Pop Feminism

[A few seconds of Taylor Swift’s Grammy speech]

Some of the more cynical feminists out there have suggested that Taylor’s Grammy was not so much a victory for all women as a victory for Taylor Swift, and that this version of feminism is really just like upper-class white women congratulating themselves for how much wealth and power they have. Now I, on the other hand… huh. Well, the important question is what would a Taylor Swift song sound like covered by Bob Dylan?

[Trouble]

Oh my God, Becky, let’s get some booze.

[Starbucks, booze, yoga]

What was God thinking when he designed drugs? He said, “this one will make you alert and awake, but anxious, and also you’ll need to take a shit.”

When people who are angry about feminism find out that I’m not angry about feminism, they often present evidence of feminists doing something stupid and want to know, well, what do I think of that, huh?

And it’s hard, because feminism has gotten so big in the last decade that it seems like everyone wants to get in on it, leading us to a situation where much of what goes on under the heading of feminism is just plain nonsense.

In the current year, female mega-millionaires can draw praise for presenting their own personal success stories as parables about the global empowerment of all womankind, and corporate marketing has discovered that attaching heartwarming girl-power babble to a brand attracts an extra kick of publicity from writers of feminist blogs.

[2:40 “Always #LikeAGirl. Obey glasses—CONSUME, Always™, “my god”]

[Always pads: “I am ravenous. I’ll have what she’s having!”]

[“I want support for ugly girls and lazy girls and girls that can’t ever get their eyeliner right.”]

Well, good on them I guess for saying “ugly girls,” instead of disingenuously insisting that everyone is beautiful. But should we really be celebrating laziness and incompetence? If we support people who can’t get their eyeliner right [like me in this video] then how are we ever supposed to learn and improve? We need shame. Shame!

[Ban bossy]

No! If we ban bossy then women will end up just like men, and men are fucking assholes. I hate men.

Seriously though, some of the “feminist” advice given to women is borderline psychopathic. You know, “Never take no for an answer,” “Always take what you want.” This is like rapist advice.

And I get that it’s attempt to turn women into monsters so that they can survive in a monstrous world, but if feminism is genuine social activism instead of just individual lessons in how to game the corporate shark tank to your own advantage, wouldn’t it better to advocate for a softer, more effeminate world, where it’s okay to apologize and care about other people?

I feel like there’s this misogynistic strain in some feminism that resents femininity, and wants women to be more like men. But I like women the way they are goddamn it. We shouldn’t be trying to turn women into men; what we should be doing is trying to turn men into women.

Beautiful. Perfect. Angels. Hairless. Pure. [Madness of some sort (“why won’t me baby drink his milk,” Shining BJ, Pickle surprise (or maybe just old horror movies?)]

Now if I wanted to, I could probably make an entire career out of complaining about the things in feminism I don’t like. I’d certainly attract a larger audience and probably more money, but there are already so many assholes moaning about feminism on YouTube that I just can’t bring myself to do it. I don’t want to be mistaken for one of those, and I honestly don’t think it would do any good anyway.

You know, it’s one thing when a young woman criticizes the dumb things her peers are doing on Tumblr or whatever, but when you’ve got, like, 49-year-old men ranting about shit 19-year-old girls are into—I dunno, I just get kind of a creepy vibe from it. It’s like when adult dudes used to hate on Justin Bieber all the time. Like, why do you care so much about the music female babies listen to?

One serious problem with junkfood feminism is that it potentially distracts from more substantive feminist activism. But it’s only a distraction to the extent you allow yourself to be distracted by it, and of course the shitlords of YouTube have more of an interest than anyone in keeping the worst of feminism in the spotlight.

I know to my ideological opponents it might sound weird for me to say that I’m a feminist, even though I think a lot of feminism is garbage. But what you have to understand is that feminism has gotten so huge and so ubiquitous that it’s come to resemble the whole of human life, which is to say that 95% of it is absolute shit. And this really shouldn’t come as a surprise.

95% of music is shit, 95% of movies are shit, and 99.999% of YouTube videos are shit. The earth itself is mostly shit. It’s like shitty deserts, and open oceans, and cold-ass tundras, and hot fuckin mosquito rainforests. And there’s like, plagues of locusts and dinosaurs tearing zebras apart. And the whole planet is adrift in a cosmos that’s 99.9-forever percent empty, and most of the parts that aren’t empty are bad and violent and shitty. And all of this is really just a metaphor for the human soul, which spends most of its time waiting in line, looking at the clock, in traffic, bored, anxious, envious, insecure, lonely, sick, hungover, aging, working, waiting for the person you have a crush on to text you back and thinking they definitely hate you, 9/11, vomiting, waiting to text your crush back because you don’t want them to think you like them as much as you do, begging for forgiveness, drying your iPhone, watching insects die because of the horrible chemicals you sprayed on them, wretched creepy lust, longing for childhood joys that can never be regained, the encroaching death of passion that slowly rots your marriage, the fucking Delaware Turnpike, cancer, joyless intoxication, and whatever fucking music it is they play at CVS.

It’s all kind of a bunch of shit, which is why the meaning of life is to seek out the little moments of ecstasy and redemption that make it all worthwhile, and to try each day to see the world as interesting and beautiful and strange, or you know, at least as kind of funny.

Anyway, that’s the best thing I’ve been able to come up with. What’s your fucking idea?

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