Bad Feminism and The Problem That Has No Name

The materials that resonated with me most this week were the excerpts from Roxanne Gay’s Bad Feminist and Hannah Bonner’s The Problem That Has No Name.

First of all, I appreciate Roxanne Gay’s complicated relationship with feminism. She agrees with its overall message (“equal opportunities for women and men”) but, at the same time, recognizes its flaws. She knows that “feminism has, historically, been far more invested in improving the lives of heterosexual white women to the detriment of all others” and understands that one static idea of what feminism is and how it functions cannot possibly satisfy the needs of every woman. Black women cannot always benefit from the same feminism that white women can. Trans women cannot always benefit from the same feminism that cis women can. Regardless of what we define feminism as, I think there needs to be a wider effort to make sure it includes all women. Rather than work to make feminism appealing to those who clearly do not share its values, we need to make room within the movement for those who do.

I also really appreciated Gay’s idea of the “bad feminist”— a woman who calls herself a feminist but still enjoys the products of the sexist society we live in. She likes pink, despite knowing that it feeds into the idea of the gender binary. She listens to music that degrades women and watches movies with sexist jokes in them. But despite all of this, she is still a feminist. It reminds me of a situation I encountered recently where I was talking about Taylor Swift with my best friend. Both of us enjoy her music but, as two people who identify as gay, we were discussing the occasional homophobia in her lyrics. Is it wrong of us to enjoy these songs, knowing that the homophobia can be hurtful and that it should be hurtful to us specifically? We talked about it for a while and eventually came to the conclusion that, “well, we’re gay, so who cares?” We recognize the homophobia in her lyrics, and we don’t champion it, of course, but seeing as we’re the targets of it, enjoying it almost feels like a reclamation of the work. We shouldn’t have to punish ourselves by avoiding everything that aims to hurt us when we can, instead, learn to declaw it and turn it into something else. This is exactly how I feel about Gay’s idea of the bad feminist—a woman who sometimes allows herself to enjoy sexist media because she's only human. All of the media we consume is the product of a sexist society and contains traces of that sexism within it. Expecting women to cherry-pick everything they consume and cast away anything with even the slightest hint of misogyny in it is simply unrealistic. I fully believe that we need to be critical of the media we consume so we aren’t blindly consuming problematic propaganda (particularly when it comes to identities we don't hold), but I think there is some leeway when it comes to media that tries to marginalize our own personal identities. Two gay friends singing along to a Taylor Swift song and laughing at the homophobic lyrics aren’t going to uproot the entire gay rights movement. A woman enjoying a show with sexist jokes in it isn’t going to deal any major blows to feminism. We should be working toward a world in which these compromises aren’t necessary, but while we’re on that road, we should be allowed to make the best of a bad situation.

Additionally, I was very intrigued by Hannah Bonner’s short film, The Problem That Has No Name. The short film takes its name from Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique, which, in its introduction, details what Friedan refers to as “the problem that has no name.” This idea refers to “a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States” that could not be explained to others (not to their husbands or even doctors) without being dismissed as nothing (Friedan). It is, essentially, the deep desire for more than the simple, domestic life of a housewife. Hannah Bonner’s short film catalogs the way this issue presents itself in film—particularly, in horror films. The idea of conflating “the problem that has no name” with horror is fascinating because, in reality, the problem is genuinely horrifying. The mid-twentieth-century housewife feels a deep, constant uneasiness, but lacks the words to describe it and is told repeatedly (even by medical professionals) that it’s nothing. She is haunted by a nameless ailment that, like a ghost in a horror movie, cannot be seen or perceived by anyone around her. She is doomed to face it alone, all the while believing herself to be going crazy. It is quite literally horror movie material, so it makes sense that the problem is so prevalent in horror films. I think the short film did a great job of combining video and audio elements to highlight this theme, and it does so in a chilling manner that beautifully expresses the horror of the issue itself.