When it comes to being put on a pedestal, she writes, “Consider me already knocked off.” A bad feminist is thus free to embrace imperfect media for entertainment’s sake, and also to hold opinions that others may deem harmful to the movement. Bad meaning what? Compared to what? According to who? Gay, who is gifted with the ability to represent two sides of an issue and find potential validity in both, finds that feminism is too quick to elect a hero, only to take her down the minute she ceases to fulfill our ideals. One of the gifts of Bad Feminist is its title and the questions it raises. Her arguments are rigorous throughout, but the book is free of academic jargon, a blessing for lay readers. That said, her take-down is so artful and hilarious you may want to read them anyway. Many of the essays here are similar in structure, clearly describing a movie, book, or television show so that readers don’t need to read the entire Fifty Shades trilogy to understand Gay’s analysis and response. It’s a keen analysis, pulling the high and lowbrow together to make it plain how rarely women control the story of our own lives, yet how within that limitation we find ways to act it out nonetheless.
She admits to loving reality television for making it seem as though “the whole of life is a performance,” but on closer observation notices how “life” in this case is scripted to make women appear stereotypically catty and cruel. So, how does one engage in soul mining by way of The Real Housewives of Wherever? In the essay “Garish, Glorious Spectacles,” Gay first looks at Kate Zambreno’s novel Green Girl, tying it to Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays and Judith Butler’s writing about gender as performance. You’ll come out of that exchange a different person than the one you were going in. The most enlightening conversation it’s likely to provoke will be a deep self-examination of values, attitudes, guilty pleasures and cultural touchstones. The book is worth reading now, since there’s so much in it worth discussing, but Bad Feminist has staying power. And of course Gay is seemingly everywhere, editing literary journals, popping up in Oprah Winfrey’s O Magazine and, if you’re among her Twitter fan base, reporting on the outcome of meals prepared by Barefoot Contessa Ina Garten alongside observations about the protests in Ferguson. The title appears on the cover in a glossy shade of pink that’s just crying out for ten toenails to adorn. and is a tenured professor-but the topics range from Tyler Perry films to the Sweet Valley High books for young adults. The essays are academic-author Roxane Gay has a Ph.D. Bad Feminist feels in some ways like a book of the summer.