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: Feminist writers have been saying for years now, “You don’t have to change your life to be a feminists” – we don’t have to stop listening to music by misogynistic musicians, or removing all the hair from our bodies, or that we can drop out of work and raise children in the suburbs and we don’t have to question it. Feminism has become a way of shielding your choices from questioning. This is part of choice feminism; I call myself a feminist and I’m making a choice so therefore the choice is feminist. And that’s absurd. There is a sense that if you question this, it is shaming. All of this is deflecting criticism. A woman had a go at me today because she’s married and she got very angry because I write that marriage is a patriarchal institution. Of course it’s patriarchal. What does she think it is?