118. Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere – Jeanette Winterson

It’s also been a very long time between visits to Jeanette Winterson’s work so when this book threw itself in my path I bought it on impulse. Later on I realised it was signed and was obviously delighted by serendipity. I have adored Winterson since my first reading of the Stone Gods. Every book of hers I pick up is somehow unexpected, the mundane becomes interesting, mixed in with fairytale or a retelling of a play. Characters can be the largest giantess caricature or the most real, full of humility individual (who just so happens to be a robot) speaking from a repeating world. Much like a lighthouse on the edge of a dark choppy ocean, I keep coming back to Winterson. She has become a bit of a hero of mine.

I can’t exactly pinpoint why she is though, perhaps it is the variation in her work, the obvious experimentation and blend of elements that build up very different books. There is no set genre to her work. Maybe it’s the queer that seems to run through a good portion of her work, which isn’t shoehorned in as a fetishised exhibit. Or maybe it is a combination of a lot of things with brilliant story telling. Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere doesn’t fall short of her usual intelligent, style, but it has a healthy dose of the conversation ease found in Why be Happy when you could be Normal?

Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere – Jeanette Winterson

Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere is short enough to read in an hour and adapted from lectures. Published at the anniversary of a hundred years of (white) women (in Britain) getting the vote. It manages to say a lot of important things loudly, sometimes with humour, but is thought provoking and a great quick insight into history. While it is chewable if you’re well versed in suffragette history it may be nothing new to you, but it is written in a way that I found quite invigorating. Courage is both a reminder of how far we’ve come and a hopeful nudge to keep going and if you’re new to feminism and new to the history of gender equality then I implore you to give Courage a go.

Alongside the edge of wry humour and likening suffragettes to Pussy Riot there is an extra spoonful of passion that toes the line of anger. Courage is the size of a postcard and a good third of it’s 72 pages are taken up with Emmeline Pankhurst’s famous 1913 speech ‘Freedom or Death’. But any anger within Courage is justified and comes from disenfranchisement, and frustration. And for something so slim and seemingly brief (it’s brief at first glance only) it riled me up.

Winterson reminds us there is still a war of the sexes going on, there is still inequality on the street and in the work place and in the home, but the glaring truth of this battle is that discrimination of any kind is never rational it only pretends to be rational. Arriving at the present day having women taking up more space than the previous hundred years is not a justification for saying feminism is finished and there is no more work to be done. It is a common mistake to make to think that it is a fight won. It is a revolution that is still singing and is still unfinished.

Why? Feminism can always be more inclusive, more intersectional, louder, clearer, and more instrumental in keeping the autonomy of bodies through health care, choice, and consent, safe (for a few). Winterson remarks on biology as destiny being an old fashioned idea, and the need for more women in technology, the success of the recent #MeToo movement, and equal pay.

She recalls the Marriage Bar where certain jobs and careers were not open to married women. That it wasn’t until 1975 the Sex Discrimination Act made it illegal to manipulate the labour market in favour of men. Although it may be clear that society is still dealing with the long shadow thrown by previous constraints, Britain is a rich and progressive country, but we have food-banks and large-scale poverty. Winterson mentions the 2008 crash, exploitative gig economy, domestic violence and Trump. And rather than being fear mongering, or a battle cry, I left it feeling hopeful and recognised.

I think what I’m getting at is Courage reminds us that if we sit in the shit for long enough, it stops smelling, but it doesn’t stop it from being shit that we’re sitting in.

It reminds us of the long shadow cast by systems that seek to dominate, belittle, and remove autonomy, and how fighting for equality, here and abroad (and of course with intersectionality) is still really important. It reminds us that Feminism is still a working part of every day equality, and if we give it up to the past as a dirty word or something that belonged to a previous century we will be doing ourselves a disservice. If it is “retired” or cast aside as irrelevant, we will be loosing a great part of the arsenal that belongs to the spheres of civil rights and equality.

108. Animal: The Autobiography of a Female Body – Sara Pasco

Honestly I know Sara Pasco sort of, from afar. I’m a fan of the Guilty Feminist Podcast and very occasionally Pasco appears on there, gives some quick wit, self-deprecating humour and disappears again into the ether. She’s not a comedian I follow religiously, but I’ve gotten into the habit of listening to her talk and smiling mildly and nodding along.

