Why I Am Not A Feminist by Jessa Crispin

Paperback, 240 pgs Pub February 2017 by Melville House Original Title Why I Am Not a Feminist ISBN13: 9781612196015

Jessa Crispin sets out to discomfit us. She is so antagonistic to begin I almost put the audiobook aside. The author reads it, and there is a sarcasm and spite to her voice that I long ago decided I would rather avoid. Yes, she’s angry. But she made me curious. How and why could she push my buttons and why was she bothering? I started again the next day and her arguments sounded different the second time around. I agreed with her.

Essentially Crispin is saying that the feminist movement has been popularized, co-opted, and dumbed down to the point that folks have forgotten that feminism is nothing less than tearing down patriarchy, and any paternalistic system that “grants” rights to a certain segment of society while denying those same rights to others. Feminism means upending expected and accepted ways of exploitation of any group, race, religion, class.

Feminism is not measured by how many female CEOs are making 70, 80, 90, or 100 percent of what males do in similarly-structured companies where the top 1 percent is making over 1000 times what the lowest paid worker is making. Feminism exposes structures which make such disparities and discrimination possible.

Now do you see why it should make you uncomfortable? Feminism overthrows current methods and modes of interaction, in our financial, social, and relational interactions. Men and women, Crispin suggests, will struggle to understand and honor feminism's new goals and intentions and how they work, and therefore should not be criticized if they question, stumble or misinterpret on the way to building new social structures. It is important to listen and think about and answer disagreement within a movement.

Here Crispin sounds Maoist (and we know how that turned out), but at base I think she is saying something important: feminism is the original inclusive movement because everyone’s roles and interactions change for the better—except those who have been advantaged by exploitation of groups not their own to achieve outsized power and influence which they wield to keep their position at the top of some figurative ‘heap.’ That will be over, as far as feminists have anything to say about it.

Most appreciated is the way Crispin draws a line from inclusiveness to saving our planet: we are going to need the talents and skills of every dispossessed group to add to the general creativity. As long as people are encouraged and advantaged when they exploit others for personal gain and at the expense of the general welfare of the entire society, we are not going to succeed in the challenges that are coming.

Jessa Crispin is one of the original online unaffiliated book reviewers; she called her site Bookslut. There always was some aggression in her presentation, and I found her reading and writing difficult to understand, for the most part. Since then I recognize that she was reading and writing to learn, rather than merely for pleasure, and I have begun to do the same. I understand her better now. I recently reviewed Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists which I liked very much. Adichie’s manner is so friendly, at first I thought she was saying that one does not have to be angry to be a feminist. But in fact, Adichie is angry: feminists should be angry, because we are not there yet. Some women have progressed; the world lags behind.

Crispin tells us that some of us have not bothered to look at the second wave of the feminist goals because some of us have gotten some personal gain and we have chosen what we want out of feminism's goals. Crispin reminds us that white female empowerment in the United States can actually be shown to be oppressive to less advantaged women overseas, by reason of feminists not completing the revolution as it were, but stopping when they have attained some measure of gain. First world women might be said to have bought into an oppressive, exploitative patriarchal system when it began to include them.

Just hearing the chapter heading “How Feminism Ended Up Doing Patriarchy’s Work” sounds exactly right. If one has enough money, one can avoid the worst effects of patriarchal control, and more and more women are stopping when we get to this point. But if we stopped and took a breath at this stage, we have to buckle on a breastplate and dive back into the fight. It is not men we are fighting. It is power and money which allows us to avoid the most pernicious effects of patriarchy and capitalism. Money and power feels good. When we get it, we don't want to carry on fighting.

So, Crispin wants to insert herself into everyone’s discussion about What Feminism Is. Feminism does not argue about who shaves and who is on top during sex. The powerless cannot, and the powerful will not, break the system. People, not just women, with both understanding and an unwillingness to buy into the system are the ones who can crush an oppressive system. She is broadening the limits of the term. “Women should think of themselves as humans first.”

In the end, Crispin's persistence in explaining why she is no longer a feminist is a serious and much-needed look in the mirror and not merely caustic and dismissive. It’s a call to arms. She’s tough: she has broadened and expanded and exploded definitions and reminded us of earlier radical feminists who are now dismissed or discredited. We might need a new word: Feminism is now ‘old hat,’ and she has moved on. I get it, and I'm with her.

