While Gay is certainly not advocating for sexist or racist media, she understands its prevalence and mass appeal. They are delightful pop confections,” (188). Of popular music, she explains, “As much as it pains me to admit, I like these songs. Beyond this balancing act, she also wholeheartedly admits that at times even when a piece popular media or entertainment has little to no redeeming qualities, it is still okay to occasionally enjoy it. Instead, she carefully weighs the positive and negative elements of each. While Gay does devote a fair portion of the book to critiquing contemporary movies, television programs, and novels for their portrayal of race and gender, she does not condemn all popular media as inherently horrible. So how does Gay reconcile this difference? By confessing to every possible way she strayed from the feminist path- every guilty pleasure and secret indulgence.
Gay explains, “The most significant problem with essential feminism is how it doesn’t allow for the complexities of human experience of individuality” (305). Instead she proposes a version of the feminism game which allows the players to continue being themselves while still pursuing feminism. Gay sharply rejects the idea of a singular feminism that all those interested in gender equality must subscribe to.
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Essential feminism suggests anger, humorlessness, militancy, unwavering principle, and a prescribed set of rules for how to be a proper feminist woman” (304). She writes, “There is an essential feminism or, as I perceive this essentialism, the notion there are right and wrong ways to be a feminist and that there are consequences for doing feminism wrong. Gay begins by identifying one of the main issues within the existing, traditional game of feminism, namely its impossibly high standards and expectations. Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist attempts to change the game of feminism by bending these rigid rules and creating space for a larger variety of players. The game has simply become too hard to play. Therefore, many individuals who could be potentially great players of such a game, instead reject the label of feminist, deeming it too radical and extreme. The game of feminism today comes with many rules ones that must be followed unquestioningly if one wants to keep playing. The word “feminism” itself has been imbued with a mess of connotations, associations, and expectations that are not only unrepresentative of the cause as a whole, but also extremely unflattering and exclusionary. Just as gender is as institution, socially constructed and governed by rules both tacit and explicit, so is feminism.