Bad Feminist: Essays Read online

  I love babies, and I want to have one. I am willing to make certain compromises (not sacrifices) in order to do so—namely maternity leave and slowing down at work to spend more time with my child, writing less so I can be more present in my life. I worry about dying alone, unmarried and childless, because I spent so much time pursuing my career and accumulating degrees. This kind of thinking keeps me up at night, but I pretend it doesn’t because I am supposed to be evolved. My success, such as it is, is supposed to be enough if I’m a good feminist. It is not enough. It is not even close.

  Because I have so many deeply held opinions about gender equality, I feel a lot of pressure to live up to certain ideals. I am supposed to be a good feminist who is having it all, doing it all. Really, though, I’m a woman in her thirties struggling to accept herself and her credit score. For so long I told myself I was not this woman—utterly human and flawed. I worked overtime to be anything but this woman, and it was exhausting and unsustainable and even harder than simply embracing who I am.

  Maybe I’m a bad feminist, but I am deeply committed to the issues important to the feminist movement. I have strong opinions about misogyny, institutional sexism that consistently places women at a disadvantage, the inequity in pay, the cult of beauty and thinness, the repeated attacks on reproductive freedom, violence against women, and on and on. I am as committed to fighting fiercely for equality as I am committed to disrupting the notion that there is an essential feminism.

  I’m the kind of feminist who is appalled by the phrase “legitimate rape” and by political candidates such as Missouri’s Todd Akin, who in an interview reaffirmed his commitment to opposing abortion, almost unilaterally. He said, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something: I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child,” drawing from pseudoscience and a lax cultural attitude toward rape.

  Being a feminist, however, even a bad one, has also taught me that the need for feminism and advocacy also applies to seemingly less serious issues like a Top 40 song or a comedian’s puerile humor. The existence of these lesser artifacts of our popular culture is made possible by the far graver issues we are facing. The ground has long been softened.

  At some point, I got it into my head that a feminist was a certain kind of woman. I bought into grossly inaccurate myths about who feminists are—militant, perfect in their politics and person, man-hating, humorless. I bought into these myths even though, intellectually, I know better. I’m not proud of this. I don’t want to buy into these myths anymore. I don’t want to cavalierly disavow feminism like far too many other women have done.

  Bad feminism seems like the only way I can both embrace myself as a feminist and be myself, and so I write. I chatter away on Twitter about everything that makes me angry and all the small things that bring me joy. I write blog posts about the meals I cook as I try to take better care of myself, and with each new entry, I realize that I’m undestroying myself after years of allowing myself to stay damaged. The more I write, the more I put myself out into the world as a bad feminist but, I hope, a good woman—I am being open about who I am and who I was and where I have faltered and who I would like to become.

  No matter what issues I have with feminism, I am a feminist. I cannot and will not deny the importance and absolute necessity of feminism. Like most people, I’m full of contradictions, but I also don’t want to be treated like shit for being a woman.

  I am a bad feminist. I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all.

  Acknowledgments

  Versions of these essays have appeared in The Rumpus, the American Prospect, Virginia Quarterly Review, Ninth Letter, Frequencies, Bookslut, Jezebel, Iron Horse Literary Review, the Los Angeles Review, BuzzFeed, and Salon. I am grateful to the editors of these publications for giving my work a home.

  My agent, Maria Massie, is the greatest champion a writer can have. Cal Morgan and Maya Ziv are wonderful editors, and Cal, in particular, was so persistent in making a space for me at Harper. You know you’ve found the right people when your editor understands your love of Beverly Hills 90210. Maya and I are BFFs now. I also want to thank Mary Beth Constant for her witty, instructional care with my words. A great deal of this book was written to the sound track of Law & Order: SVU. I’m not sure what that says about me but I must give credit where credit is due. At Salon, Dave Daley and Anna North have been so welcoming of my work and made a lot of exciting opportunities possible. Isaac Fitzgerald and Julie Greicius edited my writing at The Rumpus, and I will always trust my writing in their intelligent, compassionate hands. Stephen Elliott was the first person to open the door to my nonfiction at The Rumpus, and it has been a pleasure working with him. Thanks also to Michelle Dean, Jami Attenberg, Cathy Chung, and Tracy Gonzalez. One of my brothers wants me to include a line from Bane in Dark Knight Rises in my acknowledgments, so, “You think darkness is your ally. You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it. Molded by it.” I’m hoping my parents don’t read this book, but they are beloved and have made all things possible. I am lucky.

