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Why I Am Not A Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto

Jessa Crispin · 1 HN comments
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Amazon Summary
Outspoken critic Jessa Crispin delivers a searing rejection of contemporary feminism . . . and a bracing manifesto for revolution. Are you a feminist? Do you believe women are human beings and that they deserve to be treated as such? That women deserve all the same rights and liberties bestowed upon men? If so, then you are a feminist . . . or so the feminists keep insisting. But somewhere along the way, the movement for female liberation sacrificed meaning for acceptance, and left us with a banal, polite, ineffectual pose that barely challenges the status quo. In this bracing, fiercely intelligent manifesto, Jessa Crispin demands more. Why I Am Not A Feminist is a radical, fearless call for revolution. It accuses the feminist movement of obliviousness, irrelevance, and cowardice—and demands nothing less than the total dismantling of a system of oppression. Praise for Jessa Crispin, and The Dead Ladies Project "I'd follow Jessa Crispin to the ends of the earth." --Kathryn Davis, author of Duplex "Read with caution . . . Crispin is funny, sexy, self-lacerating, and politically attuned, with unique slants on literary criticism, travel writing, and female journeys. No one crosses genres, borders, and proprieties with more panache." --Laura Kipnis, author of Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation "Very, very funny. . . . The whole book is packed with delightfully offbeat prose . . . as raw as it is sophisticated, as quirky as it is intense." -- The Chicago Tribune
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Hacker News Stories and Comments

All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this book.
Not OP, but Answer 1: Yes, it's anecdotal but you definitely see the trend.

Answer 2: So I did the Google search as you requested, and read about the book [1]. I hadn't heard of it but it looks interesting, thanks for recommending. From what I can tell, it's central claim is that feminism has an image problem due to it being co-opted by the US right-wing which she calls "choice feminism", and the remedy is a need to return to a leftist concept of what she calls "radical feminism". Is that what you're saying?

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Why-Am-Not-Feminist-Manifesto/dp/1612...

textgel
A full on reading into one particular book is probably going above and beyond (though I cant immediately see anything about right wing co-option on a skim read of that particular one; the general criticism at the moment seems to centre on the radical lefts takeover).

The search for me at least brings a number of articles which highlight common criticisms of the movement such as rampant sexism, advocacy for abolition of basic rights (free speech, right to fair trial etc), general hypocrisy and bad faith action (see the Cathy Newman vs Jordan Peterson interview for a great example of this)

michaelpb
Oh, so for an incognito search with clear cookies in my locale (bay area), all you get for 1-5 pages or so with the search term you provided is the book and reviews and articles discussing it (with and without quotes): https://google.com/search?q=%22why+i+am+not+a+feminist%22

Perhaps when you search with your normal Google account it's skewing to different results. This particular book and the articles discussing it are critiquing modern feminist movements as too conservative, from what you perhaps would call a "radical left" perspective. I find it interesting that this is the exact opposite of "the general criticism at the moment seems to centre on the radical lefts takeover"!

I personally feel my incognito Google search captures the current zeitgeist better than your search, that people are fed up with conservatives and want a "radical, fearless call for revolution" as Google's auto-summary of my search put it. That said, ultimately it's all "bubbles" all the way down, as there's no such thing as a so-called "algorithm" (ranking formula, etc) free from ideology, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

textgel
Can you point to me the bit where its criticising it for being too conservative? Not saying its not there but I'm not seeing it.
michaelpb
On Amazon it's described by Jacobin (a leftwing magazine in the US popular with Bernie supporters etc): “A searing critique… a necessary contribution to the effort to push contemporary social justice movements further to the left and to weave an understanding of class politics into modern identity-based movements in order to build a radical politics of solidarity.”

All the other summaries on Amazon are similar, i.e. the very top description (New Yorker): "The point of 'Why I Am Not a Feminist' isn’t really that Crispin is not a feminist; it’s that she has no interest in being a part of a club that has opened its doors and lost sight of its politics—a club that would, if she weren’t so busy disavowing it, invite Kellyanne Conway in"

Having never read the book or even heard of the author until you introduced it to me I don't care one way or the other, but it's clear from a reading of these descriptions that her book is a critique from the left.

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