What I enjoyed most about this book, was that Roxane Gay repeatedly said that there is more that one way to be a feminist. (Not that anyone would have read it beside my best friend Jen, but I still should have) She says she’s Team Peta, which, honestly, if you’re not Team Katniss you don’t understand the books, in my opinion.
She talks about the Hunger Games and her love of that series but somehow doesn’t talk about how the media saw the Hunger Games, which I have a lot of feelings about and should have written an essay about when the movies were coming out. She rips apart Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke, which is a gross song that existed everywhere and I hopefully will never have to hear again. There’s a lot of talk about 20 pop culture, which in 2018 feels like 600 years ago because every week feels like 19 years nowadays. I enjoyed the discussions about pop culture, which sadly is one of the things that dated this book so quickly. The real world sucks, the media we should be able to opt out of seeing and reading about certain things in our fictional worlds.
People should not live in constant fear of being set back if they read a book, they should know what they are getting into when they go to the movies or watch a TV show.
The whole “there’s no trigger warning to live” argument makes no sense to me because things we are asking to have trigger warnings are things that we voluntarily consume. Movies have a rating system, the content we expose ourselves to should also have a rating system. To me, I find trigger warnings important and necessary. One that I did not at all agree with was Gay’s essay about trigger warnings and how they aren’t important. I enjoyed most of the essays, I agreed with most of the points being made.
There’s a couple now cringe-worthy Bill Cosby mentions, but not everything is perfect and honestly, that’s sort of the point of this collection of essays. This is a pre-MeToo movement book, which mentions some of the men that were taken down by the movement.
Not all of it, like, this is a good book but sometimes book age quicker than others. this book is good, thoughtful, funny, but even though it was released in 2014, the world has changed a lot and it makes some of what Roxane Gay says sound super dated. Sometimes it’s hard to put into words how much the world has changed in the two years, but it’s changed a lot. If I had read this book when it was first published, or even a year and a half ago, I would have raved about it. The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand herself and our society but also one of our culture.īad Feminist is a sharp, funny, and spot-on look at the ways in which the culture we consume becomes who we are, and an inspiring call-to-arms of all the ways we still need to do better. In these funny and insightful essays, Roxane Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman of color while also taking readers on a ride through culture of the last few years and commenting on the state of feminism today. I read Vogue, and I’m not doing it ironically, though it might seem that way. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink.
I used to say my favorite color was black to be cool, but it is pink-all shades of pink.