I ended up really appreciating the PRH audio production read by the author, her intense and pointed criticisms aimed at feminists and power-mongers and unconscious beneficiaries of the current patriarchal capitalist system which has been so severely skewed to benefit a group not trying hard enough to dismantle the system which keeps them comfortable at the expense of others. To write a response to the manifesto, it would be useful to have a written copy. She brings up a lot of complex ideas and I guarantee you will not be completely comfortable with her critical eye and tongue. But she wades in where every man fears to tread. Bravo!

Couple of interviews with Jessa Crispin:

Constance Grady in Vox with Crispin May 3, 2016
Michelle Dean in The Guardian with Crispin May 9, 2016



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The Making of Donald Trump by David Cay Johnston

The best part of this book comes near the end, in Trump’s Atlantic City casino.

“Akio Kashiwagi was one of the world’s five biggest gamblers, literally a one-in-a billion customer, who…in May 1990 was sitting at a green-felt table at Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino calmly wagering $14 million an hour. He had been there for nearly a week.”

Johnston prepares us for nearly two hundred pages with Donald’s history of self-promotion, alignments with shady racketeers, tax dodges, questionable accounting practices, and the real sleaze of a man who’d reached his intellectual limit selling real estate. The reader literally becomes queasy imagining the damage this man could do as leader of our country.

The story at the casino is told in minute detail, how $18.8 million in $5K chips are stacked on the table and floor beside Kashiwagi at the baccarat table as he reached the pinnacle of his win in the double-or-nothing wager he had with the house. He was still in the black by the middle of the next week, and Trump could not sleep.

It is in the middle of this story when I realize that this is one of Trump’s biggest moments…a game…for money. I can’t tell you how it turns out—the book is worth seeking out, Johnson tells the story so well—but it does have something to do with reputation and the real wealth of both men, not the heralded fake wealth bragged about. It is a fight to the death, considering mob-boss friends hold the velvet stage curtains behind which both men hide.

In the final pages Johnston's skill as an investigative journalist and writer come across clearly. He focuses the last part of the book on Trump’s little known mob connections, and criminal associates. Knowing bad folks, as Johnston points out, proves nothing. But Johnston goes on to show how Trump profited by his relationships with folks who commonly transgressed the law. Trump cared about money, and measured his worth by it. He measures other people's worth by their beauty or wealth...or power.

The ups and downs in the legal battle over Trump University alone should have given the American voting populace pause because it showed Trump’s desperation and his rhinestones-for-diamonds charlatanism. Johnston gives a good overview of the bribery, threats, lawsuits, misdirection, and outright lies involved with this case. Right after this section is one on supposed donations to charity that got all tied up in donations to and from his own foundation.

I wasn’t going to read anything about Trump right away because I was in a deep funk after the election, but a lengthy discussion with a Goodreader led me first to TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald by Timothy O’Brien, and before I finished that, to Johnston’s book. TrumpNation first came out in 2005, and was reissued in early June 2016 with a new introduction. O'Brien has a fascinating in-depth section on the Koch-Trump rivalry (Koch was mayor of NYC in the 1980's) and a hilarious description of Trump's purchase of New York's fabled Plaza Hotel.

O’Brien was an editor at the NYT before moving to become executive editor of Bloomberg View. O'Brien actually edited some of Johnston’s work when both worked at the NYT. Johnston is a specialist in tax law and reporting, earned a Pulitzer in 2001 for his reporting on taxation, and was able to see some of his suggestions adopted by Congress into tax law shortly afterward. The material in Johnston's book and O'Brien's overlaps: both are sobering assessments of the man they watch, and detailed in what they focus on specifically.

Johnston’s book came out in English and German in Aug 2016, but he'd been researching Donald Trump for almost thirty years. Johnston met Trump back in the 1980’s, when he was investigating money flows, taxes, tax avoidance, and casinos. There were so many folks involved in Trump’s success that investigations into his financial reporting went nowhere. He was both too big and too inconsequential. Trump's net worth was nothing like he claimed, but there was so much money going in and out of his accounts. It was going somewhere.

Johnston makes an excellent observation early in the book, in his bio of Fred Trump, Donald’s father.

”When Fred Trump was under intense criticism for plans to destroy a popular Coney Island attraction…where he wanted to build the first apartment project bearing the family name, Fred Trump shifted the focus of news coverage by hiring a bevy of beauties in hard hats and polka-dot bikinis to hand out bricks to locals and city dignitaries…Decades later, of course, Donald Trump would surround himself with models to attract television cameras and would have his third wife pose nearly nude aboard his Boeing 757 jet for a men’s magazine while he looked on during a photo shoot.”