Animal was a curiosity buy. So who is this so called person…? Really…

Perhaps unsurprisingly Pasco writes the way she does her stand-up. It’s a warm read and likeable, she is unashamedly honest about her not-perfect life and gives you all the queasy details. And like her stand-up, the stream of conscious, taking no breath rant that Pasco employs a lot on stage, leaves you without doubt that she is passionate. Pasco sketches out a journey in Animal that includes everything she’s learnt about being a woman and how she believes science informs people, and she doesn’t really care if you agree or not to begin with. But she might just convince you there is something to what she’s saying.

Animal – Sara Pasco

There was something about this book that didn’t wholeheartedly take me in. Maybe it has been a while since I have read anything feminist, whether that be easy to digest ‘pop’ or ‘pulp’ feminism that seems to be becoming more popular lately. Maybe I am just not as easily convinced. Maybe I want more Queer Theory. Maybe I want more Judith Butler. Who knows. But there was something niggling at me the entire time I was reading this.

But that isn’t to say that this book isn’t funny, wonderful, intelligently written, easily digestible, and perfect reading for public transport if you don’t mind cackling like a loon in public! It’s just that there was something. Maybe it wasn’t Queer enough with me (Queer with a capital Q). I found it as heteronormative and a perfectly adequate description of life if you accept the gender binary as something more innate and not a cultural construct. Perhaps.

Or perhaps what I’m getting at is that some of Pasco’s ‘science’ is perfectly adequate, but it isn’t gospel. And at times it isn’t robust enough for me. If you are like me and think too long and hard about things you may begin to pick at it and feel this grain of sand under your skin about Animal and not know what it is. Or why it is. But know it’s there.

I think this is probably my biggest criticism about this book is that there is something that doesn’t quite satisfy my own beliefs but that may come down to my own reading on the subjects covered and being very opinionated. Pasco essentially writes about her own journey, her own body, some of her boyfriends, her mum’s divorce, sex, periods, and sprinkles rape and sexual violence and consent and love and cultural appropriation in to the mix. Decorating it all with footnotes to lighten the mood and wit that goes in directions you’re not anticipating. But I feel as if I was in a room with Pasco and discussing this, we might not see eye to eye.

That’s a funny way to feel about a book, right? But that may also be because Pasco’s experience of her own sexuality, life, politics and everything else she covers in Animal is a little different to mine. Animal is unashamedly about Sara Pasco as much as anything else.

This book could be a conversation with one of your girlfriends and at times it could be a long rant that is a little sapping and exhausting. But it isn’t because there is anything wrong with what your friend is saying, it’s just that your friend is a bit of a steamroller and doesn’t pause and take a breath. In other words at times I found the style this book was written in taxing my patience.

But for as little as it hit the mark for me – Animal is easy to digest, funny, wonderful and I’d recommend it to anyone who hasn’t explored this subject as much as I have. Or if you have, to turn your brain off while you’re reading it. Animal, like How to Build a Girl by Caitlin Moran, is one of those books that could be the brilliant start into thinking about feminism and the female body and how it belongs and how it is used. If you haven’t begun to think of why monogamy might be (temporarily) useful biologically, while running around the savannah avoiding being eaten by lions, or how cultural appropriation and even politics are imprinted onto the female body or how body shaming even works this might be the book for you. It’s a comprehensive glance at a lot of things under a very wide umbrella that I think a lot of people should stand under together (because it’s big enough – when it’s the intersectional umbrella – which is the only umbrella I will ever refer to).

Pasco manages to write a book that doesn’t feel shoehorned or forced but some would point out that at times it feels like a soapbox and the science is not as robust as they would like. For as much as something, whatever it is, feels a little off with me while I was reading it – that speck of grit that got under my skin – that doesn’t take away from the value I feel this book has. It’s not perfect, but perhaps that is the point of Animal as Sara Pasco herself writes about her own flaws and how unafraid she is of being imperfect to her readers.

72. The Handmaid’s Tale

As the recent television adaptation is being celebrated far and wide, I decided it was time that I read it before jumping on the binge watching bandwagon. This is one of those novels that I dived into completely blind without looking at the blurb or synopsis but I wish that I had. I am certain I would have read it a little sooner had I been a little better informed. This is a dystopia, humanity is on the edge of extinction and few women can produce viable children. These women, the red Handmaidens, are treated like cattle, or a walking incubator. A surrogate without autonomy, they are moved from household to household, stripped of their real names and once a month submit to medical examinations and fertilisation from the eligible male in the house.

