For women on the left who have felt increasingly dispirited with the tenor of contemporary feminist discourse, Jessa Crispin’s polemical book, Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto, initially comes across as a breath of fresh air.
Inside the slender volume, published last month, is a furious rant. The book was born of the frustration of trying to engage with a movement the aims of which seem to have become, if not identical with the patriarchal capitalist status quo, then so perfectly compatible as to be indistinguishable from it.
It is a conversation we need to have but largely absent from the critical response to it has been the question of how this might translate into action. What follows from this intervention?
A more open discourse about the limited possibilities that mainstream feminism offers is both welcome and necessary, and perhaps Crispin’s book signals a turning of the tide in this direction: there is now more space than ever to talk about a new approach to fighting sexism.
But, in other ways, Crispin’s book could be read as more of the same – another rant into the void, another intervention for the sake of intervention that offers no concrete strategy for meaningful change.
The book is essentially a polemic against liberal feminism (which its author calls “lifestyle feminism”), made from a leftwing position. Crispin, however, eschews terms such as “liberal” and even “leftwing” – perhaps seeking to disassociate herself and the arguments she is making from pre-existing assumptions about the politics these terms imply.
The targets of her ire are also largely anonymous. With the exception of a quote from Laurie Penny (in which Penny, Crispin argues, dismisses the works of earlier feminists such as Andrea Dworkin), Crispin does not refer to any contemporary feminists or their work directly. She has said that she removed their names to avoid the sense that she was targeting any individual, instead of an entire philosophy: “If you name someone’s name, Twitter and clickbait media are going to turn it into a feud between you and that person.”
Instead, she opts for broad generalisations about particular phenomena, such as social media pile-ons, in largely passive language: “Names are called out, protests are organised, hashtags are circulated.” Even the widespread feminist support of Hillary Clinton during the recent US election is described only obliquely:
[Women] line up behind female politicians, their support thrown behind them almost solely because they share a gender. Despite a long history of supporting military intervention, I watch women talk about these politicians’ natural diplomacy and how they’ll keep us out of war. Despite a long history of gutting social services, I watch women talk about these politicians’ understanding and attention to women and children.
This is fair enough on one level – online outrage culture has certainly made it next to impossible to engage in productive discussion about complex political issues, let alone thrash out an effective strategy for change. But while these omissions allow Crispin a kind of lofty freedom to write in broad terms, they simultaneously undercut her argument. The consequence is a book of sweeping generalisations and unsupported assertions that read rather like a very long subtweet.
This is not to diminish the accuracy of Crispin’s critiques, where they do hit home. The above passage, for instance, could be applied with equal legitimacy to the feminist response to Julia Gillard’s prime ministership in Australia a few years ago. But they could also easily be read as a series of straw-feminist arguments and therefore dismissed just as easily by the very proponents of the philosophy she seeks to critique.
This is particularly striking when Crispin’s presumably deep engagement with the broad spectrum of feminist theory is represented by little more than an acknowledgements list at the end of the book. After all, the objections Crispin makes to contemporary feminism are not new.
Consider the opening passages to bell hooks’ Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre, which feel just as relevant as they did when it was written over 30 years ago: “The ideology of ‘competitive, atomistic liberal individualism’ has permeated feminist thought to such an extent that it undermines the potential radicalism of feminist struggle.” Or the criticisms of contemporary feminists by the writer and activist Arundhati Roy, who argues that viewing gender “shorn of social, political and economic context makes it an issue of identity, a battle of props and costumes”.
The lack of theory, history and context represented in this work feels like a missed opportunity and makes it difficult to translate Crispin’s critique into a practical pathway forward. There’s no more than a passing mention of intersectionality in the book, for example – arguably the most prominent theory circulating in the contemporary feminist movement and a concept that has a complicated relationship with the often-atomising identity politics that pervades so much of the contemporary feminist activity that Crispin finds infuriating.
Similarly, if her position is fundamentally anti-capitalist – and in her comments elsewhere she has stated that she sees patriarchy and capitalism as inextricable – it’s odd that such an otherwise strident work avoids being more explicit in this respect. She talks about capitalism, yes, but only in general terms. A deeper analysis of the specifics would open up a broad range of practical strategies – trade unionism, for example – as well as a method of analysis through which to identify a common enemy and thus provide a more concrete path forward.
As Shulamith Firestone argued: “Before we can act to change a situation ... we must know how it has arisen and evolved, and through what institutions it now operates.” These origin stories are critical: the recognition that oppression exists must be accompanied by an understanding of how it occurs, what forces allow it to continue to function. How can we develop a comprehensive strategy for change otherwise?
Firestone’s objective in The Dialectic of Sex was an attempt to follow the methodology of Marx and Engels in order to “enlarge historical materialism” – that is, to widen the scope of a class analysis using the “scientific approach to history” that characterised the duo’s works on capitalism. Similarly, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex – to which Firestone was in part responding – was a meticulous attempt to build an argument about the origins, manifestations and consequences of sexism using Hegel and existentialism as a framework.
Too often patriarchy, and thus sexism, exists in mainstream feminism as a free-floating concept, fundamentally attributed to personal prejudice rather than an analysis of material conditions. Unfortunately, without this theoretical grounding, such concepts function in a similar way in Crispin’s work – loose enough to be adopted by the reader in whichever way she sees fit.
Insofar as Crispin’s work is a call for a deeper, more critical engagement with the rich tapestry of feminist ideas that exists outside the mainstream – for the development of alternative possibilities and new ideas for how to build collective resistance to forces of oppression – it is a welcome one. It is disappointing, though, that her book itself falls short of attempting to offer those very things which are most needed.
