“Is this feminist?” is one of the least interesting questions I can think of, so I was ready for former Bookslut editor Jessa Crispin’s new book, Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto, a critique of contemporary feminism, out now from Melville House. I thought she might consider more interesting questions, so I was disappointed, then, to find 150 pages dedicated to trying to answer that very boring question—and to do it in a prescriptive way for other feminists. Why I Am Not a Feminist, which it turns out is neither particularly feminist nor really much of a manifesto, makes for a baffling, unpleasant read.
The breadth of Crispin’s disdain for other women’s choices in this book is apparently boundless. Just a few of the things Crispin disapproves of other women doing: marrying men, enjoying TV shows, buying rotisserie chickens, having jobs so they can pay off student loans, supporting Hillary Clinton (I guess we should be glad Trump won?), and wanting rapists to go to jail. Crispin repeatedly privileges a highly subjective ideological purity over any real engagement with why people might make the choices they do. It is from this predetermined, closed-off starting point that she writes her book, and the result is just as disjointed, exhausting, and unproductive as you’d expect.