A FEMINIST MANIFESTO

JESSA CRISPIN

 

Outspoken critic Jessa Crispin delivers a searing rejection of contemporary feminism… and a bracing manifesto for revolution.

Are you a feminist? Do you believe women are human beings and that they deserve to be treated as such? That women deserve all the same rights and liberties bestowed upon men? If so, then you are a feminist . . . or so the feminists keep insisting. But somewhere along the way, the movement for female liberation sacrificed meaning for acceptance, and left us with a banal, polite, ineffectual pose that barely challenges the status quo. In this bracing, fiercely intelligent manifesto, Jessa Crispin demands more.

Why I Am Not A Feminist is a radical, fearless call for revolution. It accuses the feminist movement of obliviousness, irrelevance, and cowardice—and demands nothing less than the total dismantling of a system of oppression.

Jessa Crispin is the editor and founder of the online magazines Bookslut — one of America’s very first book blogs — and the literary journal Spolia. She is the author of The Dead Ladies Project and The Creative Tarot, and has written for the New York Times, Guardian, Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, NPR.org, Chicago Sun-Times, and Architect Magazine, among other publications. She has lived in Lincoln, Kansas; Austin, Texas; Dublin, Ireland; Chicago, Illinois; Berlin, Germany; and elsewhere. She currently resides in New York City.

REVIEWS:

“The point of ‘Why I Am Not a Feminist’ isn’t really that Crispin is not a feminist; it’s that she has no interest in being a part of a club that has opened its doors and lost sight of its politics—a club that would, if she weren’t so busy disavowing it, invite Kellyanne Conway in…. Crispin’s argument is bracing, and a rare counterbalance; where feminism is concerned, broad acceptability is almost always framed as an unquestioned good.” —The New Yorker

“Small but mighty, a bracing, contradictory volume full of fury. It’s a rousing call for unity that’s not afraid to alienate, at once breezy and foreboding. It’s a radical text written in accessible, entertaining prose, slipped nonchalantly into the mainstream….A blueprint for women who care about equal rights for all women, and really, all humans.” —Flavorwire

“Perceptive and impassioned…a useful skewering of feminism’s worst tendencies….There’s something decidedly appealing, even romantic, about this vision of a radical movement that will, in Crispin’s words, set about ’fully dismantling’ the system.” —New Republic