Bad Feminist: Essays

by Roxane Gay

When I was younger, I disavowed feminism with alarming frequency. I understand why women still fall over themselves to disavow feminism, to distance themselves. I disavowed feminism because when I was called a feminist, the label felt like an insult. In fact, it was generally intended as such. When I was called a feminist, during those days, my first thought was, But I willingly give blow jobs. I had it in my head that I could not both be a feminist and be sexually open. I had lots of strange things in my head during my teens and twenties.

lingua franca

One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do is accept and acknowledge my privilege. It’s an ongoing project.

We tend to believe that accusations of privilege imply we have it easy, which we resent because life is hard for nearly everyone.

To have privilege in one or more areas does not mean you are wholly privileged. Surrendering to the acceptance of privilege is difficult, but it is really all that is expected. What I remind myself, regularly, is this: the acknowledgment of my privilege is not a denial of the ways I have been and am marginalized, the ways I have suffered.

You don’t necessarily have to do anything once you acknowledge your privilege. You don’t have to apologize for it.

I am quite content to be in my thirties, and nothing affirms that more than being around people in their late teens and early twenties.

1. 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.

Want nothing but the best for your friends because when your friends are happy and successful, it’s probably going to be easier for you to be happy.

Don’t tear other women down, because even if they’re not your friends, they are women and this is just as important.

Love your friends’ kids even if you don’t want or like children. Just do it.

If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t “Is this a potential friend for me?” but “Is this character alive?”

Some women being empowered does not prove the patriarchy is dead. It proves that some of us are lucky.

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.

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.

There are Sandusky and those surrounding him, a constellation of broken men—the victims and the men who enabled him, the men who looked the other way, year after year, men who would have to be broken to commit such inexplicable acts of silence and collusion.

In the New York Times Book Review Chloë Schama writes, “A plague of women’s backs is upon us in the book cover world.”

Sometimes, saying what others are afraid or unwilling to say is just being an asshole. We are all free to be assholes, but we are not free to do so without consequence.

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.

As with Inglourious Basterds using World War II, Tarantino once again managed to find a traumatic cultural experience of a marginalized people that has little to do with his own history, and used that cultural experience to exercise his hubris for making farcically violent, vaguely funny movies that set to right historical wrongs from a very limited, privileged position.

But still, there is this painful reality. Each time Oscar says good-bye to his girlfriend or family in Fruitvale Station, he adds, “I love you.” Coogler remarked that many young men in the inner city do this because “every time we leave the house, we know we might not make it back.”

ilk

expedient.

flagrantly

craven

sacrosanct

codified

unfettered

vehemence

There’s a great deal about our culture that is aspirational—from how we educate ourselves, to the cars we drive, to where we work and live and socialize. We want to be the best. We want the best of everything. All too often, we are aware of the gaping distance between who we are and whom we aspire to be and we desperately try to close that distance.

As Syreeta McFadden noted, “Only in America can a dead black boy go on trial for his own murder.”

agog

We suspect that everyone is, indeed, a little bit racist. It’s often not a question of if someone will reveal his or her racism to whatever degree but, rather, when.

compendium

acrimonious

polemic

The thing is, I am not at all sure that feminism has ever suggested women can have it all. This notion of being able to have it all is always misattributed to feminism when really, it’s human nature to want it all—to have cake and eat it too without necessarily focusing on how we can get there and how we can make “having it all” possible for a wider range of people and not just the lucky ones.

excoriated

untenable