Hard to believe near-nakedness distracts anyone from hanging onto their pocketbooks anymore--isn't that the oldest con of all? But so it goes. Donald continues to point to sexy beauty and away from his own indiscretions.

Johnston starts Trump’s family history with the observation that the family name was once Drumpf, changed in 1648, too early to implicate Donald, but not too early to influence his sense of himself. Johnston points out various meanings of the word trump:

”Donald no doubt enjoys the bridge player’s definition of trump: a winning play by a card that outranks all others. But other definitions include ‘a thing of small value, a trifle’ and ‘to deceive or cheat’ as well as ‘to blow or sound a trumpet.’ As a verb, trump means to ‘devise in an unscrupulous way’ and ‘to forge, fabricate or invent,’ as in ‘trumped-up’ charges.”

Johnston has just the right amount of amused skepticism and new information to hold us in thrall rather than have us toss the book across the room in a rage. He keeps us reading and thinking. It is absolutely unbelievable that Trump was victorious in November.





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The Colonel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi

This summer the Iranian government issued a postage stamp on the novelist Dowlatabadi’s 74th birthday commemorating his lifetime of work. Despite the regime’s professed respect for the art of the novelist, Dowlatabadi’s The Colonel is still not published in his own country. It was first published in Germany, where it was shortlisted for the 2009 Haus der Kulturen Berlin International Literary Award. After publication in Britain, the novel was longlisted for the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize and it won the 2013 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature.

This novel was begun by Dowlatabadi in the 1980’s and periodically added to and amended until the author declared it ready for publication in 2008. It relates the story of a man, military man of discipline and principles, who appears torn asunder by the change sweeping his country and his family in light of the 1979 revolution against the Shah which was the end of a 2,500-year history of monarchies. His wife is dead by his own hand for her adultery, and three of his children have been killed, two for their anti-Islamic tendencies, and one as a martyr for the cause of the new Islamic state under Khomeini. Two children remain, but the eldest son is sunk in an unresponsive nihilism as a result of the failure of the Communist faction he supported, and his daughter Farzaneh is married to an opportunist who shifts his allegiances with the changing political leadership.

One of Dowlatabadi’s great skills as a novelist is reputedly to use language in an earthy yet lyrical way. We cannot enjoy the original Persian, but we can see the straightforward way in which he draws his characters, exposing their weaknesses and failures while at the same time acknowledging that one could not have done differently.

"The colonel had always let his children find their own way in life...But now he could not help but wonder whether the dreadful fate that had overtaken every one of his children was in fact due to his laissez-faire approach. But no, this did not really provide the old man with an easy answer, either. He firmly believed that he had bequeathed to his children only the most natural of rights, namely the right to determine what they wanted to do with their lives...In the end, perhaps the colonel's wish that his children lead independent lives was a reaction on his part against a life which he felt had been imposed upon him. He felt that he had been short-changed by never having had the freedom to live his own life. This made him feel like some sort of cripple...At least one of you should look out for himself. It's not as though you were carrying the weight of all history on your shoulders! I'm not as strong as you think I am. That's what he really wanted to tell his children."

Dowlatabadi describes an interrogation session, torture, and what jail is like. He describes the total confusion and uncertainty among family members and the general populace for years after the revolution when the political winds shifted to and fro. He describes the agony of a parent who is despised by his children and who has to bury his tortured 14-year-old daughter on a rainy night without help from his family. He describes the guilt and desperation of educated and serious patriots who no longer believed in god or goodness as a result of what they have seen and how their understanding of their most basic rights as humans felt violated. Even though I have not had much opportunity to read Persian literature, there can be little doubt about how such an open and painful account of despair would be received by a sitting government.

"The colonel felt guilt, too--guilty for the very existence of his children, or lack of it, as the case may be."

Apparently the present government in Iran would be willing to publish this novel in Persian if the author would make some changes, which he has refused to do. And yet, for his other work which is widely hailed in Iran as unique and masterful, Dowlatabadi is respected and honored by the postage stamp in his honor.

"One would think that boys were born coy, but there lurks within them a dreadful, perverse force that can, in the blink of an eye, turn them into savage beasts, beasts that since the beginning of history have been easily drawn into committing the most appalling of crimes, just to prove themselves. They follow orders to the letter and call what they do acts of heroism. Can we blame them? What about us, the people who send these unformed lumps of soft putty out onto the street, where they fall into the arms of the first merchants of villainy they come across? And we just sit back and wait for them to be turned into rods to beat our own backs..."

This book is an important addition to the literature coming from the Middle East, and one hopes that one will never have read its like again.


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