Comedian Deborah Frances-White is host (and co-creator, with Sofie Hagen) of the “50 million download” podcast The Guilty Feminist. Like the podcast, each of the chapters in Frances-White’s book starts with the line “I’m a feminist, but…”, followed by a confession. For instance, Frances-White (an Australian based in London) wants women to be taken seriously in leadership roles, but she also wants to look good sitting down naked. She can riff about patriarchal structures with the best of them, but she once lied about her weight when boarding a light aircraft, endangering herself and others.
And so on. Anyone can play this game, including myself (I’m a feminist, but I still watch America’s Next Top Model completely without irony). This is where The Guilty Feminist lives – the space where women’s good intentions bump up against being flawed and human, and they find themselves compromising. While Frances-White doesn’t want to “lower the bar”, she feels that feminist remorse can become just another thing for women to feel guilty about: “What if we are at base camp, and the summit looks as though it’s crowded with better feminists than us?”
This message is important – after all, most women end up practising what I’d term (ahem) “bespoke” feminism. Certainly it seems counterproductive to reduce the rich, complicated arena of modern feminism to the level of a New Year resolution that’s too strict and unbending to keep up. However, Frances-White doesn’t make the mistake of diluting feminism to the point where the term verges on meaningless – The Guilty Feminist covers an admirable amount of feminist territory, historical and ideological. Moreover, throughout, there’s the fascinating subtext of Frances-White’s Jehovah’s Witness background (now atheist, her experience left her very alert to sexism within religion and elsewhere).
She muses on everything from the diet industry (“Don’t drink the low-cal Kool Aid”), being open to other people’s struggles (“Doors that may be traditionally open to you (may be) padlocked to someone else”), and toxic masculinity (“The fear of only having 97% of the pie, rather than 99%”), to such tricky topics as women’s own sexual submission/rape fantasies, all the way through to President Trump (“He has manspread his way into the White House”) and the Hollywood casting couch mentality that enabled the likes of Harvey Weinstein: “If you have a piece of furniture named after your entitled abuses of power, the establishment has been supporting your bad deeds for too long”.
Elsewhere, Frances-White makes cases for everything from the fun of makeup, to it not necessarily being better if little girls dress up as Spider-Man instead of Elsa from Frozen (“There is an implication that male traits are better than female ones”), through to “bridezillas” constituting a power grab (but only because most men aren’t remotely interested in wedding preparations?), and how perhaps a well-expressed catcall signifies a celebration of female fertility, when men are “fertile until they die”.
She makes it clear that she doesn’t care if people sometimes disagree with her views – the aim is to amplify the female voice per se. Indeed, the credo of The Guilty Feminist podcast (“A microclimate that gives more power, space and assumption of brilliance to women”) comes through loud and clear, with Frances-White including highlights from the show, and interviews with past guests. The result is a passionate, funny, fresh, thought-provoking read, as engaging as it’s informative. Towards the end, Frances-White observes: “Every day of my life, I’ll wake up and not be perfect. I’ll always do and think less-than-feminist things until the day I die.” The point being that Frances-White sees the funny side of her feminist stumbles and misfires, and she wants other women to relax a little too.
• The Guilty Feminist by Deborah Frances-White is published by Virage (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.89 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
