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No liberated woman would misrepresent the cause by appearing less than hale and happy." It's too easy to dissect the error of such thinking. She says, "Looking great is a matter of feminism.
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She takes the idea of essential feminism even further in a September 2012 Harper's Bazaar article where she suggests that a good feminist works hard to be beautiful. Consider Elizabeth Wurtzel, who, in a June 2O12 Atlantic article, says, "Real feminists earn a living, have money and means of their own." By Wurtzel's thinking, women who don't "earn a living, have money and means of their own," are fake feminists, undeserving of the label. This is nowhere near an accurate description of feminism, but the movement has been warped by misperception for so long that even people who should know better have bought into this essential image of feminism.
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Essential feminism suggests anger, humor- lessness, militancy, unwavering principles, and a prescribed set of rules for how to be a proper feminist woman, or at least a proper white, het- erosexual, feminist woman-hate pornography, unilaterally decry the objectification of women, don't cater to the male gaize, hate men, hate sex. There is an essential feminism, the notion that there are right and wrong ways to be a feminist, and there are consequences for doing feminism wrong. Butler's thesis could also apply to feminism. Women who don't adhere to these standards are the fallen, the undesirable. Good women are modest, chaste, pious, sub- missive. Depending on whom you ask, good women bear children and stay home to raise them without complaint. Good women work but are content to earn 77 percent of what men earn. Good women are charming, polite, and unobtrusive. We see this tension in socially dictated beauty standards-the right way to be a woman is to be thin, to wear make up, to wear the right kind of clothes (not too slutty, not too prude, show a little leg, ladies), and so on. As Judith Butler writes in her 1988 essay, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution": "Performing one's gender wrong initiates a set of punish- ments both obvious and indirect, and perform- ing it well provides the reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender identity after all." This tension-the idea that there is a right way to be a woman, a right way to be the most es- sential woman-is ongoing and pervasive. I feel like I am not as committed as I need to be, that I am not living up to feminist ideals because of who and how I choose to be. Î ESSAY Bad Foitiinist Roxane Gay Y FAVORITE DEFINITION OF A FEMINIST 1 is one offered by Su, an Australian woman who, when interviewed for Kathy Bail's 1996 anthology DÍY Feminism, described them simply as "women who don't wamt to be treated like shit." This definition is pointed and succinct, but I run into trouble when I try to expand it.