I. On Why Life Is Shit

Sometimes, after I read about another man who raped another woman I respect, I think about an idea I read once in a Marie Calloway article that female separatism is the event horizon of feminism. Sometimes when I can’t sleep I visit this idea like a vacation. It drapes over my mind like a beam of afternoon light, like the hazy dream that it is.

Unfortunately, I’m mostly straight. Fated or doomed to want men, depending on the day. It can’t be a coincidence that most of my closest female friends have expressed, at some point, that they wish they were born a gay man. I've said it too, and for me it’s less the wish to be a man than the sublimated desire to be attracted to people who aren't also your oppressors. To unshoulder the burden of politicized power dynamics in a way that straight girls, regardless of the membership count in the rec league of male feminists, never will.

Never, at least, under patriarchy and the Intersectionality of Why Life Is Shit (also known as white-supremacist capitalism, or insert your preferred awkward phrase here) that patriarchy is married to right now. And reading this essay was all it took to convince me, years ago, that we’ll be living under the consequences of WLIS for more years than can be claimed in one or ten lifetimes, unless we self-destruct first. To paraphrase Tumblr’s resident genius Lazenby, just look at how long it took for most of the human race to become literate.

The printing press, Wikipedia informs me, was invented sometime around 1045 AD. Nine hundred and sixty-nine years later, I learned almost every true thing I know about feminism from reading the internet, the only liberal-arts program that moves faster than a Tinder swipe. I divide the semesters of my education by the websites that I frequented: finding Tiger Beatdown at nineteen was like crashing a junior course without taking any pre-reqs, and early-era Jezebel compensated as a witty, accessible entry into F-101. Right after I turned twenty, the girl-cult that rose around the new classic I Love Dick whispered into my ear and it was my Book That Changed Everything (I wasn't the only one.)

When a Philosophy in Literature professor for an actual college class asked me, after I turned in a paper declaring Zorba The Greek to be artless masculine trash, to recommend some books by female authors for future syllabuses, I sent him a link to Chris Kraus’ Wikipedia page. He never replied.

II. On 3014 AD

It wasn't until I got a Twitter account in 2012 — and suddenly had easy access to the smartest women — sex workers and queer women and women of color and combinations of all of those checkbox words for the vastness of Othered existence — that I realized the decrepitude of what passes for mainstream feminism right now, its insidious uselessness. The appropriation of radical rhetoric by agendas that secretly, smarmily hate women: that’s my millennial feminist inheritance. That’s the third wave.

The third wave is “sex-positive,” a concept that seems like it could have been invented by the Koch brothers, a mainstreaming of female “empowerment” without the redistribution of any actual power. Just slap some rhetorical window dressing on normative sex dynamics and call it progress; call it done.

The third wave is a PC spin on the status quo whose primary purpose is to bolster the bank accounts of rich men. It’s a white man talking on a major feminist platform about why “jizzing” on your face is A Good Thing while doing everything in his power to silence black women. It’s blonde ladies who cry for solidarity while condescending to women who aren't in their demographic zip code.

The third wave is a listicle that a hot, smart girlfriend of mine posted on Facebook called “28 Most Iconic Feminist Moments of 2013.” Ever-curious about the thought processes occurring in minds other than my own, I clicked. The #1 moment is — spoiler alert — Jennifer Lawrence inspiring women to love their bodies. (The irony inherent in a thin white actress congratulated as a feminist heroine of body acceptance goes unremarked. This isn't J. Law’s fault but it might be ours.) The rest of the article positions internet criticism of a Robin Thicke music video and a tampon commercial alongside “International Outrage After Gang Rape in India Sparked Historic Change In Laws.” Iconic!

But the only reason I still remember this list at all is moment #26, in which various women’s groups created a petition for Facebook to “remove its gender-based hate speech.” I quote: “Seeing the potential damage this could do to the company’s brand, Facebook issued an official response. In it, the company recognizes that ‘systems to identify and remove hate speech have failed to work’ and vowed to correct the problem. This was hailed as a huge feminist victory.”