The Handmaid’s Tale turns women into objects unable to rule themselves, sex into that which is pleasureless, and pregnancy is rewarded with social status and privilege. The other side of this coin is that the inability to reproduce is punished, abortion and (presumably) birth control are illegal, and this totalitarian society will kick you to death while it softly smiles.

The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

I don’t think I love this novel, but the Handmaid’s Tale has given me some complicated feelings. It is a novel that seems to look at you accusingly. I don’t know how or whether this is intentional, but I had that overwhelming sense of silent judgement, but it is a gaze that stares at you directly, unflinching, while a very frank narrative is unwoven. But this accusation, this sense of guilt that comes from this novel is delivered from a protagonist who is in a position least able to accuse. Offred is required to be passive, but we hear the narrative through her introspection. She is also a character who is forced to hide her face, to walk with subservient posture and is not to directly put her will on anyone beyond her intended purpose. This results in the only safe place for Offred is within her own mind.

The Handmaid’s Tale made me feel uncomfortable and powerless, particularly because this society seems to be built overnight. Assigned gendered roles, laws suddenly dismantling lives and how helpless Offred is within this tsunami is harrowing. While reading it I could not help but think how easily it would be for Offred to drown, how easily under these circumstances one’s will could break. It is as if Atwood has shifted the entire cosmos off it’s recognisable axis, but left enough that read with the right set of social opinion this is a horror story. But read by the casual observer this is still a novel dares you to say these circumstances are humane and are something for a society with a dropping population to aim for.

Offred’s position as a Handmaiden is relatively routine. She does the shopping, getting items in exchange for plastic tokens. She daily has to pass the Wall of dead traitors, displayed like a butterfly collection. She has to navigate other Handmaidens, probing for who is a true believer and who is part of the underground movement. She witnesses births. She reflects upon her own life, grieving for her family and once a month she joins the Commander and his awful wife, Serena Joy in the bedroom.

I should also mention that in this world, men don’t have an easy ride with sex either. Men aren’t allowed to have sex unless it is properly sanctioned.

The monthly ritual is a loveless affair, much like ploughing a field. And life, I expect, would’ve continued like this until something very odd happens. The Commander invites Offred into his study one evening, requests her to kiss him like she means it, and to play scrabble with him. This sounds like the cheesiest date in the world, but Offred is not allowed to read or write, she is not allowed to kiss or be kissed by the Commander and she is certainly not allowed to be alone with him in his study.

Offred agrees to spend time alone with him curious to where these meetings will take her and he gives her old magazines to look through and they often fall into discussions in a way that two people with these very different social positions shouldn’t. While this is going on the oblivious Serena Joy seems to be hatching her own plan. The usually terrible woman offers Offred a plan and a cigarette in an unexpected moment of kindness. But things of course don’t work out as intended (but you’ll have to read it to find out why).

Although this novel left me with conflicting feelings I really enjoyed it. Atwood seems to take pleasure in delivering her horrible world and it is beautifully written at times. The candid intimacy between Offred and reader that cuts close to the bone and Atwood also writes a whole host of women who are convincing and believable. From Offred struggling in the now, to her reflections on her wild feminist activist mother, to her old friend Moira, to the wives and the other handmaidens. The world of women dominates this novel, albeit it is a helpless and horrible one and of course, who do you trust when everyone is waiting for everyone else to slip up? Men in power seem to circle above these women dipping in and out only to pick at the carcass that is left for them as if these little shreds they grab are trophies.

There is really something terribly sickening and emotionally exhausting about this novel but also it awakens that enduring rage and drive that is ever rekindled by social issues. The Handmaid’s Tale jolts awake the senses with a powerless protagonist who has had her choices taken away but who is suddenly given unexpected options. This is an important novel. Put it on your ‘novels to read this year’ list.

67. How to Build a Girl

This is not my first encounter with Caitlin Moran because I’m already a bit of a fan. Raised by Wolves (written by Moran for Channel 4) was one of those TV programs that I couldn’t help but love because it is reminiscent of families I knew growing up, and of my own family, friends and just about everyone I knew before I went to university. Sure it’s a bit of a piss-take, but it captures the rough as muck, angry crust that makes the pride of Black Country people. And let’s face it, if we aren’t taking the piss out of you and cracking vulgar jokes while drinking your beer and eating your crisps – we probably don’t like you.

Moran is a familiar voice. She is a working-class girl who has triumphed in journalism and her authenticity comes through in How to Build a Girl.

