BOOK OF THE DAY: ANTHEA McTEIRNANwrites The Noughtie Girl's Guide to Feminismby Ellie Levenson Oneworld, 216pp,£ 9.99
THERE'S A classic moment in the BBC comedy Pullingwhen Sharon Horgan's character, Donna, discovers her inner feminist.
When her reformed binge-drinking mate Karen says that her new boyfriend prefers it if she doesn’t wear make-up, Donna tells her to ditch the “surrendered wife” act, pull herself together and put the slap back on. “Women fought for the right to wear make-up. You owe it to the Suffragettes,” she chides.
Donna you're a peach. And, with Twitter-style minimalism, you seem to have summed up British journalist Ellie Levenson's thesis. Because if her Noughtie Girl's Guide to Feminismis to be boiled down to a single message that may well be it.
Levenson’s mission is to make sure that Noughtie girls – that’s you if you were born in the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s – aren’t put off feminism by any extreme elements. “I am a feminist who wears a bra and shaves her armpits. I don’t see it as a choice between being feminine and being feminist,” she writes.
“Feminism can be an embarrassing word,” the well-depilated, lingerie-obsessed Levenson continues. She urges Noughtie girls to embrace their inner feminist like Donna did and develop a personal definition of the term, so that they can be quick on the draw if challenged. Her own definition reads thus: “Feminism is about believing that no one should be treated differently, judged differently, afforded different rights or forced into specific roles in society according to their sex.”
It’s all very worthy. Levenson’s right, of course, life can be a bitch (see, even our idioms are gender biased), but I’m not sure shaving your legs is the way to transform it. Maybe not shaving your legs . . . Or have we tried that before?
Which leads nicely to the distressing crux of the matter. Levenson says that some women are put off defining themselves as feminist because they are intimidated by previous generations of blue-stockinged academics and the unrelenting “waves” of feminism on which they feel they must be experts. In this context, Levenson’s declaration of gratitude to 1970s feminists who “achieved a lot that women today should be grateful for” seems a little insincere. After all, those seem to be the very ladies, she believes, whose hairy pits are costing the feminist movement present-day recruits.
I really wanted to love this book, with its chick-lit packaging and reassuring stance on binge-drinking and sleeping around. I really did. Levenson is right about many things and I know that she is in no way culpable for the blurb on the back of the book which delivers a bitch slap to generations of feminists by declaring that The Noughtie Girl’s Guide to Feminism “rescues the movement from the dustbin”.
But all the good stuff is drowning not waving in a sea of misdirected recriminations. “The word feminist has become too associated with a particular type of feminism, one in which people think they need to be angry all the time,” writes Levenson.
Angry? Moi? No, I’m blinking furious. Did it not occur to Levenson that feminism has weathered the backlash of all backlashes from those who would rather confine it to the seminal feminist tomes that Levenson says we need not read. She would have been better getting on the case of those smug post-modern media blokes who think that women banging on about inequality is a bore.
Time to stop shaving your legs. You owe it to the Sufragettes.
Anthea McTeirnan is an Irish Timesjournalist