Nobody who reads “Bad Feminist’’ can avoid thinking about the position and role of women in the world, and what it costs every person who is allowed to claim identity in one category and disallowed in another.ĭespite its flaws, “Bad Feminist” signals an important contribution to the complicated terrain of gender politics. That Gay is so dismissive of the stereotypical constraints of the word is a call to action as well as a gesture at inclusivity. In this sense, she humanizes a word - and its attendant cultural movement - that has been flung like a curse by pop culture commentators, political pundits, scholars, and writers alike. Gay makes clear that a decision to accept or vilify the label of feminist continues to be a relevant issue for everyone. What Gay does well is show the ways in which all of us have internalized an “essential feminism” that either doesn’t exist or is so riddled with stereotypes as to no longer deserve our attention. Most women struggle with the feminist movement and its meaning - partly, Gay makes clear, because asking an individual, regardless of gender, race, class, ability, or sexual orientation, to choose one “side” or the other of a movement is always reductive. In the insightful and original “What We Hunger For,” Gay aligns herself with what she calls her “favorite” definition of feminists as “just women who don’t want to be treated’’ poorly and teases out the culturally sanctioned idea of “woman power.”

In “The Careless Language of Sexual Violence,” she brilliantly examines the ways in which the representation of sexual violence on television, where “the trajectory of victimhood is neatly defined,” has profound and devastating effects on how real-life victims are mistreated in the nation’s most respected news outlets. Gay is at her best when she leads the reader through a situation or dilemma in a focused way, relying on personal anecdote and research. Readers will, however, immediately understand the appeal of Gay’s intimate and down-to-earth voice. The personal essays are at once too chatty and not revealing enough, and the more overtly political pieces often could go deeper.

Bad feminist writer