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“I think constantly about connection and loneliness and community,” Gay confides in “Feel Me. She isn’t oblivious to the hypocrisy-she wants to disclose her own weak spots. But even there, Gay wants to complicate things: “My real problem is that The Help is written by a white woman,” she admits, despite an earlier essay arguing fervently that writers of all backgrounds should be permitted to imagine and talk about experiences of all stripes. Her delicious, tour-de-force takedowns of The Help(“There is not enough height in the atmosphere for us to suspend our disbelief”) and Django Unchained (“My slavery revenge fantasy would probably involve being able to read and write without fear of punishment or persecution coupled with a long vacation in Paris”) are in part correctives to the centering of white people in social justice crusades.
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She rightly suggests that one of its biggest failures involves not taking women of color, queer women, and transgender women seriously. For all her loyalty, Gay allows that feminism itself is “bad” sometimes. The peculiar and gracious back-and-forth in which Gay specializes-exposing faults in order to embrace that which is fallible-works on movements too. On Girls: “It is unreasonable to expect Lena Dunham to somehow solve the race and representation problem on television while crafting her twenty-something witticisms and appalling us with sex scenes so uncomfortable they defy imagination.” On Sheryl Sandberg: “If she chose to offer career advice for working-class women, a group she clearly knows little about, she would have been just as harshly criticized for overstepping her bounds.” On the privileged perspective of the narrator in Kate Zambreno’s memoir Heroines: “No book can be everything to everyone.” In essay after essay, Gay ably diagnoses our desire for female role models to symbolize all things to all people. Feminism’s rules, Gay observes, are different from the patriarchy’s, but they can be equally strict and screw-up-able. Heaven help the young actress who tweets the wrong thing about Woody Allen, or the corporate executive with socioeconomic blind spots.
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The “bad feminist” moniker turns out to have a special magic-it allows Gay to resist the pressure to be perfect, and points out the irony of women fighting the sexist idea that they must be other than what they are (more beautiful, more agreeable, more maternal or professional or fill-in-the-blank), yet still demanding flawlessness from their feminist idols. There is no effort to reconcile these inconsistencies. She thinks misogynist songs like “Blurred Lines” are catchy but writes an impassioned letter to the girls who say they would let Chris Brown hit them. “I am failing as a feminist … I am a mess of contradictions.” Gay, the author of one novel, An Untamed State, which came out in May 2014, despises rape jokes but loves crappy exploitative television. “I am failing as a woman,” she writes, half seriously.