I remember staring at that last sentence for a solid minute. It’s a phrase that has dropped into my head, randomly and incessantly, nearly every day since I read it. This was hailed … as a huge … feminist victory. If the biggest Big Brother of corporations “vowing to correct” a problem-not doing anything but vowing to-is a huge victory, who wants to win? I’d rather hang myself from the bleachers. In a game with such low stakes, victory’s as cheap as the minimum wage.

Which is a useful metaphor, because almost every “issue” can be clarified through the lens of money, and actually has to be if you want to get at any truth. Here’s some: Poverty rates are higher for women than for men. Women are poorer than men in all racial and ethnic groups. Black and Latina women face particularly high rates of poverty. Over half of all poor adult women are single with no dependent children. Elderly women are far more likely to be poor than elderly men. And that’s just in the United States.

This isn't “problematic.” It’s The Problem. The Ryan Gosling meme economy can wait. I Don’t Care About Your Corporate Feminism and I’m drowning in a million words about the sexualization of Disney Girls and it’s difficult to picture what a “huge feminist victory” might actually look like and I think I’ll just go to sleep, I’m so tired, someone wake me up in a hundred years.

Sometimes I think about the trajectory of feminism, which is thought to have begun with the first wave, around the start of the 19th century. That means the modern feminist movement has been around for about 214 years, and if we pretend that the third wave ended on Jan. 1st, 2014: three divided by 214 equals an average of seventy-one years per wave. The better part of a century, and we’ll be well dead in a hundred years; between now and then is the world that I've got, and I’m a materialist at heart. The only real question to me is what’s possible right now.

But as soon as you start taking the idea of possibility seriously, it’s hard to resist becoming an armchair futurist. Sometimes I think about the girls who’ll be coming of age a thousand years from now, which would situate them, in this cosmology, in the middle of the fifteenth wave of feminism. In 3014 AD. The apocalypse as a thought experiment is the easy way out; I think it’s far more likely we’ll go on and on; we’ll merge with robots until we’re more machine than flesh and maybe then women will finally witness the disappearance of rape, poverty, violence, and VIDA.

In the meantime, I’m scratching at my skin and wondering — where the bad feminism at? Where you hiding?

III. On Getting Paid

I already have an idea of the answer, although right now it’s more of a hypothesis than a theory. It’s hiding in the best writing on the internet. The girls slash women I admire most among my peers are subversive in ways that are distinctly post-empire. Cat Marnell might vocally support Terry Richardson but she’s so much herself it’s intoxicating; her writing is its own drug. She’s self-made and directing her own shitshow of a life, doing exactly what she wants to do and send God the bill, and what looks ignominious about that act to basics feels vital to me.

Like plenty of people who lost the white-male lottery, my ideas became radicalized through the self-centered desire to do what I wanted; and from there, out of the necessity of becoming a whole, full person in order to do that. In a culture so diseased, the starkest struggle in feminism is converting yourself. To not only stick your finger down your own throat again and again, purging whatever poison you've internalized — but to find a way to feed yourself replacement ideas for those parts of your insides, and to do all this while managing to remain alive. Surviving in a world filled with the worst thing in world, other people.

Rashida Jones famously told women to stop acting like whores but I want more women to start thinking like them. Because being beautiful is still the inherited job of every woman but sex workers are the only ones getting paid; and in case you've never tried it, appealing to straight men, especially in an extreme (and extremely anhedonic) Maxim way, is real work.

Reading the French feminist Virginie Despentes on this unpaid effort felt like a fast slap in the face. From her book King Kong Theory, emphasis mine:

“Whether walking around town, watching MTV or a talk show, or flicking through a women’s magazine, you will be struck by the explosion of the outer-limits slut look—and very attractive it is too—cultivated by lots of young girls. It’s a way of apologizing, of reassuring men. These kids in G-strings seem to be proclaiming, “Look what a hot girl I am, in spite of my independence, my culture, my intelligence, all I care about is pleasing you. I can do anything I want, but I choose to alienate myself through these efficient seduction strategies.”