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For whatever reason, we hold feminism to an unreasonable standard where the movement must be everything we want and must always make the best choices. How do we reconcile the imperfections of feminism with all the good it can do? In truth, feminism is flawed because it is a movement powered by people and people are inherently flawed. Gay’s greatest feat is precisely the ability - the willingness - to tune in what we as a culture chronically tune out, to expand the constantly constricting boundaries of our bubbles as we struggle to navigate an increasingly peopled world of growing complexity. “With more people, there are more voices to tune out,” the narrator in Susan Sontag’s short story Debriefing observed with hollowing poignancy. Feminism has helped me believe my voice matters, even in this world where there are so many voices demanding to be heard. Feminism has certainly helped me find my voice. The cultural climate is shifting, particularly for women as we contend with the retrenchment of reproductive freedom, the persistence of rape culture, and the flawed if not damaging representations of women we’re consuming in music, movies, and literature.įeminism is flawed, but it offers, at its best, a way to navigate this shifting cultural climate. These bewildering changes often leave us raw. The world changes faster than we can fathom in ways that are complicated. In the introduction, Gay examines the state of feminism, half a century after Margaret Mead contemplated its future, and justifies her identification as a “bad” feminist: She steps firmly ashore in Bad Feminist ( public library) - a magnificent compendium of essays examining various aspects of “our culture and how we consume it,” from race and gender representations in pop culture to the way revolution and innovation can often leave us unfulfilled and unheard to the gaping blind spots of what we call “diversity.” To be sure, Gay isn’t writing to and for women only - what is perhaps her most piercing clarion call to men is made sidewise and subtly, as a comment about privilege in an essay about the class asymmetries of the education system, where she writes: “The notion that I should be fine with the status quo even if I am not wholly affected by the status quo is repulsive.” Illustration from the 1970 book ‘I’m Glad I’m a Boy!: I’m Glad I’m a Girl!’ Click image for more. Roxane Gay, one of my favorite minds, has been swimming against the current in many ways - female, black, large, queer.
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“Those who swim against the current may never realize they are better swimmers than they imagine.”
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“Those who travel with the current will always feel they are good swimmers,” science correspondent Shankar Vedantam wrote in his excellent exploration of our hidden biases.