Title: Jessa Crispin: the woman at war with lifestyle feminism | Books | The Guardian
Headings: Jessa Crispin: the woman at war with lifestyle feminism
Books
Interview
Jessa Crispin: the woman at war with lifestyle feminism
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Where did the idea for the book come from? Did it come out of a moment of rage with contemporary feminism or was it more gradual?
How did you come to feminism? Was it through 90s feminists such as Naomi Wolf or did you connect via the second wave, such as Dworkin?
So what was your real-life experience of feminism when you were growing up in middle America?
How do you define the lifestyle feminism that you critique in the book – and why is it bad?
Like the way that women talk about self-care?
You write that feminism is a “decade-long conversation about which television show is a good television show and which television show is a bad show”. What do you mean by that? That it’s become something abstract?
A lot of your book is a critique of capitalism – which very much distinguishes it from the Lean In style of feminism, which says to move with and harness those forces. Do you think capitalism has gobbled up feminism?
Particularly now?
How do you see society functioning once or if the patriarchy is destroyed?
The way we live is quite individualistic though – there’s not a huge emphasis on community.
Do celebrity feminists do more harm than good?
You write in the book about how romance needs to be demoted from being the central feature of women’s lives.
Is conventional beauty still something feminists hold on to?

Content: This is a gutsy and bracing book arguing that contemporary feminism has lost its way, and no longer has much in common with its revolutionary roots. For an age, Crispin writes, gains for women were made by a “small number of radical, heavily invested women who did the hard work of dragging women’s position forward, usually through shocking acts and words”, and that the “majority of women benefited from the work of these few, while often quickly trying to disassociate themselves from them”. Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto by Jessa Crispin review – it’s time to get radical
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Last year, after closing her popular, long-running literary blog Bookslut, Crispin gave an interview to Vulture in which she said: “ Contemporary feminism is not only embarrassing but incredibly misguided to the point where I can’t associate myself with it.” The type of feminism Crispin is critiquing can loosely be described as lifestyle feminism: a “decade-long conversation about which television show is a good television show and which television show is a bad show”. But it’s also a movement that empowers individuals, often at the expense of the collective. The result is a blend of capitalism and feminism that feeds successful women into a patriarchal power structure of money, comfort and privilege but does not do much to improve the lives of many women who still live with capitalism’s boot on their neck. Crispin writes that in feminism’s pursuit of mainstream acceptability, it’s lost a lot of its power and kick: “