How to Build a Girl – Caitlin Moran

This isn’t a perfect novel however, this isn’t a sleek novel with a thin layer of polish on the mahogany. This novel is a bit like a pub table. It has hundreds of ancient layers of varnish that are pockmarked with lighter scorches, it wobbles a little, and the corners are bashed to all hell, but it works.

“So far, the only plan I’ve come up with is writing. I can write, because writing – unlike choreography, architecture or conquering kingdoms – is a thing you can do when you’re lonely and poor, and have no infrastructure, i.e.: a ballet troupe, or some cannons. Poor people can write. It’s one of the few things poverty, and a lack of connections, cannot stop you doing.” p. 31

How to Build a Girl is the story of well-read Joanna Morrigan, a 14 year old girl living in 90s Wolverhampton who is trying to reinvent herself. She refers to this reinvention as killing herself, a sort of suicide of the old to allow the new to take over and conquer. This is a twist on a coming of age story with a lot of vulgarity, humour, and of course – writing.

Joanna first takes to trying to write a novel, and when she realises this is a non-starter, she enters a poem into a competition. On winning the competition she is invited to be interviewed on national television and this strange, unpopular, overweight teenager does something terrible, an impression of Scooby Doo, which subsequently means she can never show her face in public again.

From this point Joanna decides to turn her hand to music journalism, takes up a new name, Dolly Wilde, and becomes a sort of goth. For a while this doesn’t help her other quest which is to become not a not-kissed, virgin until then she finds some success in her new career, leaves school, and begins mixing with a crowd of cynics from work.

There are a lot of balls flying around in this novel from this point. Johanna’s escapades into sex are focused on pleasing her male partners and not actually in finding pleasure for herself. Johanna realises that class is a significant part of her life when she realises she is her not-quite-boyfriend’s ‘little bit of rough’. This leads to her shouting at him, demanding that actually he is actually ‘her little bit of posh’ (I’ve been there). There is the love interest, the eccentric John Kite, the alcoholic, chain-smoker who is far too eloquent. And of course Johanna learns that being a cynic rather than a fan in her work earns her a more work, but also how poison cynicism can be.

“Cynicism is, ultimately, fear. Cynicism makes contact with your skin, and a thick black carapace begins to grow – like insect armour. This armour will protect your heart, from disappointment – but it leaves you almost unable to work. You cannot dance, in this armour. Cynicism keeps you pinned to the spot, in the same posture, forever.” – p. 262

Johanna is an interesting character as development goes, there is all the enthusiasm and excitement and desperation associated with 14 year old girls and navigating teenage years. But it is satisfying as she comes to conclusions in sometimes absurd ways. I quite like Johanna, but partly that is because she reminds me of girls I grew up with, and partly she reminds me of myself.

Her family are the honest to goodness, struggling to survive unit, on benefits, five kids, Mum struggling with postnatal depression, and Dad who hurt himself quite badly once, but still dreams of becoming a rockstar. There is something very ordinary about all of them, her parents love and support their daughter, Johanna herself wants to be daring and do something different from the rest of her family. And fundamentally I think she really wants to carve out her own identity.

This is a very relatable book, it’s funny, blunt and vulgar, it’s easy to read but it is raw and has spontaneity. This novel has certainly intrigued me about more of Moran’s work, but I am not certain I would read it again but I will certainly bestow How to Build a Girl’s virtues on anyone who asks (or doesn’t).

This is not a novel for a faint heart or the easily offended or for anyone who believes women do not masturbate. This novel has it’s balls out and firmly pressed to the shop window and is glorious in it’s blunt honesty.

57. The Thing Around Your Neck

I often forget that literature can be a good means to emotionally challenge yourself. But it is not often that I pick up a novel wanting to face that kind of challenge. I’ve read a few good feminist texts that have redefined the way I think of womanhood, The Vagina Monologues for example, but not many that achieve something like a melodic undertone. Adichie’s short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck is beautiful in it’s multitude of definitions, it is human, it is feminist, it paints stark realities about corruption. But it also feels honest, but in a quiet way. The Thing Around Your Neck does not point at the root of evil at your door while screaming, instead it withholds judgement while it demonstrating injustice.

This is a novel that like so many people could fall into that trap of getting angry and arrogant and dismissive of those who do not share it’s core views. But instead it seems to take a step back and steel itself. Around Your Neck is a considered set of narratives, handled with apt dexterity and no where does it run away from the author and shatter it’s own integrity or dignity.

