"Bad" Feminist & "Bitch" Era

The image above depicts the character "Fleabag" with words along the edges of the frame: can't even call herself a feminist, morally bankrupt, depraved, greedy, selfish, apathetic

I’ve been stewing on writing this piece for weeks on end, and I’m not sure why. Actually, I know exactly why. Though I tend to fret that any and all of my writing is “bad” (which is already giving me the credit of the assumption it’s being read), this fear is magnified any time I actually express an opinion.

I often think of the iconic Fleabag quote, “I sometimes worry that I wouldn't be such a feminist if I had bigger tits.” I often think of how women and men alike mistake a feminist for a misandrist. I often think that “I hate men” is a blanket, comfort statement circulating digital and literal conversations, but “I hate women” welcomes a torrent of rage. Rightfully so, by the way.

I am and always will be a feminist, but when I finished reading The Hunger Games as a preteen, I thought that Katniss having a family was, and I probably quote, “stupid,” because I just couldn’t understand how it could make sense. This feels like a Buzzfeed conclusion, but at some point in my life, I had to realize that actually there’s nothing antifeminist with wanting to raise a family and following the “traditional” path (and I say traditional very, very loosely because there’s much, much to unpack with the onset of the nuclear family structure coinciding with the industrial era, capitalism, and all that crap). At some point, I had to learn that liking pink isn't antifeminist, because at age 6, I was lying in first grade about my favorite color; I liked blue, or more specifically aquamarine, but I was trying so hard to fit into the mold of a Bulgarian-American girl that likes pink and dolls rather than blue and Nintendo that I didn't have time to think twice about the fact that none of those associations are based in anything but bullshit to begin with. I'm a feminist, but I perform for the male gaze like I'm performing labor, even by trying to subvert it. And if you think that's contradictory, just look up the cool girl and manic pixie dream girl tropes.

I've known people who didn't want to identify as feminists because they thought it would make them seem "bitchy." This brings me to why I'm writing this: the rise of the "bitch era". I read Emily Ratajkowski's My Body earlier this year during a power outage so I couldn't get any work done, and I devoured the book in almost one sitting. I had grabbed it on a Target run -- you know the one. The one where you go there to buy literally anything besides a book and you ended up buying one anyway? Yeah, that one. I liked the cover, heard/read wonderful things, but ultimately was skeptical. Here I was, a 21-year-old woman identifying as a feminist, skeptical that a woman like Emily Ratajkowski would have anything relevant to say to me. It's embarrassing, honestly, because at what point in my life will I smear away internalized misogyny?

Months and months after reading her work, I come to find out @emrata is in her "bitch era" releasing a podcast called High Low with EmRata (not to be confused with The High Low by Dolly Alderton and Pandora Sykes as many people in the comments pointed out). And it's this exact comment section on an announcement post that sparked my interest in writing whatever this ramble is:

The images above feature a comment section with comments that read as follows:

"I'm so sick of seeing these prolapsed lips."

"Yes, I think a smile would be nice. I never see her smile. *straight line mouth emoji*"

"Have yet to see or hear her say anything other than the obvious and it's kind of annoying how she tries to be some sort of intellectual but every single one of her Instagram posts is just LOOK AT MY T*TS LOOK AT MY A$$ LOOK AT MY BODY look at my baby but LOOK AT MY T*TS..not that you can't do both, you totally can if you're capable of doing it with some humility, but in everything I've read by her it's just bereft of any real meaning or value. Word salads about how she's been treated by men..'Bitch era?!' Girl, you are standing on the shoulders of decades of women who already did that work."

I've blocked out usernames for privacy (and if this is your comment and you'd like me to take this down, please reach out to me!), but that first interaction was between a man and a woman, and it's actually the woman thinking that a smile would be nice. So, looks like we've come full circle.

The second, lengthier comment is clearly rooted in anger and frustration, but at the very least, the last sentence rings true. Work has already been done, and what work are we doing now? Apparently, it's boring.

