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The feminist manifesto we should all read – even men
Zoe Strimpel’s new book Good Slut smashes the pieties of both Left and Right, and makes a call for women’s sexual freedom
On the Right, a wave of self-described reactionary feminists and their fanboys are convinced that contraception and abortion are corrupting women. On the Left, a heady mix of identity politics and victim narratives downplay women’s ability to escape a life of perpetual danger. These imagined crises converge on the same depressing conclusion: we ladies have too much freedom.
Enter Zoe Strimpel, writer, journalist and columnist for this publication. Her new book, Good Slut, is a deliciously mean and freedom-loving antidote to the prudish portrayal of the 21st-century Western woman. With a cover that would make Georgia O’Keeffe blush (you’ll see it below), Good Slut reclaims the legacy of the sexual revolution as our right to “do it” with whoever we want, whenever we want, as often as we want. (To critics who call her – for she’s also a strong supporter of Israel – a “Zionist whore”, Strimpel responds: “There’s no better sort of person to be.”)
“Why”, she asks, “do we insist on acting like the whole horizon for women is one nuclear cloud of radioactive misery?” Countering those paternalists who say women need protection, either from their own vices or those found in the world around them, Strimpel replies: “It’s true that there is no personal autonomy without risk. But it is way, way better to be free and miserable than unfree and miserable.”
Strimpel’s main argument is that both the Left and the Right wish to drag women back into the private sphere, whether it’s through romanticised notions of stay-at-home motherhood or capitalism-bashing critiques of career women. She runs through a checklist of irritating contemporary complaints, ticking each one off with the kind of self-confidence that should be taught on college campuses. A newfound belief among the young that hormonal contraception is some kind of psychological warfare? Nonsense. Obsessions with women’s bodily functions and their agonies? A “horizon-limiting victimology”. Concerns about online dating heralding the death of traditional romance, marriage and baby-making? “Hook-up culture,” she writes, “is a representation of the very architecture of choice we should be proudly defending”.
This is the kind of fist-punching intervention many of us have been waiting for. Like Strimpel, during the #MeToo years I found myself adrift in a sea of panic about women’s safety. It’s hard to ride two horses at the same time: to acknowledge that male violence against women is a real and terrible thing, but also to argue that our response to it shouldn’t be to shroud women in fear and suspicion.
And it’s here that Strimpel’s defence of sexual freedom is at its most powerful. There might be physical realities to women and men’s differences, but when it comes to notions of sexual equality, she insists, “it is a choice, not a necessity, to emphasise women’s physical vulnerabilities… In a world in which there are brave all-women Kurdish militias fighting Isis, we should be teaching girls and women – as I plan to do with my own daughter – that they are a force to be reckoned with, mentally as well as physically.”
Women’s freedom of choice, Strimpel says, has been enabled and enriched by the values and gains of Western capitalism. Her book is subtitled How Money, Sex and Power Set Women Free. Admittedly, when writing most strongly in this vein, Strimpel can sometimes seem to paint just as simple a picture of the “good woman” as the targets of her ire do. The chapter titled “Let’s Be Careerist, Bitches!” should leave us in no doubt as to her views on stay-at-home motherhood. Each to their own, but most women have jobs, not careers, and spending time having fun with your children while cleaning your own floor is, for many of us, preferable to leaving them with strangers while being paid peanuts to clean someone else’s.
The undervaluing of motherhood, Strimpel thinks, is overblown. I disagree, and find this position to be the sole major disappointment of Good Slut. (It was, by comparison, merely annoying to read her celebration of Bonnie Blue or, worse, Lily Allen.) For the remaining irregularities between men and women’s freedom still rear their ugly heads most obviously when motherhood comes into prospect. To paraphrase Engels, capitalism might be excellent at providing technological advances that improve women’s quality of life, but it depends on a private sphere that reproduces and replenishes labour power for free. And women are still the ones expected to pick up the saucepans. If we want to get serious about their liberation, to grasp why becoming a mother has become a site of political and psychological angst is worth serious consideration.
Still, in every other area, Good Slut is the kind of optimistic, pro-freedom argument we dearly need in our misanthropic times. It draws on interviews with feminists old and young, personal anecdotes from Strimpel’s youth and reflections on the challenges she faces as a newly single mother. There are still many more roadblocks to demolish before women can truly call themselves free, but already, Strimpel argues, “we can choose how to fill our cup so that it looks way more than half full.”
Ella Whelan is the author of What Women Want: Fun, Freedom and an End to Feminism. Good Slut is published by Constable at £22. To order your copy for £18.99, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books
