(Relatedly, non-feminist identifying readers of The Guardian, The New York Times and the like have become increasingly familiar with feminist and queer issues, sometimes to the point of protesting via the comments about yet another article on intersectionality or transgender visibility, a fascinating development I hope suitably qualified scholars are currently analysing).
Quality feminist writing is easy to access. On the flip side, the high demand for feminist voices and for commentary on gender and sexuality in what has become an increasingly click-driven media landscape has meant that some writers are now able to make a living from this work and that the market for feminist books has expanded. As Gloria Steinem would attest, the role of media-anointed feminist spokesperson has never been a comfortable one, but right now, when it’s so easy for the perpetual feminist backlash to reach its targets, it seems especially exhausting – and this is before we factor in the expectations of other feminists, in their diverse glory, and the endlessly recycled questions posed to feminist spokespeople about the f-word. He lost his job, temporarily became a martyr among his kind and somewhat predictably, Ford was subject to more online bile than ever before. All of these books are memoirs (more or less), that describe (among many other things) the peculiar experience of being a feminist with a public built online, or as Ford wryly puts it, ‘a man-hating, separatist feminazi hell-bent on installing a matriarchy and imprisoning men as its slaves’.įord, a popular and polarising Fairfax columnist and broadcaster, made tabloid news in late 2015 when she contacted an online antagonist’s workplace to let them know what he’d been up to during working hours (posting abusive comments on her Facebook page). These include Valenti’s Sex Object, Shrill by Lindy West – and Clementine Ford’s Fight Like a Girl.
It’s hardly surprising that she and other ‘professional feminists’, to use Valenti’s own descriptor, sometimes take social media breaks, or that navigating misogyny online is central to the contents of several popular feminist books released in 2016.
#BAD FEMINIST ROXANE GAY QUOTES BY CHAPTER OFFLINE#
Earlier this year, Guardian columnist Jessica Valenti went offline after a troll threatened to rape her young daughter. Who would want to be a high-profile feminist in the age of social media? I sometimes find myself thinking this as I scroll through the Facebook and Twitter feeds of well-known feminists that I follow or the comments sections of their columns, awed by both their output (I’m an academic – so my work is slow in comparison) and struck by the high volume of cyber-hate that comes in the wake of even the most benign opinion pieces.