Incidentally, on two separate occasions, I've noticed that third-wave feminism or 21st-century feminism was described as uninteresting by notable women. Both Pamela Anderson and Lana Del Rey. A quick Google search pulls up even more, like an article on Jessa Crispin, writer of Why I am Not a Feminist, who said "Today’s feminists are bland, shallow and lazy" and even seems to look down on something Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist, said about not having to read Andrea Dworkin. These quotes are, of course, out of context, so I do encourage reading into them more, but the gist is that there seems to be a "right" way to be a feminist and a "wrong" way. In other words, nowadays, we're all a bunch of "bad" feminists. (And I say we as in like, a general "we." Whether you identify with that or not is up to you.)

So let's see what we're working with: less prolapsed lips, more smiling, and being a hot intellectual but making it ✨humble✨. Also, being interesting. Of course, we don't want to be too interesting so as to appear that we're not humble, because otherwise, we'd also seem too smart. And we don't want to smile too much because it would draw attention to our lips, but we also can't have a "resting bitch face" because, well, we're not into the "bitch era" either. I think Jia Tolentino summarizes this core issue in Trick Mirror more succinctly than I ever could: "The timidity in mainstream feminism to admit that women's choices--not just out problems--are, in the end, political has led to a vision of 'women's empowerment' that often feels brutally disempowering in the end." Though, funny enough, Tolentino is "suspicious" of "women like Emily Ratajkowski constantly espousing the bold feminist platform that nudity is good."

The point is, we choose to comment, regurgitate, pull quote, clickbait, de-contextualize, era-ify. Inherently, these are not "bad" things. But someone commenting about being sick of a person's physical features rather than commenting criticism of literally anything else about them doesn't seem "good". A woman regurgitating the "smile more" line to another woman doesn't seem "good." Labeling Pamela Anderson and Lana Del Rey as antifeminists based on a couple of quotes out of the larger context of their work doesn't seem "good." And to be fair, yes I'm the one bringing them up in the first place, but there's plenty of pockets for clarification or further criticism. Dismissing the rise of the "bitch era" as another pointless categorization following the reputation era, cottagecore, goblincore, fleabag era, and many others doesn't seem "good."

Every day, particularly through digital means, we are co-opting labels of all sorts. We're doing this so much so that there's a hullabaloo come every December about Spotify Wrapped, which this year handed us a Myers-Briggs-esque listening personality and mood/genre classifications of listening based on the time of day (I'm an Adventurer [ENVU] with gloomy tender mornings...whatever that means).

The image above is an edit of the Spotify Wrapped minutes summary, saying "You spent 525,600 minutes this year being a dumb bitch."

Eras are evermore important to pay attention to even as they cycle through quickly. And they're especially important to pay attention to in relation to how they're a passive, comforting, and inexpensive method of retaliation against systems tearing us down (cottagecore and goblincore oppose capitalism, fleabag and bitch eras oppose the patriarchy), "good" and "bad" feminists alike.

I think the conclusion, though, is more muddled than that. Even though cottagegore and goblincore are meant to oppose capitalism, sales of mushroom-related products have skyrocketed. I'm not even pulling data on that, I think it's just obvious. The systems of capitalism and the patriarchy feed on subversion like leeches. It feels like we're on a boat and everything we know and don't know and love and hate is the water, and there's a hole growing larger and larger and we're scrambling with our silly little buckets of eras to collect the water and toss it back, but the point is that the buckets are being filled and emptied over and over and everything gets thrown back into that blue abyss eventually. And we're still on the boat with the "good" and "bad" feminists alike.

So, I don't know what happens next. I don't know if we hit shore or sink or swim or what. I don't know where we keep getting buckets from, what happens when we toss them, or if people poke more holes as others patch them up. Bear with me, it's not the sturdiest of metaphors. But I do know that I'm tired of apologizing for what I like or don't like. For changing my mind. For being a "bad" feminist, getting better to only get "bad' again, and then "better." I think despite us being in deep waters, we're still in the shallows of our consciousness regarding the complexity of identity (again, aside from people who have been doing the work for decades and decades deconstructing the binary and other anchors of oppression). Eras add layers, albeit sometimes superficially. But at the very least, it gives us something to talk about as the waters rise.