“I always feel better when there is something hard between my legs,” joked Madonna, the American pop icon, singer, and songwriter, pointing to the standing microphone and starting her acceptance speech at Billboard’s Women in Music in 2016. It was not the first time Madonna had been so blatant in terms of her female sexuality. In her speech, not only did the female pop star recollected her long-lived music career, she also confessed about the time when she felt like she was “the most hated person on the planet”. In 1992, Madonna released her Erotica album and published her notorious Sex book, exploring the then taboo subject of sex with candid sexual references in lyrics and extremely erotic pornography in the book. “I was called a whore and a witch. One headline compared me to Satan,” Madonna recalled. “Camille Paglia, the famous feminist writer, said I set women back by objectifying myself sexually. So I thought, ‘oh, if you’re a feminist, you don’t have sexuality, you deny it.’ So I said ‘fuck it. I’m a different kind of feminist. I’m a bad feminist.” What is a bad feminist?
In her essay “Bad Feminist: Take One”, Roxane Gay, American writer and commentator, offers a hint of what being bad feminist means. In Gay’s essay, she argues that bad feminists are those who do not fall under the “essential feminists” category. Gay admits that she often feels herself not fit in the category and falls short as a feminist. In terms of essential feminism, Gay points out that essentialism suggests the notion that there are right and wrong ways to be feminists. While women who do not adhere to certain beauty standard are considered bad women, feminists that do not “hate pornography, unilaterally decry the objectification of women” are regarded as bad feminists. Gay demonstrates that one of the most significant problem with essential feminist is that it does not allow complexities of human experience or individuality (840). Gay lists several feminist writers that she thinks limits the definition of feminism including Elizabeth Wurtzel who says feminists should be women who earn a living and have money of their own, and Marissa Mayer who rejects the feminist label because she considers it having a negative connotation. Specifically, Gay targets on Sheryl Sandberg and her book Lean In, which Gay considers is only applied to working class women. Hoping to widen the definition of feminism, Gay openly shies away from the feminist label and brands herself as a bad feminist. By embracing the label of bad feminist, Gay encourages that women should not be apologetic of what they choose to be or what they want in life, even if mainstream feminists criticize them for it. To Gay, being a bad feminist means pushing the boundaries of essential feminism and advocate for what each individual believes in.
Adding to the list of feminist writers Gay does not agree with, there is Adrienne Rich, the American feminist essayist and poet. In her commencement speech addressed to the 1977 graduating class of Douglass College, “Claiming an Education”, Rich argues that women must consider they are in college to “claim education” instead of “receiving education”. In other words, female students should be active in their academic pursuit and not be submissive. Rich subsequently demonstrates that “one of the devastating weakness of university learning” is the exclusion of women — a large number of women universities are run by men and the education women receive there is subject to “male subjectivity”. Rich then continues to convey the importance of a woman’s responsibility to herself, because only until women take themselves seriously will men also treat them seriously. In the end, Rich encourages women to be active in seeking criticisms so they can push themselves further. However, by telling women what they should and should not do, Rich seemingly falls under the category of essential feminism. While Gay indicates that some scholarly essays and book on feminism can only be applied on some certain class of women (Gay, 846), Rich’s argument seems definitively only applicable to women who are entitled to receive an education considering that the speech itself is addressed to the graduates of a female-only college.
At the same time, Rich also demonstrates that taking initiative in life and academics, for women, goes against the roles women traditionally play in history — women are expected to stay home and be homemakers for their husbands. Such expectation of women perpetuates a binary notion of gender. This older notion of gender, which for the most part has been rejected by gender theorists of modern day, claims that the genitals one is born with, penis or vagina, correlate to the expression of the person as masculine or feminine. This notion allows for only two genders to exist—men or women—claiming that having a certain body part dictates societal roles and presentation of the self, allowing no room for someone to fall in between the two categories. The modern day view of gender explains it as a spectrum with masculinity and femininity as the two opposing sides of it. Given that it is society that created the idea of gender (separate from sex), we realize today that there is not only man and woman, but instead there is masculine and feminine and everyone falls somewhere in between—not necessarily on either side.