The Thing Around Your Neck – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The short story collection moves around some themes you’d expect, immigration, sexuality, infidelity, unhappy marriages, sibling rivalry and the ugly faces of corruption and violence. There is a lot of displacement and an incredible amount of female narrators. Some of these women desperate to find pride in their culture but are forced to shed it when they immigrate to America. Some of these women are experiencing terrible tragedy and loss. Some of these women are from either side of waring religious groups yet find a strange sort of peace in a life threatening situation. But more than anything there is a lot of unhappy characters and in particularly unhappy women at the mercy of their male counterparts in this collection.

There is a stark frankness to Adichie’s writing, it is uncomplicated which adds to the harrowing kick of some of these short stories. Rape is handled like an offhanded norm, as if Adichie’s characters are speaking of going to get apples and oranges from the supermarket. It is an almost desperate reality for many of these characters that they half expect to always to be something less significant. Their bodies seem like public property to be graffitied upon and owned by who ever chooses to. They are the socially subordinate sisters who tell their brother’s stories and not their own and sometimes, a minority of them take small revenges. But these feelings cascade throughout the collection.

When we do come across empowered characters, they are usually women our narrator is warned against, or they appear in ways we do not anticipate such as the subject of same-sex desire. Or they live with guilt, from past actions that they should never have been forced to undertake.

The culture clashes in this collection are perhaps more poignantly felt through the young women in the collection who are visiting Nigeria from the USA or where women escaping Nigeria find themselves faced by an oppressive individual elsewhere. It as if Adichie dangles the hope of change and autonomy in front of a lot of her characters and then snatches it away. There is very little space or time for grief, because in many of these stories survival is the focus and there is no room to slow down or stop. Or there is no worth given to grief or magnitude of emotion that they experience because they are women and some how less important than their male counterparts.

This is my first real taste of African literature and as I expected it was an emotionally fraught experience and I did find it challenging. But it was only a challenge because this is a topic that I am passionate about and I empathised with these women, fictional or not. Adichie’s candid writing hasn’t made me feel any less convinced that feminism is important. Around Your Neck has only strengthened my convictions that this is a global issue and that feminism isn’t something that is over and ‘old news’.

I think you should read this novel. I think that if you are in a position of privilege and believe that feminism is only important and relevant when it is concerned with the west and is entirely whitewashed, then you should really try to read this novel. I think that if you want to emotionally challenge yourself and the staying power of your convictions on this topic then you should also really read this novel. It will give you a lot to think about.

38. Men Explain Things to Me and Other Essays

Isn’t it funny that whenever I come near to posting about any feminist text, I feel that I must take up the arduous task of defending myself and my position. Or rather, isn’t is appalling that I assume someday I shall be on the other end of cheap shots taken by internet strangers, who may be misinformed, but who will certainly be angry. I want to deflect death and rape threats before they arrive. I want to emphatically carve my position into the introduction of a post, yet that takes up far more of a blog post than it should because it transforms it into a passionate plea for reason and for what I believe is morally right.

But to make it simple for all of you that are poised above the keyboard muttering ‘feminazi’ under your breath: I am a feminist. I am a woman. I have never believed in a matriarchal society. I believe that misogyny is as a destructive force to men as it is to women, and that perpetuating toxic ideas of masculinity is in fact emasculating and destroying men. That when we enforce the idea that boys do not cry, we are raising men who are unequipped to deal with emotions in a healthy way. When we enforce that paternity leave is not as socially valuable as maternity leave we are undermining the value of fatherhood. I believe someone’s gender does not limit their potential job.

I believe that it is not okay to reduce people into animalistic lumps of flesh swinging their fists around, any more than it is okay to belittle people into walking meat sacks whose only purpose is incubating other human beings.

Men Explain things to Me and Other Essays – Rebecca Solnit

I also believe that women deserve the right to be heard and believed. That her body should be governed by only herself and nobody has the right to abuse it with violence when she says no. That it is not okay to joke about rape or pussy grabbing or how you want to enforce your sexual violence upon someone for ‘bants’. That it is not okay to victim blame. That it is not okay to send death and rape threats online to women no matter how much you don’t agree with what she says. That it is not okay to tell someone to ‘kill themselves’ because they don’t like your dick pic, or because they aren’t interested in dating you, or because you’ve decide that you have been ‘friend zoned’.

I believe that good feminist essays are supposed make you angry. Men Explain Things to Me and other Essays, made me angry, they disgusted me, they left me feeling upset and genuinely appalled. But they gave me a little bit of hope too and now I feel like I need to read them again.

