Twenty years ago, when Roxane Gay was 19, she disappeared. She was studying at Yale, at the start of a new term, and instead boarded a plane to San Francisco, where she had arranged to meet a man she had befriended online. On the face of it, her life was good. She had a well-off, supportive family, a strong academic record, a potentially sunny future. But she had spent seven years struggling with the unmanageable secret of a childhood sexual assault, and her life was unravelling. When this online friend, a 44-year-old man, suggested they travel to Arizona, she said yes.
She spent a year there, telling no one where she was; even now, she won't tell me the job she did, just that it was "nothing illegal". She laughs uproariously. "I could have met a serial killer. I could have been murdered in my sleep. But I met legions of kind, warm people."
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/02/roxane-gay-bad-feminist-sisterhood-fake-orgasmHer parents eventually tracked her down – thanks, she suspects, to a private investigator – and she moved back to Nebraska to be near them, enrolling at another university to finish her studies. The year had been an adventure – a liberation, but not a resolution.
I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. I am messy. I’m not trying to be an example. I am not trying to be perfect. I am not trying to say I have all the answers. I am not trying to say I’m right. I am just trying — trying to support what I believe in, trying to do some good in this world, trying to make some noise with my writing while also being myself: a woman who loves pink and likes to get freaky and sometimes dances her ass off to music she knows, she knows, is terrible for women and who sometimes plays dumb with repairmen because it’s just easier to let them feel macho than it is to stand on the moral high ground.
I am a bad feminist because I never want to be placed on a Feminist Pedestal. People who are placed on pedestals are expected to pose, perfectly. Then they get knocked off when they fuck it up. I regularly fuck it up. Consider me already knocked off.
When I was younger, I disavowed feminism with alarming frequency. I understand why women still fall over themselves to disavow feminism, to distance themselves. I disavowed feminism because when I was called a feminist, the label felt like an insult. In fact, it was generally intended as such. When I was called a feminist, during those days, my first thought was, But I willingly give blow jobs. I had it in my head that I could not both be a feminist and be sexually open. I had lots of strange things in my head during my teens and twenties.
I disavowed feminism because I had no rational understanding of the movement. I was called a feminist, and what I heard was, “You are an angry, sex-hating, man-hating victim lady person.” This caricature is how feminists have been warped by the people who fear feminism most, the same people who have the most to lose when feminism succeeds. Anytime I remember how I once disavowed feminism, I am ashamed of my ignorance. I am ashamed of my fear because mostly the disavowal was grounded in the fear that I would be ostracized, that I would be seen as a troublemaker, that I would never be accepted by the mainstream.
I get angry when women disavow feminism and shun the feminist label but say they support all the advances born of feminism because I see a disconnect that does not need to be there. I get angry but I understand and hope someday we will live in a culture where we don’t need to distance ourselves from the feminist label, where the label doesn’t make us afraid of being alone, of being too different, of wanting too much.
Stephanie Doty
Women’s Issues Matter
August 5, 2014
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0
