Book Review/Heather Seggel

Stay Nasty

Donald Trump. Mike Pence. Brett Freaking Kavanaugh, in confirmation hearings as I write. Positions of power in our country right now do not have the best interests of women at heart. Despite the will of a vast majority of Americans, this amoral minority of older white dudes, with an occasional assist from Clarence Thomas, are trying to set us back a generation or two in terms of progress. It’s infuriating, disheartening, appalling. It can also be the stuff of which great comedy is made. Enter Erin Gibson and Feminasty: The Complicated Woman’s Guide to Surviving the Patriarchy Without Drinking Herself to Death (Grand Central Publishing). Gibson and fellow comedian and actor Bryan Safi co-host the Throwing Shade podcast, and the women’s issues, LGBT issues, and deep dive into the shallows of pop culture that they’ve trademarked inform the approach here as well.

Fans of Gibson’s work, either from Throwing Shade (which was also a show on TV Land for one season) or from numerous Funny or Die sketches, know her humor is loud and precisely targeted if often absurd. Also, her jokes aren’t merely dirty, they are filthy; The Aristocrats would blush. But it all comes in service of sound progressive ideals. More women in positions of power mean less sexism as a given. Equal rights for all don’t mean less rights for you; if you feel that way, examine your assumptions. We know these things so well it’s easy to become numb to our own messaging; what better way to hit ‘refresh’ than a bracing joke about her dog eating post-coital waste products found in her bedroom? What I’m trying to say here is, read the first chapter title and you’ll know if the book is right for you.

One of the pleasures the book offers fans is seeing a piece that was an issue on the pod, or perhaps explored on the TV show, get an even closer look in print. If you don’t bleed once a month it has probably not occurred to you to question why all but 12 US states do not consider tampons and pads to be medical necessities, and thus add sales tax to their already excessive cost. The rest of us have some feelings about this, and about the rank hypocrisy of giving the tax exemption to cotton balls! “Ques que le difference, tax code? A tampon is just an orgy of cotton balls climbing a gym-class rope up into my crampy vagina. Tampons are subject to sales tax because they are considered a luxury item. You know, private jets, infinity pools, super-absorbency tampons.” Similarly, it will never not be funny to me to hear about VP Mike Pence’s wife, Karen (a.k.a. “Mother”), her very specific passion project, and the lengths to which she went to guard against anyone buying a similar website URL.

There are essays here about the need to make STEM fields more receptive to women, the weak arguments people have made against the #MeToo movement and why their objections are utterly bogus, the “pinkwashing” of breast cancer into the greatest shopportunity ever, and a truly harrowing story of medical misconduct and how hard it can be to find a better doctor than the one you’re currently with (especially in Los Angeles). There are also anecdotes about Gibson’s working class youth in Texas, which informed her political views; her brash humor doesn’t diffuse their emotional rawness. Readers who are motivated to learn more about an issue will be pleased to find links to source material indexed at the end.

The book’s conclusion includes a list of topics Gibson didn’t manage to squeeze into the book, ranging from incels and the struggles of trans women to “Hollywood being surprised Girls Trip was a hit.” That ability to pivot from politics to pop culture is part of what makes Feminasty such a pleasure to read; it’s a big part of why the podcast is so delightful as well. The monolithic tower of crap we’re expected to gamely put up with — as women, queer folk, the working poor, etc. — requires direct engagement with intelligence and skill, which is frankly exhausting. So little things, like a new beloved book or TV show, or the return of cotton candy grapes to AmazonWaPoWholeFoods, mean a lot. Reading this can help you get involved, will definitely make you furious, and will also induce stuff-out-the-nose laughter. That’s a lot! Get into it.

Heather Seggel is a writer living in Northern California. Email heatherlseggel@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2018

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