  About the Author

  ROXANE GAY is the author of the novel An Untamed State and the story collection Ayiti. Her work has also appeared in Glamour, Best American Short Stories, and the New York Times Book Review.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  Advance Praise for Roxane Gay and Bad Feminist

  “A strikingly fresh cultural critic.”

  —Ron Charles, Washington Post

  “There are writers who show you the excellence of their brains and writers who show you the depths of their souls: I don’t know any writer who does both at the same time as brilliantly as Roxane Gay. Bad Feminist shows this extraordinary writer’s range—in essays about Scrabble, violence, fairy tales, race, longing, and The Hunger Games, Roxane Gay is alternately hilarious, full of righteous anger, confiding, moving. Bad Feminist is like staying up agreeing and arguing with the smartest person you’ve ever met. Stop reading this blurb. Start reading this book.”

  —Elizabeth McCracken, author of Thunderstruck & Other Stories

  “Alternately friendly and provocative, wry and serious, her takes on everything from Girls to Fifty Shades of Grey help to recontextualize what feminism is—and what it can be.”

  —Time Out (New York)

  “She had me at Sweet Valley High. Gay playfully crosses the borders between pop-culture consumer and critic, between serious academic and lighthearted sister-girl, between despair and optimism, between good and bad. Gay gives us permission to take up the sword of feminism while laying down the shield of policed authenticity. As a result, we complete this book both more powerful and more vulnerable, just like Gay herself. How can you help but love her?”

  —Melissa Harris-Perry, Wake Forest University professor and MSNBC host

  “As Bad Feminist proves, Gay is a necessary and brave voice when it comes to figuring out all the crazy mixed messages in our mixed-up world.”

  —Flavorwire, “20 New Nonfiction Books That Will Make You Smarter”

  “Roxane Gay is so great at weaving the intimate and personal with what is most bewildering and upsetting at this moment in culture. She is always looking, always thinking, always passionate, always careful, always right there.”

  —Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?

  “With prodigious bravery and eviscerating humor, Roxane Gay takes on culture and politics in Bad Feminist—and gets it right, time and time again. We should all be lucky enough to be such a bad feminist.”

  —Ayelet Waldman, author of Love and Treasure and Bad Mother

  “Praise Roxane Gay for her big-hearted self-examining intelligence, for her inclusive and forgiving stance, for her courage and determination, for humanizing the theoretical and intellectualizing the mundane, for sayi
ng out loud the things we were thinking, for guiding us back to ourselves and returning to us what was ours all along. Now that she’s here, it’s impossible to imagine what we ever did without her.”

  —Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted

  Also by Roxane Gay

  FICTION

  Ayiti

  An Untamed State

  Copyright

  Cover design by Robin Bilardello

  BAD FEMINIST. Copyright © 2014 by Roxane Gay. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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  ISBN 978-0-06-228271-2

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  1 This is the definition of the word “scrabble” according to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.

  2 In all seriousness, Scrabble was invented by a man named Alfred Mosher Butts.

  3 Scrabble tournaments are a lot like soccer tournaments for four-year-olds in that, oftentimes, everyone goes home with a little something.

  4 Officially rated tournaments are run by NASPA-approved tournament directors. NASPA is the North American Scrabble Players Association. Tournament directors are generally encyclopedic in their knowledge of Scrabble and can easily clarify any confusion about the rules or negotiate disputes that arise during a tournament. Disputes, they arise.

  5 This is how serious competitive Scrabble is: there is a national championship, held annually during the summer. The first national tournament was held in 1978. There are also world competitions (the first world championship was held in 1991), a cottage industry of Scrabble-related merchandise, game timers, boards, tiles, etc., plus books, documentaries, and academic articles on the nuances of competitive Scrabble. There are Scrabble-related apps for your iDevices (I use Zarf, CheckWord, the official Scrabble game, Lexulous, and Words With Friends). There are Scrabble games on Facebook (I play the official Hasbro game and Lexulous). Elsewhere online, there’s the Internet Scrabble Club (ISC), where I also play. There is a website, cross-tables.com, dedicated to tracking all the official tournaments in the country with scores and rankings. I am ranked 1,336th in the country. I’m guessing that’s out of 1,400 players, given my lowliness.

  6 There are more than two hundred Scrabble clubs in the United States. The club in my town meets monthly, while the club in Champaign, Illinois, meets weekly. In bigger cities, some clubs will even meet twice a week.

