Beyond gender
If you want to be friends with another woman, Roxane Gay has some advice for you. At the top of her list: “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.” This is No. 3A: “If you feel like it’s hard to be friends with women, consider that maybe women aren’t the problem. Maybe it’s just you.” And here is No. 3B: “I used to be this kind of woman. I’m sorry to judge.”
In the introduction to “Bad Feminist,” her expansive collection of new essays and previously published writings on race, politics, gender, feminism, privilege, pop culture and the media, Gay acknowledges that she doesn’t have all the answers, “I am messy,” she writes. “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.”
Perhaps, but it’s in that very acknowledgment of her humanity and willingness to grapple with the contradictions of everyday life that Gay does arrive at all the right questions and offers many wellreasoned answers. Yes, one can prefer pink even though cool girls are supposed to like black, love (or hate to love) Vogue even as it reinforces the beauty standard, and admit that Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” is catchy even as its lyrics degrade women.
In an essay on the “Fifty Shades of Grey” trilogy, Gay concedes that the books may be formulaic and poorly written, but rather than dismiss them outright, she engages them on their own terms, deconstructing the plot lines with wit and sagacity. The absurdity of E L James’ depiction of Christian’s deflowering of Ana, a virgin so pure she has never even masturbated, is brought into relief as Gay cites Ana’s bewildered reaction to Christian’s erection — “Don’t worry,” he reassures her, “You expand too.” She follows with a snarky zinger, “You haven’t lived until you’ve read such prose” — an approach that allows the reader to take pleasure in the trashiness of the trilogy, even as she ultimately shows how the books aren’t merely the stuff of harmless erotic fantasy. “Fifty Shades of Grey” romanticizes a fictional relationship that is at its core abusive and controlling. Gay reveals the way it reinforces the message that women should tolerate, or even embrace, dysfunctional relationships in real life.
Other essays take race as their focal point. Writing about the hit film “The Help,” Gay rejects the notion that Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, the movie’s white protagonist, heroically gives black women a voice. Skeeter sets out to tell the stories of black maids who cleaned the houses of white people and raised their children, but citing “The Help’s” sanitized depiction of the segregated South of the early 1960s, the exaggerated dialects spoken by the maids, and the excessively sympathetic depiction of the white women who employed them, Gay challenges “The Help’s” status as an unproblematic “feel good” film. She is just as tough on black powerhouse director Tyler Perry, whose films have grossed more than a half-billion dollars. Gay points out that Perry all too often transforms characters based on black women and the working class into caricatures, which helps him to tell the kind of simplistic morality tales that sell tickets.
What makes “Bad Feminist” such a good read isn’t only Gay’s ability to deftly weave razor-sharp pop cultural analysis and criticism with a voice that is both intimate and relatable. It’s that she’s incapable of blindly accepting any kind of orthodoxy — even feminist and other “liberationist” doctrine. Whether discussing movies, television, music, books, magazines or newspapers, Gay is always peeling back the layers, revealing the multiple and conflicting forces at play in the way cultural images and ideas are produced and consumed. She’s not coming at this from a perspective of detached erudition, but through lived experience, which is often conveyed anecdotally, always with powerful insight.
The only drawback of being so of the moment is that some of the older pieces in Gay’s collection may appear topically dated. Even so, the points she makes hold up well. Whether she’s doing battle against a Scrabble opponent or championing the power of social media to augment and complicate mass media narratives, Gay is passionately committed to engaging with the world and trying to lead in what she acknowledges is a small, imperfect way. Despite embracing the “bad feminist” label, Gay isn’t a bad feminist at all. In fact, she’s one of the best.