Strangely, there were no questions about the whereabouts of the father while this rape was taking place.” There were even questions about the whereabouts of the girl’s mother, given, as we all know, that a mother must be with her child at all times or whatever ill befalls the child is clearly the mother’s fault. “There was discussion of how the eleven-year-old girl, the child, dressed like a twenty-year-old, implying that there is a realm of possibility where a woman can `ask for it’ and that it’s somehow understandable that eighteen men would rape a child. The author “focused on how the men’s lives would be changed forever, how the town was being ripped apart, how those poor boys might never be able to return to school,” Gay writes. Gay pillories a New York Times article titled “Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town” about the gang-rape of an 11-year-old girl. She highlights gender inequality in the publishing industry and offers practical solutions.Ī later essay further drives this point home. She compares being a first-year professor to being a kid who gets to sit at the adult table on Thanksgiving for the first time. Gay is as comfortable dissecting a Joan Didion novel as the reality TV show “Flavor of Love” with equal fluency and smarts.
You need to understand the extent of your privilege, the consequences of your privilege, and remain aware that people who are different from you move through and experience the world in ways you might never know anything about.” The essays range from the humorous – an account of her unwitting entry into the cutthroat world of competitive Scrabble – to the weighty issue of acknowledging privilege: “You don’t have to apologize for it. In her new collection of essays, “Bad Feminist,” Gay argues that she needn’t fit a mythologized image of a feminist in order to fight against institutional sexism, pay inequity, the cult of beauty, attacks on reproductive freedom and so on.
Roxane Gay may call herself a bad feminist – she cops to loving pink and dancing to misogynist music – but she is a badass writer. “Bad Feminist: Essays” (Harper Perennial), by Roxane Gay
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