  7 He is my Scrabble sensei. I almost beat him once, where “almost” is “not so much.” Early in the match I played TRIPLEX for around 90 points. Then I played another bingo. I was way ahead and deluded myself into thinking I was on easy street. The sweetness of my imagined victory was nearly unbearable. Marty would go on to play ENTOZOAN across two Triple Word Score spaces for 203 points. He was Sub-Zero in Mortal Kombat tearing out my Scrabble spine with his bare hands—FATALITY. We have not played since. I have been properly humbled.

  8 I love anagrams. When I was a kid, my mom would write big words on lined paper and ask me to find all the possible words. Now, finding words is kind of my superpower.

  9 In the seventh round of the 2011 World Scrabble Championships, Edward Martin, while playing Chollapat Itthi-Aree, realized a tile was missing. The tournament director came up with a reasonable solution, but Itthi-Aree demanded Martin prove he wasn’t hiding the missing tile on his person. Play resumed, and Martin eventually won by a single point. My friend/sensei Marty was totally sitting right next to these guys when this went down. He said, “It was a distraction.”

  10 There are multiple official word lists. In North America, most Scrabble players use the Official Tournament and Club Word List (OWL). Outside of North America, players use the Collins English Dictionary. At some tournaments here in the United States, you will find smaller Collins divisions for those Scrabble players who want to test their skills using the Collins dictionary. The challenge is remembering which words are acceptable for Collins and then remembering which words are acceptable for OWL when returning to traditional play.

  11 Henry is not his name.

  12 I have always enjoyed board games. I love rolling dice and moving small plastic or metal pieces around game boards. I collect Monopoly sets from around the world. I will play any game so long as there is a possibility I can win. I take games seriously. Sometimes I take them too seriously and conflate winning the Game of Life with winning at life.

  13 Scrabble people are really quite friendly and gracious, but to be clear, they are also intense and serious as hell. I have an imagination. In my head, as we prepared to word rumble, I felt as if we were about to throw down like in the music video for Michael Jackson’s “Bad.” A lot of my life can be described in terms of Michael Jackson’s music. I’d explain the significance of “Man in the Mirror,” but then you’d think I was crazy.

  14 Players can be very . . . particular about how you comport yourself during a Scrabble game. Some players want complete silence during matches, so they won’t appreciate your idle chatter. Some players think you’re cheating if you play with your phone. Don’t take a call should your phone ring, that’s for sure. I once got a dirty look for tapping on my phone without muting it. Apparently, the gentle beeps were simply too much for that player. The longer you play, the more you finely hone these particularities. I, for example, have developed several Scrabble-related pet peeves and preferences. I have strong opinions on the type of scoring sheets I use and the kind of pens I use to keep score (Uni-ball .5mm roller ball). I now have a very low tolerance for players who draw their tiles in annoying ways. I am particularly aggravated by players who do a lot of mixing the tiles up before each draw. IT DOES NOT CHANGE THE OUTCOME. I also do not look kindly upon players who tap the tiles on the board as they tally their points. Why are they doing that? What really sets me over the edge, though, is when players recount my word scores after I’ve announced my score at the end of a turn as if I am incapable of simple math. Certainly, math is not my strong suit, but in general, I have addition under control. When this unnecessary score verification occurs, I sometimes have to sit on my hands to keep from punching a player in the face.

  15 A bingo is when you play all seven letters on your rack. This is one of the most coveted Scrabble plays. I am a bingo player. I have no time to learn all the three-letter words and random obscure words, so I spend most of my time going for bingos because, in addition to the point
s you earn from the board, you also earn a fifty-point bonus. There are twenty-three possible Scrabble words in “bingo.”

  16 Don’t get it twisted. Competitive Scrabble is both word chess and word poker. You need a game face, and you need to wear that game face hard.

  17 I choose to believe she asked this because I look so fresh and youthful.

  18 Much like in poker where you try to make an educated guess as to the cards your opponent is holding, great Scrabble players will track the letters played throughout a game. By the end of the game, you should know exactly what your opponent has on his rack. It is also important to track because it allows you to make smarter strategic decisions. It’s good to know if high-value letters (J, X, Q, K, V, etc.) are in play because if there are few letters left and you’re holding on to a U or an I and you know the Q is still in the bag, you want to be smart about where you play those vowels so your opponent cannot build a word with his Q unless he has the necessary vowels in his own rack.

  19 Everything turned out fine.

  20 “Shit” is a valid Scrabble word.

  21 There are no bingos with the letters T, R, E, K, I, N, and G. If Henry studied, he would know that.