Feminism 101

Book: Reading Women: How the Greatest Books of Feminism Changed My Life


Author: Stephanie Staal


Published: 2011 (PublicAffairs)


Pages: 264


I finished this book about revisited feminism right before I unwrapped a new dress and pulled it on over tights to go over to my boyfriend's house. 

I spent the whole clothes time wondering who, exactly, was I wearing this for? Me? My boyfriend? Because I wanted him to think I looked cute? Because I wanted to look cute for myself? But what if looking cute for myself is subliminal code for looking cute in a way that he and society think look cute, so there's not actually any of me in this decision at all? ...How the hell am I ever supposed to know what's me and what's for him and what's Western societal pressure on the female bits of me?


Reading about feminism always makes me wonder that without giving me any answers. 


This book charts the experiences of a lady who revisits her Fem Text class at Bernard when her professional and family lives are doing that thing where they don't work together. Classic feminist dilemma that--say it with me now--she never thought would happen to her. 


And I loved reading about it. She writes in the perfect deft balance of understated confessional personal narrative and academic research. Her readings make her think about her real life and where she's at now in her real life makes her understand the readings in depths she couldn't get close to when she was a 20-year-old undergraduate immersed in an all-girl's college. And y'all, she's incredibly insightful about the vague, impractical, and hypocritical points of feminism while still being firmly in favor of the movement because, come on. Women are people too. 


She doesn't come to any more solid a conclusion than I ever do, though. She's glad she took the class during a whole new generation of thought, and she's glad it's made her appreciate how hard her life balance is and that it really might be worth it in the end, but she's not changing anything radical in her life because she read Vindication for the Rights of Woman again. I was sort of hoping there'd be an Awesome Gentlelady Who Doesn't Give a Fuck About Gender Roles No Seriously magic formula somewhere in there, but alas. 


Welp. I don't want to end on "alas" because I really liked this book, so I will tell you that after a good boyfriend visit I decided that I do dress for myself first but angle for outside appreciation. At least when I'm going out in public. 

Auntie Zadie doesn't actually live here.

Book: Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

Author: Zadie Smith

Published: 2009 (Penguin)

Pages: 297

I had been saving this collection since I bought it for something ridiculous like 90% off cover price in the last gasping summer days of my hometown Borders. Why? Because It's Zadie motherfuckin' Smith, author of three of my favorite novels, the first and the best of which she got published when she was twenty-four. White Teeth at twenty-four!

And so I was saving this because if I read it right when I bought it, it'd be over with too soon. I'd have no ZS to break the monotony of dead white lit fic I have a habit of putting way too much hope in.

And so, when her essays reveal a tremendous knowledge of literary theory and intellectual cultural analysis and only the briefest, unadorned glimpses of personal life, I was reminded of Stuff I've Read on the Internet (fuck save us all) that said she's kind of a cold person. 

I really don't want her to be like that. I want her to be a sister of literature, like she talks about in her essay on Their Eyes Were Watching God. I want to feel like she'd find a funny, easy way to break her favorite subjects down for us while letting her methods reveal how her own brain works.

Maybe these essays do, and her mind just works a lot more like a straightforward scholar than I want it to. Her collection of movie reviews for The Guardian are the strongest arguments for the possibility of her being the person I want her to be; but they're her briefest and least seriously structured. And I could track various tropes in her novels in subject matters, at the very least: Golden-era Hollywood, old fathers who started second lives, mixed race and age-gap marriages, straddling cultural lines and not being quite accepted on either side.

These are solid, excellently-written essays. But I was expecting a series of those chats you have with your best friend at two in the morning outside wandering back to their car when the air is clear enough to shoot your ideas back and forth on invisible telepathic lines. What I got was a series of discussions from a really good teacher. I learned more this way, but I missed the emotional high that comes from the matching of minds.

Translated: I am shamed into thinking I should've been an English major.

Insert!

This is where I add a thank you note to Liberry Jam for lending me this and the next few books in my to-read pile. Also for painting me a picture with words of Bourbon Street for a short story. And books! Did I mention the books, LJ?

Lack of squishy armchairs

A few days ago, I went to my hometown’s Boarder’s and started paging through a book about submitting writing to publishers to decide if it was worth its $3.95 sidewalk discount price. Sort of an exercise in futility, since I didn’t actually have $3.95 and couldn’t convince my mom it would be an investment in my future after I laughed at how obvious most of the advice was. But I kept digging deeper into it, convinced I would miss something important during my 2pm speed-read and equally convinced there was nothing there and I’d be cheated if I paid money for it.

Bookstores drive me crazy. There’s just so much crammed into such a relatively small space—millions of words covering thousands of ideas bound up in hundreds of neat packages stacked together waiting patiently to unleash their power. It’s amazing.

I love the journal sections, too. I’ll pick up each one that has a pretty cover and flip through it like I’m expecting messages already scribbled in there. All those blank pages beg to be filled with ideas instantly so they can start being read.

And it makes me nauseous. I want to read everything at once, so I end up overwhelming myself, paralyzing myself with indecision. I already have so many novels—but I love them, they’re my favorite thing to read—so all the more reason to get something else—but do I get something I know I’ll agree with? Something I can argue? Something entertaining, light, serious, easy or hard or middlebrow but profound? True or not true or just true in the author’s mind? Gah!

Not having money to spend doesn’t help me from wanting. It does help my ultimate decision, though: nothing. I’ll buy nothing but enjoy myself all the same by grabbing a Poets and Writers, turning to its classifieds and scoping out which writing contests have reasonable deadlines and no entry fees. Doing this will also help me decide that chain bookstores need more squishy armchairs.