First, if you haven’t yet read the masterpiece that is Roxane Gay’s recap of Magic Mike XXL, go do that first.
Done?
Okay, so this book is nothing like that Magic Mike XXL recap, excepting that they are both written by the same very talented writer, who can slip effortlessly from writing obscene yet gut-bustingly hilarious movie recaps with a smidgen of feministic leanings, to writing very deeply personal and intelligent, well-reasoned essays about body image and sexuality and pop culture and rape and race in the movies and any number of other topics relevant to life in the modern world. This is a book full of the latter, but because Roxane Gay is a funny person, her humorous outlook on life also slips in to even the most serious of the essays.
All in all, this essay collection isn’t just one thing. It is many things at once, just like Ms. Gay herself. It’s messy and complicated and compassionate and reasonable and flawed. From the very first chapter, Gay declares it her mission statement to embrace the label of the 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 am 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: a woman who loves pink and likes to get freaky and sometimes dances her ass off to music she knows, she knows, is terrible for women and who sometimes plays dumb for repairmen because it’s easier to let them feel macho than it is to stand on the moral high ground.”
The opening essay is probably the most important, just because it sets the tone of the book, laying out what she’s trying to accomplish.
“I am a bad feminist because I never want to be placed on a Feminist Pedestal. People who are placed on pedestals are expected to pose, perfectly. Then they get knocked off when they fuck it up. I regularly fuck it up. Consider me already knocked off.”
Basically, the whole book is a call for inclusion and compassion and reason, and to allow for human flaws and complexity. It’s incredibly sane. Probably the most sane book I’ve ever read concerning feminist issues. Really, human issues. Unfortunately, the title is probably going to scare off a lot of people who would enjoy and/or benefit from reading it. So, I implore you, don’t let the title scare you off. There is absolutely nothing about this book that is radical. If you are a human being, there will be something in here for you to enjoy or relate to.
Reading this book was like sitting out by the pool with your best girl friends, shooting the shit about life and people and stuff and things. Which is funny, because I read a large part of this book while sitting by a pool with my best girl friends a couple of Saturdays ago.
The book is broken up into sections. The first features only a couple of essays, and it’s sort of an Intro to Roxane Gay. Mostly they are about her career as an English/Writing professor, and her introduction to the cutthroat world of competitive Scrabble. This is probably the funniest essay in the collection. The other sections roughly cover gender and sexuality and race and pop culture in equal measures. My favorite essay was about the Hunger Games, which actually turned out to be equal parts emotionally brutal and hilarious, as Gay goes pretty personal in that one. Other highlights are her takedowns of Tyler Perry and Fifty Shades of Grey. She also has a perspective on The Help that is very different from my own. I didn’t agree with everything she said in every essay, but it’s hard to get upset about it as the main point of the book is that people are different and messy and human.
(A notable example of this is her read on Crazy Eyes/Suzanne Warren from Orange is the New Black. She seems to miss the entire point of that character, mainly that she is introduced as a stereotype at the beginning of the show because it is the entire point of that character that because of her differences, she is dehumanized. A main arc of that character is her desire and action to become a person that other people treat like a person. This is one of the rare instances in the book where Gay seems to miss the larger context, or be so affected by her own personal biases that she mis-reads a situation. But again, people are flawed and messy so this is okay.)
Not everything in this book totally worked for me, but I feel like I just really need to give it five stars, because what worked REALLY worked. And the vast majority of it felt like the literary equivalent of eating a mint-chocolate chip ice cream cone on a hot summer day, equal parts messy and delicious and soothing of the hot and bothered soul. I need to buy my own copy immediately.
And I shall close this review with a quote from the last page of the book, a sentiment that brilliantly sums up how I feel about feminism:
“Like most people, I’m full of contradictions, but I also don’t want to be treated like shit for being a woman. I am a bad feminist. I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all.”
