judge how anyone heals, but I wonder if the author should listen to her instinct on this one.

Even after all of my rantings here, I am uncertain that I have fully conveyed how endless disappointed I was by this book. I had such high hopes for it, and fully expected to have a new favorite author by the end, but I can safely say that I will not be returning to this title or any other titles (fiction or non) by Roxane Gay in the near future. ...more

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About Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay

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Roxane Gay’s writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, West Branch, Virginia Quarterly Review, NOON, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Rumpus, Salon, The Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy culture blog, and many others. She is the co-editor of PANK and essays editor for The ...more

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Quotes from Bad Feminist

“I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. I am messy. I’m not trying to be an example. I am not trying to be perfect. I am not trying to say I have all the answers. I am not trying to say I’m right. I am just trying—trying to support what I believe in, trying to do some good in this world, trying to make some noise with my writing while also being myself.” — 500 likes

“I believe feminism is grounded in supporting the choices of women even if we wouldn’t make certain choices for ourselves.” — 388 likes

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