This follow-up to Everyday Sexism is the ideal first book on feminism for young women, but is too restrained. Bates seems scared to show her anger

“Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women,” begins Laura Bates’s Girl Up, “there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.”

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Wait – sorry, my mistake. That was the opening of the radical feminist Scum Manifesto, published by Valerie Solanas in 1967. Here’s how Girl Up begins: “Before social media, the internet was a bit like an electronic version of a library.” Over the next 350 pages – broken up by graphics and inspirational quotes – the follow-up to Everyday Sexism aims to encourage young women to embrace feminism, love themselves (sometimes literally) and discover 100 synonyms for vagina. It’s part handbook to teenage life, part introduction to patriarchy-smashing. Covering consent, dating, body image and role models, it would make an excellent present for a young relative.

Having met Bates a few times, and having followed her work with schools on sex education and with the British Transport police on sexual assault, I have no hesitation in declaring her to be A Good Thing. This book is not a memoir or a confessional – although it does feature a picture of Bates in a bikini to illustrate the evils of Photoshop – but nonetheless it feels infused with the warmth of her personality. Watching feminist debates over the last five years has often felt like being a spectator at the Colosseum (OK, OK, I’ve occasionally been the gladiator, and also sometimes the lion). Somehow, though, Bates has floated above all the rancour and the hurt feelings and the accusations of privilege and the microbeef. I can’t think of anyone with a bad word to say about her.

There is so much that is good in this book that I am frustrated by its omissions

Partly this is down to her fundamental decency, and partly it is about her willingness (or deliberate decision) to avoid those areas of feminism that are pock-marked with landmines. This book knows its audience: it has been written firmly in the register and vocabulary of contemporary online feminism. There are the US colloquialisms – such as several references to “LGBT folk” – which spring from an internet where America enjoys cultural hegemony. There is an invocation to make sure your feminist group has a “safe space policy” using trigger warnings when appropriate. Every bead on the online feminist rosary is here: it is not the job of the marginalised to educate you; don’t say vagina when you mean vulva; feminism isn’t just for women, but people of “all genders”.

There is so much that is good in this book that I am frustrated by its omissions. For example, although various role models are interviewed, ranging from Paris Lees to Mary Beard, there is no sense of feminism as an intellectual tradition. You could be forgiven for thinking that it sprang, fully formed, into life in about 2006. While I understand the “alcopop model of activism” – reel ’em in with fun and relatable causes – it would be great to see some acknowledgment that Laphroaig or real ale are also available for the connoisseur.

This approach also means that there is no attempt to foster solidarity across the generations, or to relate the specific concerns of younger women to a larger ideological framework. There is little reference to pregnancy (except how to avoid it) and childcare, and none to other caring responsibilities. In this respect, the book is extremely in tune with online feminism, which can be acutely, even painfully, attentive to the needs of those who are “agender, asexual, queer, intersex, gender fluid etc”, while simultaneously giving not the tiniest of tiny shits about women over, say, the age of 50. You never hear anyone say on Twitter: “Um, actually, people of all genders are affected by inequalities in the state pension age.”

Girl Up does, however, differ from much of online feminism (and, indeed, the Scum Manifesto) in its relentless niceness. This book would not throw itself under a horse, mostly because it would worry about hurting the horse. Doesn’t Bates long to lose her temper once in a while? And surely, if there is anything that brings young women to feminism, it has to be anger? A burning sense of the injustice that consigns half the population to a subordinate role, paying them less for the same work or not paying them at all to care for others, and wasting hours of their time with commands to depilate and exfoliate?

Bates does gesture towards the possibility of offending or outraging readers. Early on, she declares: “I want to give you a heads-up at the beginning that this book is quite rude.” I feel that a book that politely warns you about being rude will not, actually, turn out to be that rude. She adds that the book has “zero fucks to give” about “societal expectations”, “gender stereotypes” and “cronuts (because why would you take a perfectly good doughnut and make it all dry and flaky?)”. But there is no more leaden social expectation, or more rigid gender stereotype, than the idea that women should be nice. Accommodating. Not too forceful. By definition, feminism should confront that. It should be unladylike.

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And yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that Bates is scared to show her anger at the many injustices she describes in case it is alienating to her readership. Throughout the book, a small drawing is dropped in whenever some particularly egregious bit of misogyny is described. It shows a party horn, and reads “PARP! Sexist bullshit klaxon”. By the end of the book, I hated that flaccid “parp” with the fire of a thousand suns. Parp! FGM affects thousands of girls worldwide. Parp! Every two days, a woman is killed by a partner or former partner.

Then there is a bit where Bates describes a stereotypical “mouthy feminist”: “she’s always banging on about women’s rights, she wears dungarees, never shaves her armpits and is probably a lesbian, which is obviously an insult”. Reassuringly, we are informed, this woman does not exist, which will be news to many of the lesbian feminists I know who don’t conform to contemporary grooming standards and do talk about women’s rights a lot. Some of them may even have, in the privacy of their own 1980s, worn a dungaree. But, no, they must be tidied away lest they scare teenage girls browsing the Feminism table in Waterstones who are worried that fighting sexism is incompatible with wearing lipgloss. (It’s not.)

The restraint is particularly vexing since, in Bates’s telling, there is plenty for girls (or “people with vaginas”) to be angry about: the lack of proper sex education in schools; the double standards that make boys studs and girls sluts; a media that relentlessly sexualises and objectifies female bodies. But even in her media criticism she pulls her punches. We are told that “if you put ‘all grown up’ into the search bar on one national tabloid website alone it comes up with 26,991 results”. Why be coy? It’s the Daily Mail website! Of course it’s the Daily Mail website!

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Then again, this is a book that prefers not to name its enemies. You come away feeling that sexism can be solved if only enough people become aware of its existence; as if systems of oppression are sustained largely by innocent ignorance. Sadly, this is not true. For that reason, consciousness-raising can only take you so far – and while I hope that Girl Up will be the first book on feminism many young women will read, I hope also that it is not the only one.

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