Fifty Shades of Feminism
Edited by Lisa Appignanesi, Rachel Holmes and Susie Orbach
Virago, 336pp, £12.99
In 2013, feminism is at a crucial moment. In the west, the dreaded “30 per cent problem” is looming: because some gains have been made, there are fewer stark, staring injustices to stir the troops to action. (It’s named after the idea that once female representation in a particular area reaches a third, many people feel that that’s fair – or even that there are too many women around.) In countries such as Tunisia and Egypt, meanwhile, there is a struggle to articulate a women’s rights movement with its own identity, one that cannot be dismissed as an imperialist import. And for God’s sake don’t even mention pornography or prostitution: ask three feminists for their views on those and you’ll get four opinions.
On to this battlefield strides Fifty Shades of Feminism, a book that is resolutely unembarrassed about taking its name from an oldfashioned romance novel, albeit one with lashings of BDSM and terrible dance-based metaphors. I should say that I love the idea of this book and I love that it got published. It feels as though there’s a greater energy to the feminist movement now than I’ve experienced before in my adult life; there’s a critical mass of women who just won’t shut up about the things they care about.
That said, there are a few, perhaps inevitable, problems with a collection of this kind. First, there are several references to how quickly it was pulled together and the book seems to have lost count of its contributors somewhere along the way. Instead of 50 shades, the back cover lists 56 names and there’s a further essay by a young, feminist prizewinner tucked away at the back. Hey, who cares? Maths is for dudes, anyway. (This is a feminist JOKE. Don’t write me letters.)
The bulging list of contributors suggests that the editors might have had to cope with some high-level ego-management; and, because of the format, there are some crunchy gear changes. (Try going from Camila Batmanghelidjh ending a piece with “I’m a drunken whore with alternative boobs!” to Bidisha’s stern list of woman-hating behaviour such as “belittling and victimblaming” for a taste of the varying tones of contemporary feminist discourse.)
There are also occasional chapters that a harsher editor would have rejected: Shami Chakrabarti’s disjointed list of heroines and Liz Kelly’s technical, footnote-heavy description of the cases of Jimmy Savile and Julian Assange are the most obvious. That Kathy Lette has been enlisted to provide the “funny bit” also tells its own story.
But enough carping. Where this book excels is where its contributors approach the topic from an oblique angle: where they show, rather than tell. In this vein, Meera Syal’s reflections on playing Beatrice in a Bollywood-inspired Much Ado About Nothing are exquisite. The Chinese author Xinran’s chapter, showing the sexist assumptions behind the construction of five Mandarin written characters, is revelatory. Ahdaf Soueif’s bittersweet story of her Sri Lankan housekeeper’s return home undermines the easy narrative of the developing world’s aspiration to be more like the west. I also loved the novelist and video games writer Naomi Alderman’s comparison of the unabashed male domination of the tech world with the subtle sexism of publishing – but then it could have been written specifically for me.
It is intriguing that although the book is filled with quotations and illustrations, there is relatively little formal experimentation in the texts. A rare example comes from Jeanette Winterson, who juxtaposes her misgivings about porn with quotations from X-rated websites. The other surprising experimental highlight was the long free verse by Laurie Penny, of this parish.
Previously, I would have said that a feminist poem sounded about as appealing as a Vogon one but Penny’s scalpel-sharp observation is here complemented by some rhetorical fireworks: “There are more of us than you think, kicking off our high-heeled shoes to run and being told not so fast . . . who dared to dance until dawn and were drugged and raped by men in clean T-shirts and woke up scared and sore to be told it was our fault . . . who were told all our lives that we were too loud too risky too fat too ugly too scruffy too selfish too much . . .” It could have been excruciating; instead, it’s intoxicating.
Overall, the three editors of Fifty Shades – Lisa Appignanesi, Rachel Holmes and Susie Orbach – have made a conscious effort to keep their feminist church broad and their contributors are a diverse bunch in terms of age, race, sexuality and nationality. (Although, given their inclusiveness, the absence of a transgender writer does seem pointed.)
What does this book tell us about modern feminism? That it can be angry and warm and witty and wise; that there are more feminists than you might think and they care about an astonishingly broad range of topics; and that, as all women know, there aren’t enough bloody hours in the day.
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