Bossypants
This is a book I ought to have judged by the cover. Because looking
at the cover - an mage of Tina Fey's head photoshopped onto a man's body
- filled me with exactly the same mixture of emotions as the book did. I
think it was supposed to be funny, but it mostly just left me
uncomfortable.
My biggest problem is that Fey's feminism is dated. Which is to say it fails to be intersectional. Fey is mostly concerned with the plight of the middle-class white woman. She's basically a poster child for Lean In, juggling a family and her dream job and making it look easy (because of that full-time nanny she employs, who she can barely even talk to). Fey's racism and homophobia come through in interesting ways. Even in the story where she learns an important lesson about not using gay people as props in her own story, she manages to use a cast of gay people as props to teach her a lesson. One she clearly never internalized.
There were things I could relate to. I mean, I'm an upper-middle class white woman, too. Her hopes for her daughter rang true. Her battles against sexism at SNL were victorious. They actually reminded me a lot of living in North Dorm in college. I was never particularly bothered by the sexism, but I still think my girlfriends and I managed to, ever so slightly, change the culture of that dorm for the better by the time we left. But the bulk of the book left me cringing, and the jokes mostly fell flat for me. On the bright side, it only cost $1, and it took less than a day to read. So it's not like there was a huge investment on my part here.
My biggest problem is that Fey's feminism is dated. Which is to say it fails to be intersectional. Fey is mostly concerned with the plight of the middle-class white woman. She's basically a poster child for Lean In, juggling a family and her dream job and making it look easy (because of that full-time nanny she employs, who she can barely even talk to). Fey's racism and homophobia come through in interesting ways. Even in the story where she learns an important lesson about not using gay people as props in her own story, she manages to use a cast of gay people as props to teach her a lesson. One she clearly never internalized.
There were things I could relate to. I mean, I'm an upper-middle class white woman, too. Her hopes for her daughter rang true. Her battles against sexism at SNL were victorious. They actually reminded me a lot of living in North Dorm in college. I was never particularly bothered by the sexism, but I still think my girlfriends and I managed to, ever so slightly, change the culture of that dorm for the better by the time we left. But the bulk of the book left me cringing, and the jokes mostly fell flat for me. On the bright side, it only cost $1, and it took less than a day to read. So it's not like there was a huge investment on my part here.
Comments
Post a Comment