Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults by Laurie Penny
I have always been a feminist. Even as a young girl, when the word feminism was unknown to me, I was a feminist, or to be more precise, I have always had the mentality of a feminist.
When I was a young girl, growing in a small village in mainland Greece, people used to say that I had some strange ideas about how girls should behave. To me, it was simply unfairnesses. I couldn’t understand why, for example, I should have to stay quietly with the other girls in a half-empty classroom learning how to make stitches, instead of being out in the school’s playground with the boys, shouting and playing basketball. Those days, I looked around me how girls and women were treated. and anger seemed like a perfectly reasonable response.
My anger and confusion about the role of women in society lasted until my early teenage years. It was around that time that I discovered -I don't even remember how and where- a book with the title ‘The Second Sex'. Simone de Beauvoir seemed to explain fundamental truths that all the adults in my small universe seemed to ignore. This book, a critique to patriarchy and the social constructs faced by women, changed my worldview. I stopped being confused, but I carried the anger my anger for many years, turning it inwards. In a lot of ways, it makes me uncomfortable to acknowledge how long you have been angry for.
After Simone de Beauvoir, I started exploring other feminist writers, Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer, bell hooks, Susan Sontag, anything I could find. For a while, feminist theory became an obsession. When I finally lifted my head, I knew I was a feminist. Needless to say that back then, the feminist label was an accusation. It was the ‘F’ word, a dirty word. Feminism, to me, is one of the greatest liberation movements in human history.
When today I look how the women are treated, that old anger returns. But a lot of things have changed since then. The world is different. Feminism is different. The notion of feminism today is defined as the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes. It includes transgender, gender binary, and any other gender identifications.
In her collection of essays, Bitch Doctrine:Essays for Dissenting Adults , written in a three years period and up to the election of Donald Trump, Laurie Penny shows that feminism today is about inclusiveness and intersectionality. There is a lot of stuff in this book, a lot of different topics. Laurie’s writing is smart, provocative, emotional, thoughtful. She questions many of the underlying assumption that structure our lives and probing identity issues. We are not just women. We are women with different bodies, gender expressions, sexualities. We are humans full of contradictions and differences and we need to take these differences into account and how they affect us. Without this kind of inclusion, as Roxane Gay says, our feminism is nothing. Feminism needs to take into account the needs of women of colour, queer women, transgender women. “In the end,” writes Laurie Penny, “feminists and the LGBT community have all this in common: we’ are all gender traitors. We have broken the rules of good behaviour assigned to us at birth and we have all suffered for it.”
I don't agree with everything Penny says, but there is a lot of food of thought in this collection. There is a great deal of humour too, and understandably, a great deal of anger. I liked the energy and the passion on her essay “The women’s march and the triumph of the won’t” about the women’s march in Washington, a day after Trump’s inauguration, on 23 January 2017. I found her views about James Bond on the essay 'The Tragedy of James Bond", witty and hilarious. Perhaps the most interesting to me was the essay “Let’s not abolish sex work; let’s abolish all work,” which talks about the porn industry and capitalism and connects them in ways that I haven’t thought before.
This collection of essays is a provocative call for action. As Laurie Penny says in the introduction,
The title is a provocation, but so is the rest of the book. How could it be otherwise? Anything any woman ever writes about politics is considered provocative, an invitation to dismissal and disgust and abuse, in much the same way that a short skirt is considered an invitation to sexual violence. That’s the point. I have learned through years of writing in public that if you are a woman and political, they will come for you whatever you say—so you may as well say what you really feel. If that makes me a bitch, I can live with that.
As a culture, patriarchy exists as a set of rules and values that specify how men and women should act in order to be safe and protected. Breaking the patriarchical rules can have real consequences. Women need to find their own voice. Only then we become able to communicate our own feelings, and to pick up the feelings of others we would be able to dismatle the structures of hierarchy.