Feminism Deathwatch

I must read 100 articles a year, at least, that outright declare feminism dead, or casually ask: "Is feminism dead?"

No. It really, really isn't.

The latest is this completely aggravating piece in the WaPo about a new book called The Re-Education of the Female, written by Dante Moore, "a first-time author from Washington [whose] slim treatise purports to explain how women should go about sex, relationships and marriage—according to men" and contains awesome advice like "The fatter you get, the more you decrease your potential single-man pool. Let me give you an example. When you go to the grocery store to shop, do you pick out the nastiest-looking, most rotten, smelliest fruit or meat you can find? Oh, you don't? Why not? …It's the same with men when they see baby elephant-sized, out-of-shape women." (Tracy Clark-Flory's got more on Moore's hot book at Broadsheet.)

The author, Laura Yao, takes note of a woman buying the book for her teenage daughter. "Maybe feminism is dead," suggests Yao.

Yeah, maybe. Or maybe not all women are feminists.

I'm just totally exhausted with the construction that if every single woman isn't a feminist, and if examples of women doing anti-feminist things can be pointed to, then it's evidence that feminism is failing, pointless, critically flawed, dying, or dead. I'm exhausted with it because the narrative itself is inherently sexist, treating women as a monolith (which, ya know, we're not), but also because it's predicated on the premise that every woman has had equal access to feminist ideas—and women who aren't feminists are simply rejecting those ideas.

That the same media which actively endeavors to misrepresent, subvert, and marginalize feminism at every turn would behave as if feminism has been given a fair shot and been made easily accessible to every woman just makes my goddamned eyeballs itch.

[H/Ts to Shaker Corinne for the WaPo article and to Shaker gotoL for the Broadsheet item.]