This Week in Feminism: Roxane Gay, Lucille Ball, and Teenagers Make Us Proud
It was another power-packed week of feminism and the pursuit of equal rights. In case you missed anything, here’s what happened:
Roxane Gay’s powerful book of pop culture essays—Bad Feminist—evoked widespread praise for its raw, honest and very funny look at what it means to be a woman in American today.
Christie, who won over the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last year with her stand-up show “Bic for Her,” returned this year with more hilariously honest material, covering everything from the ridiculousness of yogurt ads to the inherent problems of victim-shaming.
The Post’s Naomi Schaefer Riley points to the lame Women Against Feminism hashtag and the New Yorker’s recent piece about the radical feminist conflict with trans rights movement, as a sign of the Women’s Lib-pocalypse. Slate’s Amanda Marcotte smartly takes her to task, citing statistical evidence that feminism is stronger than ever. She writes that “the truth is that mainstream, nonacademic feminism is not losing women at all. On the contrary, feminist arguments are winning people over.” Then there’s the fact that everyone, including The New York Post, wants in on the conversation—that alone suggests that engagement in issues of women’s equality is up, way up.
In an interview with The Frisky, Kazan answers the age-old (actually pretty new) question: Are you a feminist? For the record, she is. And she’s got some very interesting thoughts on the matter: “I think saying that ‘you’re a feminist’ is a little bit like saying that you’re a humanist, because what it’s really about is equal opportunities and equal thinking about genders being only a part of your identity rather than something that would define you and define your character.”
After a classroom debate over Of Mice and Men and the lack of a strong female character in the book, a group of students in Melbourne formed a collective on Kickstarter, raising upwards of $12,000, in an effort to make feminism more accessible to students in schools across Australia. Pretty cool.
On Thursday, the Hollywood Reporter’s Ken Tucker explained how Ball “injected anarchic female power into the TV industry both in front of the camera (as the wildly atypical housewife Lucy Ricardo in I Love Lucy) and behind it (as an early auteur who controlled much of her own destiny by forming Desilu Productions at a time when the networks and movie studios oversaw the means of production).” He goes on to say: “Her influence echoes down the decades to today: You can bet that, in very different ways, Girls‘ Lena Dunham and the two broads of Broad City know their Lucy.” Oh, I really love Lucy.
(Featured image via)
