History of Feminism

Full Frontal Feminism is damn good. It is, very much, a love letter to feminism and a feminist primer. It is not a book that is meant to appeal to career feminists, or to women who have made feminism their lives — however, I am a woman who has pretty much made feminism her life, and I really enjoyed it and I learned from it. The point of Jessica’s book, though, is to explain to younger women why feminism is appealing, and why it’s valid in their lives. It explains why feminism has been important in Jessica’s life. FFF is appealing precisely because it’s conversational. Jessica’s writing is so incredibly tight that she can take complicated topics and distill them down to compelling one-sentence summaries — followed by “fuck that,” or some otherwise perfect, funny and to-the-point dismissal. She takes issues that would take me pages to explain and pares them down to a paragraph. And you’re laughing by the end of it. FFF is not an academic work, and was never intended to be. It’s informative without being intimidating; it’s intelligent and still accessible. Reading it is a lot like talking to Jessica in person — charming, funny, cutting, sometimes foul-mouthed, intelligent, and always fascinating.

Jessica and I differ on several issues, porn and statutory rape being the two that come most immediately to mind. But damn if she doesn’t present solid, grounded arguments for her points of view. And while we may not agree on everything, the fact is that Jessica gets it. She is well-schooled in both academic feminism as well as day-to-day, life-lesson feminism — and as a general rule she errs on the side of lived feminism, which is incredibly refreshing. I’ve done the academic feminism thing — hell, I’m still doing it — and while I love me some theory, at the end of the day, the way women live their lives and negotiate feminism with their lived realities matters a whole lot more than theory ever will. So her book isn’t laden with academic terms. Jessica isn’t trying to remind you that she’s smarter and more feminist than you are. And after spending a semester reading Butler and Foucault, sitting down with Full Frontal Feminism was a nice change. I could read it, be entertained, learn something, and not feel like I was having to work at it.

Full Frontal Feminism is intended to target younger women — high school and early college-aged would be my guess. I didn’t identify as a feminist until college, not because I didn’t have feminist beliefs, but because I hadn’t met anyone my own age who identified as feminist, and because I bought into a lot of the negative stereotypes about feminism. If you had thrown Andrea Dworkin or Judith Butler at 16-year-old Jill, she would have told you it was the most ridiculous thing she had ever read and thrown it back at you. But if you had given me Full Frontal Feminism, I would have thought twice about the feminist label. That was Jessica’s point — not to impress the theory-whores out there. Not to convert the 25-year-old grad student. Not to open the eyes of the 60-year-old veteran feminist who spent her whole life on the front lines. But to reach out to the younger women who have been scared away from feminism by the conservative backlash and an unsympathetic media.

That’s incredibly important. And that’s why so many of the criticisms of Full Frontal Feminism have pissed me off so much.

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You don’t have to agree with everything Jessica writes, or how she writes it, or how she packages it. Criticism is crucial to building a more effective movement, and to making us all better people. But the snipes and the little cruelties leveled at Jessica are making my skin crawl. I want to believe that we can be constructive in our criticisms, that we can realize that we’re all trying to make progress toward gender equality and/or women’s liberation, and that even if we go about it in different ways, our hearts are in the right place. I want to believe that, while feminism may not unite us, it will at least offer some common ground. I want to believe that even if we quibble on the details, we will nonetheless support each other and have each others’ backs. I want to believe that we won’t cut each other down in the way that the rest of the whole fucking world cuts us down. It makes me incredibly sad to know that that isn’t the case.

Jessica is doing the hard work of making feminism accessible to a wide range of younger women. She is at the forefront of online feminist activism. She is well-versed in feminist theory. She is someone who I’m happy to see taking the lead in my generation of feminists. She is one of the kindest, smartest, most generous people I have ever met. She should be incredibly proud of what she’s accomplished. I’m incredibly proud of her. And I offer her my sincerest congratulations on a job well done.
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2007/05/16/full-frontal-feminism/