Why I Am Not A Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto
Jessa Crispin
Melville House
It is worth stating clearly that Jessa Crispin certainly does consider herself a feminist. It is other people who are not: her book tells the story of a scourge of false – if well-intentioned – feminists, bungling in and mucking up the movement. It is a nostalgic story, one in which early feminism’s ‘shared vision’ of a politically just society has been betrayed by contemporary feminists, in our individualist focus on identity politics, personal choices and self-empowerment.
At points, this is just as patronising and dodgy as it sounds: the book’s opening chapters shame women for pole dancing, for removing body hair, and – most troublingly – for loving abusive men. But much of this text is necessary, nuanced and thought-provoking. Crispin raises uncomfortable questions around why contemporary feminism is so easily absorbed by market logic. She fully and finely elucidates the problems with seeking inclusion in an unchanged bourgeois order, and stands unequivocally against any version of feminism that ends up being ‘a fight to allow women to participate equally in the oppression of the powerless and the poor.’
The feminist alternative Crispin hints at is organised differently, through networks of care and conversation. Her vision of getting there requires facing up to the ‘darker regions’ of how feminism has played out – its capacity for inflicting hurt, its need for vengeance, its desire for power at the expense of others.
The flaws of this book are the flaws of the manifesto form: it is sweeping and it goes too far. There is a disproportionate focus on the failures of women – especially slightly well-off women – which deflects attention from those with real, glaring power. By refusing to accept anything less than women’s full commitment to radical change, Crispin’s politics exclude many and worse, they risk devaluing the potent communities that contemporary feminists have formed. And yet the power of this book is the power of the manifesto at its best. We need idealists; we need harsh, imperfect thinkers who ask feminists not only to be better than we are, but better than this whole sodden system. I am glad that this book exists.
Words – Gillian Moore
