Like Roxane Gay, I am ambivalent about feminism and the opinions of “louder”/high-profile feminists. Some essays were stronger than others, but none were super impactful to me personally. To be fair, this collection lives up to its title: it is deeply personal, from the pop-culture interests to the anecdotes and specific experiences. She does acknowledge her own privilege and the non-universality of her position, but it still feels like she’s trying to make proclamations about the Female Experience and feminism in general — with lots of contradictions regarding whether something is a “good” contribution to the conversation (ie, problematic or pure, yikes) and whether any media/individual has the responsibility to “be everything” for the group of people it addresses or represents. Sometimes it felt like she was listing viewpoints rather than coming to conclusions, which didn’t help.

Part of my issue with these essays is not that I disagree with the themes of her essays (though I do), but that I don’t think they’re analyzed or even conveyed as effectively as they can be. This might be an eye-opening read for some people, but for the most part she covers well-trodden ground and doesn’t add much to the conversation. I feel that these essays are outdated, and I don’t just mean the court cases and legislature referenced; the concept of intersectionality is only briefly, imperfectly touched upon and never named. (Honestly, until she mentioned sex with men I was under the vague impression that Gay was a “Black lesbian” — an example of my own preconceptions and biases, in part influenced by the readings assigned in my Women & Gender Studies intro class — because those are the two main groups she seems to focus on, to the point where she glosses over or fails altogether to mention the issues faced by Latinx, Asian, bisexual, and to some degree transgender people. It’s not that I expect her to address every possible intersectional topic, but erasure is real and important and underrecognized.)