Essential feminism, advocating women’s equal rights, undoubtedly falls on the feminine side of the binary. By arguing the tension of performing one’s gender wrong will lead to a set of punishments both obvious and indirect, Gay confirms that the essential feminism suggests there is a right way to be a woman or more problematically, a right way to be an essential woman. Gay’s disagreement with the notion of essentialism is regarded as bad feminism by herself. Particularly, in the essay, Gay points to Sandberg, author of Lean In, along with her commitment to the gender binary conceived from essentialism. Explaining Sandberg’s idea, Gay writes “professional women are largely defined in relation to professional men; Lean In’s loudest unspoken advice seems to dictate that women should embrace traditionally masculine qualities.” (845). In other words, Sandberg’s advice, that professional women should act masculine and be confident, aggressive, and brave enough to take risk, is obsolete. Similarly, Rich’s viewpoint on women acting masculine and taking control in an academic setting is outdated due to the ever-changing notion of gender in the modern age. Such notion advocates the gender binary notion where men should act masculine while women otherwise. By widening the definition of feminism, bad feminism, on the other hand, helps push the non-binary notion of gender.
However, men are no exception when it comes to being expected to behave in a certain way. Gretel Ehrlich, American essayist and documentary filmmaker, examines the stereotypes of men, particularly of the western cowboys. Ehrlich argues that mass media’s depiction of cowboys has led its audience into believing that all western cowboys are supposed to possess the stereotypical qualities in media — strong and silent, tough and relentless. Ehrlich argues “it’s not toughness but toughing it out that count.” (703) That is, media’s oversimplified portrayal of cowboys have misled them to appear tough, but in fact not so. The misrepresentation of western cowboys in mass media play to the notion that men are supposed to own only masculine qualities, like toughness. In a way, the stereotypes are reinforcing the gender binary by once again putting traditionally gendered traits to a specific gender, emphasizing the difference between masculinity and femininity.
While bad feminists are helping to push the boundaries of gender binary, some men are not of any help in the field of gender. One might think drag queens are pioneers and trailblazers when it comes to advocating for gender non-binary, but it is in fact quite the opposite. While drag pushes the boundaries of gender, exposing the performative nature of it and making it more acceptable for men to dress up as women and women to dress up as men, the overall culture and language used in entertainment drag as it exists today perpetuates a binary notion of gender.
One of the most prominent and popular depictions of drag today is in “RuPaul’s drag race,” a show that is defining how our society today is viewing drag. Most of the competitors on the show identify as cisgender and homosexual men. When they are in drag, however, the language they use to speak to each other and about each other is very binary and perpetuates this notion of gender. When RuPaul—the host of the show—speaks to the contestants, the language used always centers around cisgender female pronouns such as repeated uses of “she,” “girls,” and “ladies.” When RuPaul introduces a challenge on the show, it is always lead by the statement “May the best woman win!” putting an emphasis on the word “woman.” In using this language targeted at the old notion of binary genders, RuPaul emphasizes that it is an act that the contestants are participating in. The contestants mostly see themselves as men when they are outside of this performance, though when they are in drag, it is so obvious that they are playing a role and enacting a performance by their extreme make up, long hair, and dresses—exaggerated, campy features of traditionally female styles. With the language being so centred around the idea of them as women, it is clear that they are playing roles and not necessarily enacting a part of their identity (besides as actors). This is additionally enforced by the fact that people who perform drag typically take on stage names which further alienate their character from their every day identities—separating and differentiating between the two. The stage names further push the idea that people in drag are performing as a character who isn’t them. These drag queens still aid in making cross-dressing more acceptable and more accessible, but the concept of gender that drag performance utilizes (consciously or not), is binary.