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Book: Bad Feminist: Essays
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Roxane Gay _ Bad Feminist: Essays
In a Publishers Weekly interview with Claire Messud about her novel The Woman Upstairs, which features a rather "unlikable" protagonist, Nora, who is bitter, bereft, and downright angry about what her life has become, the interviewer said, "I wouldn't want to be friends with Nora, would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim." And there we have it. A reader was here to make friends with the characters in a book and she didn't like what she found. Messud, for her part, had a sharp response for her interviewer. For heaven's sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you're reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn't "Is this a potential friend for me?" but "Is this character alive?" Perhaps,
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Roxane Gay _ Bad Feminist: Essays
Narratives about certain experiences are somehow legitimized when mediated through a man's perspective. Consider the work of John Updike or Richard Yates. Most of their fiction is grounded in domestic themes that, in the hands of a woman, would render the work "women's fiction." While these books may be tagged as "women's fiction" on Amazon.com, they are also categorized as literary fiction. These books are allowed to be more than what they are by virtue of the writer's gender, while similar books by women are forced to be less than what they are, forced into narrow, often inaccurate categories that diminish their contents. James
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Roxane Gay _ Bad Feminist: Essays
Feminism has certainly helped me find my voice. Feminism has helped me believe my voice matters, even in this world where there are so many voices demanding to be heard.
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Roxane Gay _ Bad Feminist: Essays
It is untenable to go through life as an exposed wound. No matter how well intended, trigger warnings will not stanch the bleeding; trigger warnings will not harden into scabs over your wounds.
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Roxane Gay _ Bad Feminist: Essays
more ambitious and focused because we've never had a choice. We've had to fight to vote, to work outside the home, to work in environments free of sexual harassment, to attend the universities of our choice, and we've also had to prove ourselves over and over to receive any modicum of consideration.
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Roxane Gay _ Bad Feminist: Essays
Trigger warnings aren't meant for those of us who don't believe in them, just like the Bible wasn't written for atheists. Trigger warnings are designed for the people who need and believe in that safety. Those of us who do not believe should have little say in the matter. We can neither presume nor judge what others might feel the need to be protected from.
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Roxane Gay _ Bad Feminist: Essays
It has been suggested, more than once, that if you don't believe in trigger warnings, you aren't respecting the experiences of rape and abuse survivors. It has been suggested, more than once, that trigger warnings are unnecessary coddling. It is an impossible debate. There is too much history lurking beneath the skin of too many people. Few are willing to consider the possibility that trigger warnings might be ineffective, impractical, and necessary for creating safe spaces all at once. The illusion of safety is as frustrating as it is powerful.
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Roxane Gay _ Bad Feminist: Essays
Life, apparently, requires a trigger warning. This is the uncomfortable truth: everything is a trigger for someone. There are things you cannot tell just by looking at someone. We all have history. You can think you're over your history. You can think the past is the past. And then something happens, often innocuous, that shows you how far you are from over it. The past is always with you. Some people want to be protected from this
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Roxane Gay _ Bad Feminist: Essays
Many feminist communities use trigger warnings, particularly in online forums when discussing rape, sexual abuse, and violence. By using these warnings, these communities are saying, "This is a safe space. We will protect you from unexpected reminders of your history." Members of these communities are given the illusion they can be protected.
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Roxane Gay _ Bad Feminist: Essays
In literature, as in life, the rules are all too often different for girls. There are many instances in which an unlikable man is billed as an antihero, earning a special term to explain those ways in which he deviates from the norm, the traditionally likable.
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Roxane Gay _ Bad Feminist: Essays
It's hard not to feel humorless, as a woman and a feminist, to recognize misogyny in so many forms, some great and some small, and know you're not imagining things. It's hard to be told to lighten up because if you lighten up any more, you're going to float the fuck away. The problem is not that one of these things is happening; it's that they are all happening, concurrently and constantly.
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Roxane Gay _ Bad Feminist: Essays
If readers discount certain topics as unworthy of their attention, if readers are going to judge a book by its cover or feel excluded from a certain kind of book because the cover is, say, pink, the failure is with the reader, not the writer. To read narrowly and shallowly is to read from a place of ignorance, and women writers can't fix that ignorance no matter what kind of books we write or how those books are marketed.
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