Solnit has an easy to digest writing style that doesn’t patronise the reader, it doesn’t demonise men, but it seeks to resonate with an attempt at answering why feminism is still a relevant global topic today. These seven essays aren’t 130 pages of Solnit anecdotally belittling the men who have explained things to her or patronised her, as may be assumed. The title essay tells of an older gentlemen explaining Solnit’s recently released novel to her, pursuing on regardless of being repeatedly told ‘that’s her book.’ But there are essays dedicated to the pervasive sexual violence against women, vibrant writing on the topic of IMF and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and powerlessness. She discusses the egalitarian marriage, Woolf, and the last essay ends with some dignity and hope for the topic.

They forced me reflect on the young girl who was snatched and killed from my secondary school all those years ago, and on another local woman who was found unconscious with no underwear, and on the statistics of a rape being reported every 6 minutes in the USA, and on gang rape, and on how many sexual assault survivors I know, and on women being set on fire and then eaten for refusing sexual advances, and on brave women being left for dead by assailants but still walking to the nearest police station.

But these essays also made me reflect upon myself as a product of society, both as a unwilling subject for the Male Gaze and how deeply my own fear of sexual violence runs. I found myself reflecting on how perverse I find misogyny and violation. How difficult I find it that someone somewhere, believes wholeheartedly that they have the right to someone else’s body without consent. Good feminist essays make you angry. Really good feminist essays make you angry and then solidify and consolidate your ideas into concrete. But as always there is a peppering of sadness – why, why, why, why do human beings do this to one another?

Something that has resonated with me from this collection is the suggestion that a pandora’s box (or jar) of ideas has been opened. That all of the ideas that have flown out and established themselves will be forever difficult to budge. Women will never again relinquish their hold over their own bodies, voices, votes, and worth. That traditional gender norms are being unravelled. That, with complete certainty, there is more than one way to be a human and to have value. And surely, given the state of 2016 is about to leave us in, that is a happy thought to hold on to.

31. We should all be Feminists

This sneaky little volume has crept into a very quiet month of reading. I’m afraid I have abandoned Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth and I think that unless I have a really strong desire to write a blog post about the books I don’t finish, I’m simply just putting them aside. What is reading if you don’t enjoy it hmm?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a name that has been on my radar for a while. I recently met someone who is very interested in African literature and it is something that I have been readying myself to explore a little. We should all be Feminists is an adaptation of Adichie’s Tedtalk on the topic which can be found: here!!! The Tedtalk is about half an hour and the published volume that accompanies is very slim and pocket-sized. I read it in about an hour. But do not be fooled, it may be small, but it is mighty.

We should all be Feminists – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I am a big fan of feminist texts. I am a big fan of any text that underlines the importance of gender construction and how damning it can be culturally. As you can imagine this is a text that does just this but it is closely interwoven with Adichie’s personal experiences from Nigeria. Too easy in the west I believe we forget that gender expression is very ridged in other parts of the world.

However, We should all be Feminists can be universally understood regardless of where you are in the world. It begins with Adichie’s first encounter with the word ‘feminist’, flung at her as an insult, with a tone implying being such was akin to being a terrorist – this is something I have encountered recently and it never fails to amaze me when it happens. A ‘feminist’ is someone to avoid and that ‘feminist talk’ will ruin your marriage if it gets in your head. Adichie describes a much stricter social landscape than the one we are used to in the west, women are not greeted when they enter a restaurant with a male counterpart. It is assumed that women alone are prostitutes when they try to enter a hotel without a male companion and bars and clubs will not let women in alone unless they are with men.

It’s chilling. Gender expression is something that has actually been at the forefront of my mind recently. I have been debating with myself how easy it is for human beings to pressure one another into labels and in to social behaviours to define themselves and others. How in doing so they are comfortably aware how their world is built, how they fit within the society puzzle, and how others do also. But also in defining yourself so strictly you also open yourself up to limiting the potential of who you are and who you can be. You are instead actively limiting your behaviours and internalising repression.

Which is, in part, something relatively central to this text. I would also like it to be added to the record that this text is not only a comment on how women move in Nigerian society,  but is also how men are expected to perform within a very narrow definition of what masculinity is. The Hard Man, as Adichie puts it, the pressure to be masculine, not cry, not be sensitive and to be physically impressive is certainly a concept that I think is easily recognised without much difficulty in the west.

The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognising how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations. – We are all Feminists, Adichie, p.35. 

I really enjoyed this text, it is not overly complicated, and it is a very broad but concise snapshot into gender construction within Nigeria and of course, why we should all be feminists.