According to just about everyone, the feminist media boom is flawed: Many, many women of color have pointed out that the feminists most likely to crack the mainstream are the ones with the most pre-existing privilege. For every “Flawless” or Frozen, there are ten overtly misogynistic singles like “Blurred Lines” and movies in which women barely show up on screen, let alone talk to each other. Rape culture is still alive, well and wrecking lives. The Supreme Court continues to make ridiculous, Paleolithic decisions on women’s health. Yet, for all that, the path to gender equality still doesn’t seem clear. Finding that once-rare feminist community is as easy as registering for a free social media account. (Whether or not you agree with or like everything these outlets publish, they exist opportunities to read about feminism in a mainstream publication are no longer confined to “waiting for TIME to publish its twice-a-decade obituary of feminism.”) There’s a constant buzz of coverage, analysis, protest and debate on Tumblr and Twitter. And there are also mainstream feminist-friendly publications like Rookie, Jezebel, and XOJane, as well as sub-sections like Slate’s Double X. To find pro-feminist media coverage, you only need an Internet connection and the ability to Google: Larger independent feminist blogs like Feministing and Feministe do the work of dredging up otherwise-obscure news stories and providing analysis. Top-grossing children’s movies like Frozen or Maleficent tell stories about how the love of a sister is worth more than that of a loser boyfriend Katniss Everdeen is the action heroine of a generation. Beyoncé, the most popular music artist on the planet, posed as Rosie the Riveter on Instagram and samples Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s definition of feminism on her latest album. Barnes & Noble had a miniscule “women’s studies” section, and major magazines like TIME sometimes ran stories about feminism - usually to announce that Ally McBeal had killed it or the like.įast-forward to 2014, and feminists - and feminism - are everywhere. As a teenager in small-town Ohio in the ’ 90s, my feminist education was mostly gleaned from rock lyrics (many of them from women like PJ Harvey, who denied being feminist when interviewers asked her about it) and secondhand paperbacks I found at a food co-op. To access the information, a would-be feminist had to be located near the action, meaning that you had to hope against hope that your city had a thriving feminist community, or else have the privilege of attending a college with a good women’s studies program. Educating oneself about feminism pre-Internet was no simple task. Gay is never doctrinaire, never interested in the easy answer to any question and never interested in contrarianism for contrarianism’s sake.įirst, the “easy” part.

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