Book Review: Feminist Fight Club by Jessica Bennett
A feminist womanifesto declaring the power and equality of women in the workplace.
The Feminist Fight Club (FFC) is fun.
It’s not a finger-wagging, downtrodden look at a woman’s place in society. It’s a celebration of it.
The fun parts:
Part of the fun is the different terms Jessica Bennett uses to describe females in the workplace (and people’s reactions to them). Wordplay abounds. Some favorites:
- Manstruhaters
- Womanspreading
- Manterrupter
- Vagfirmative action
The FFC fills an important void in how to get ahead at work. Often, men provide the success how-tos: how to get a promotion, how to ask for a raise, how to assert yourself in meetings.
As the FFC points out, many of these success tactics that work for men would leave women with negative labels such as “pushy.â€
The rules for getting ahead are different for women, and it’s just not fair.
Here’s what’s not as fun:
Some of the comebacks to sexist remarks aren’t diplomatic. This is a tricky balancing act, both to navigate in the workplace and upon which to pass judgment.
I would never recommend passive acceptance of sexist remarks. A few of the recommended responses, though, are pretty combative, reading almost like revenge porn (you know, the snappy stingers you daydream about that will absolutely slay the person to whom you verbally hurl them).
At work, you sometimes have to bite back the zinger and just save it for a complaint to HR.
The women’s associations near the end seems to act more as a list than a resource. The Burned Out Business Women’s Association (BOBWA), for example, sounds interesting, but all I find of them online is an old WordPress template with one entry.
