I’m about a quarter of the way through Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters, the new book by Jessica Valenti, one of the founders of Feministing.com and an all-around doer of good works and sayer of noble things.
I don’t want to get too deep into what I think of the book, which isn’t very good and which, after all, I haven’t finished reading, but I was interested by the review of it that I came across in the National Review. The reviewer, Allison Kasic, is a conservative movement functionary whose particular assignment (handed down, I presume, by Mr. Charlie) is to spread the bad word about feminism on college campuses, so it wasn’t a great surprise that she didn’t like the book. What surprised me a bit, however, was how profoundly Kasic, who should at least be attuned to the book’s vulnerabilities, failed to appreciate what was going on. She writes:
While Valenti’s brand of radical feminism is nothing new, her presentation is. Valenti takes a casual, albeit angry, tone and employs a slew of profanity (she is “slightly potty-mouthed,” as she puts it) to make her points, similar to the style of Feministing.com and much of the liberal blogosphere. For all her attempts to shatter myths about feminism (Feminists are ugly! Feminism is for old white ladies! Feminism is so last week!) she will do little to dissuade anyone of the notion that feminism often takes an angry and bitter tone. The book reads as one long rant; the pent up anger radiates from the pages.
The problem with Full Frontal Feminism (if it is a problem, and I’m not entirely sure that from a strategic point of view it is) isn’t that pent up anger radiates from the pages, but rather that pent-up self-satisfaction, and up-with-people empowerment naivete, radiates from the pages.
In fact, one of the unexpected things about Full Frontal Feminism is that there really isn’t much anger at all. There’s the facsimile of anger — a lot of profanity, a lot of sentences that tell the reader how angry she should be about various injustices — but the real message that’s conveyed is that feminism is fuckin’ awesome and you’d be an idiot, if you’re a woman, not to be a feminist. A few examples:
When you’re a feminist, day-to-day life is better. You make better decisions. You have better sex. You understand the struggles you’re up against and how best to handle them. I wrote Full Frontal Feminism because I spent a really long time feeling completely confused as to why more young women wouldn’t embrace something that to me was clearly the greatest thing ever.
Because you never really do know what a feminist looks like, but I guarantee you she’s smiling.
I’m better in bed than you are. And I have feminism to thank for it.
That Kasich is unable to acknowledge the triumphalism here is evidence, I think, of two things. The first is that the anti-feminists long ago realized that they’d already lost the fight over the basic philosophical questions of equality between the sexes but that they could win, or at least hold their own, in the fight for cultural and political power if they could successfully sabotage the perception that feminism offered a more appealing life– that it would make women happier, wealthier, more satisfied and more whole. So Kasich, as a good soldier, is doing her part fo further the notion that feminists are feminists because they’re angry and bitter.
The second reason she misses the point, I suspect, is because she secretly fears that Valenti is right — that all those feminist hipsters really are out there having a better time, better sex, and more cleverly engineered martinis at artfully disheveled bars in the cooler neighborhoods in Manhattan and Brooklyn. And they’re living this fantabulous life while being more virtuous and enlightened to boot.
What wafts from Kasich’s review, frankly, is precisely the envy and resentment which she’s accusing Valenti of exhibiting. Which is telling, I tihnk, about some of what drives the hostility to feminism.
UPDATE: I was just watching the video of Valenti on the Colbert Report, and she had a line that I thought nicely pointed to my trouble with her book. "Feminism is like self-help times a hundred," she said. Self-help really is the model for her book, which has its advantages, obviously, since we live in a self-helpy culture, but it’s also annoying for many of the reasons our self-helpy culture is annoying.
