6. Jessica Valenti: Full Frontal Feminism
Started Reading: January 15, 2008
Completed Reading: January 24, 2008
Book rating: 9 out of 10 stars
Book Description
Feminism isn't dead. It just isn't very cool anymore. Enter Full Frontal Feminism, a book that embodies the forward-looking messages that author Jessica Valenti propagates on her popular website, Feministing.com.
Covering a range of topics, including pop culture, health, reproductive rights, violence, education, relationships, and more, Valenti provides young women a primer on why feminism matters.
Valenti knows better than anyone that young women need a smart-ass book that deals with real-life issues in a style they can relate to. No rehashing the same old issues. No belaboring where today's young women have gone wrong. Feminism should be something young women feel comfortable with, something they can own. Full Frontal Feminism is sending out the message to readers - yeah, you're feminists, and that's actually pretty frigging cool.
My review
Full Frontal Feminism is a primer targeted towards young high school/college aged women. It's extremely US-centric, but I loved reading it anyway. Many of the issues covered in this book affect young women in other (Western) countries too, even though the specifics might not be the same as in the United States. While reading, at times I felt frustrated at how bad things are, but mostly I felt uplifted. I don't think it's possible to read the book and come away thinking "nah, we don't need feminism anymore". For a more seasoned feminist Full Frontal Feminism can serve as brain candy between more serious reads.
This book is not without its flaws, but I hope that people reading it will be inspired to read some more on feminism. There is a list of resources in the back of the book, including some recommended reading such as Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics by bell hooks, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism by Cherrie Moraga, BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine by Lisa Jervis & Andi Zeisler, Cunt: A Declaration of Independence by Inga Muscio, Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation by Leora Tanenbaum, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture by Ariel Levy and Kiss My Tiara : How to Rule the World as a SmartMouth Goddess by Susan Jane Gilman. Jessica Valenti also has a list on Amazon called My fave feminist books, which has some more recommendations.
Full Frontal Feminism has been criticized for not speaking to all American women, but instead focusing on the upper middle-class, white women. The struggles of women of color are mentioned in several chapters, and in the short historical section Jessica talks about the racism of the women's suffrage movement. Still, woc are mostly mentioned in passing, and their contributions to the feminist movement are almost completely absent from this book. Also, some of the issues affect poor women in different ways - it's hard to be overcome by wedding hysteria if you can't afford to have a wedding.
As a white woman, I didn't even notice anything was missing, until I read this post by a blogger called brownfemipower. It was truly eye-opening, and I hope that any people whose interest in feminism is sparked by Full Frontal Feminism would go on to read something else too, in order to understand feminism better. Otherwise we'll have to deal with the problem with feminism lite. Still, everyone's gotta start somewhere, and I think Full Frontal Feminism is definitely one good place to start.
It looks like I've once again concentrated more on the negative aspects than the positive, which gives a rather skewed picture of my opinions on this book, and is in contrast with the 9 stras I gave it. So I'm ending this review by quoting a blogger who expressed much better than I did why she liked the book.
Jill Filipovic's review at Feministe:"Full Frontal Feminism is damn good. It is, very much, a love letter to feminism and a feminist primer. It is not a book that is meant to appeal to career feminists, or to women who have made feminism their lives - however, I am a woman who has pretty much made feminism her life, and I really enjoyed it and I learned from it. The point of Jessica’s book, though, is to explain to younger women why feminism is appealing, and why it’s valid in their lives. It explains why feminism has been important in Jessica’s life. FFF is appealing precisely because it’s conversational. Jessica’s writing is so incredibly tight that she can take complicated topics and distill them down to compelling one-sentence summaries - followed by “fuck that,” or some otherwise perfect, funny and to-the-point dismissal. She takes issues that would take me pages to explain and pares them down to a paragraph. And you’re laughing by the end of it. FFF is not an academic work, and was never intended to be. It’s informative without being intimidating; it’s intelligent and still accessible. Reading it is a lot like talking to Jessica in person - charming, funny, cutting, sometimes foul-mouthed, intelligent, and always fascinating.
Jessica and I differ on several issues, porn and statutory rape being the two that come most immediately to mind. But damn if she doesn’t present solid, grounded arguments for her points of view. And while we may not agree on everything, the fact is that Jessica gets it. She is well-schooled in both academic feminism as well as day-to-day, life-lesson feminism - and as a general rule she errs on the side of lived feminism, which is incredibly refreshing. I’ve done the academic feminism thing - hell, I’m still doing it - and while I love me some theory, at the end of the day, the way women live their lives and negotiate feminism with their lived realities matters a whole lot more than theory ever will. So her book isn’t laden with academic terms. Jessica isn’t trying to remind you that she’s smarter and more feminist than you are. And after spending a semester reading Butler and Foucault, sitting down with Full Frontal Feminism was a nice change. I could read it, be entertained, learn something, and not feel like I was having to work at it.
Full Frontal Feminism is intended to target younger women - high school and early college-aged would be my guess. I didn’t identify as a feminist until college, not because I didn’t have feminist beliefs, but because I hadn’t met anyone my own age who identified as feminist, and because I bought into a lot of the negative stereotypes about feminism. If you had thrown Andrea Dworkin or Judith Butler at 16-year-old Jill, she would have told you it was the most ridiculous thing she had ever read and thrown it back at you. But if you had given me Full Frontal Feminism, I would have thought twice about the feminist label. That was Jessica’s point - not to impress the theory-whores out there. Not to convert the 25-year-old grad student. Not to open the eyes of the 60-year-old veteran feminist who spent her whole life on the front lines. But to reach out to the younger women who have been scared away from feminism by the conservative backlash and an unsympathetic media."
Jessica Valenti's new book He's a Stud, She's a Slut, and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know will be out April 28, 2008.
See my review at bookcrossing. I will offer this book as a bookring.