Blackstone Audio Inc. - Feminasty: the complicated womans guide to surviving the patriarchy without drinking herself to death

Certain names have been changed, whether or not so indicated in the text.

Copyright 2018 by Erin Gibson
Cover design by Anne Twomey. Cover photography Ricky Middlesworth. Cover copyright 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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First Edition: September 2018

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018946511

ISBNs: 978-1-4555-7186-4 (hardcover), 978-1-4555-7188-8 (ebook)

E3-20180717B-NF-DA

To women.

You are not my competition.

During the Great Depression, Lysol was the number one form of contraception for women. You read that correctly. Lysol, the number one product for cleaning up elementary school puke, was marketed back then as a feminine hygiene douche for women. Feminine hygiene in the early 1930s wasnt about keeping your flapper hoo-ha fresh and minty; it was woman code for birth control, which was illegal. So Lysol stepped in and became a womans first and only resort to prevent pregnancy.

While the days of disinfectant douches are behind usbecause we are too young to have experienced it or because it melted our insides and we diedwomen still have about four hundred million obstacles to overcome. Some we know aboutunequal pay, under-representation in government, reproductive restrictions, lack of floor-length mirrors in hotel roomsbut a lot of them are harder to identify. Theyre the white noise of oppression that weve accepted as lady business as usual, and the patriarchy wants to keep it that way.

Too bad I dont give a fuck about what the patriarchy wants.

Im here to make sure were smarter than the patriarchy. That we identify every single way theyre trying to fuck with our lives. That we see through their lies and deceit and power-hungry motivations and find ways to subvert and destroy their system.

Its time to go HAM on the patriarchy. And Im just the bitch to show you how.

For the last nine years, Ive dedicated my career to repackaging lady sadness into digestible comedy so that we can all be a little smarter and a little savvier and can laugh together at the insane ways people try to control us. For the past seven years, Ive been the cohost of the absurdist political comedy podcast Throwing Shade, where Ive been talking shit about Mike Pence since he was just a small-time rat-eyed worm man/governor of Indiana. The time Ive spent reading about his antichoice state legislation is more than Ive invested in getting my brows waxed, and I am very punctual with my facial hair maintenance. On the show, Ive covered womens issues, from Catholic hospitals subpar treatment of black mothers to female students being kicked out of proms for wearing suits to the WNBA pay gap. Throwing Shade wasnt my first job verbally eviscerating the worst of the worst. As a political writer/director at Funny or Die, Michele Bachmann, Megyn Kelly, Michelle Duggar, Jan Brewer, Mitt and Ann Romney, and the entire state of Utah made making fun of them too easy. But I truly owe my career to my first job in political comedy. As the host of Modern Lady, a segment on the TV show InfoMania, I researched the shitty trends of women in the media, like female cops all being victims of a crime or celebrity breastfeeding shaming, and made them funny. Or tried to at least. Youve never seen my An Independent Girls Guide to Valentines Day segment and you never will.

My transformation into a childless, career-obsessed, nail-biting, hell-bent feminist she-devil banshee was not easy or fast. It took me twenty years of soul-crushing defeats completely tied to my gender. When I was eight years old and standing a cool adult height of five foot nine in the third grade, I was a loveable, joy-filled dork who found the inner confidence to rock pink geometric Garfield glasses AND size 10 (adult) hot-pink Reebok high-tops. As a kid, I had my head in the clouds, dreaming of being the next Steven Spielberg. Dreams that were effortlessly crushed by teachers who didnt have the imagination to consider a woman just as capable of standing behind a camera and bossing people around while the director of photography does all the work.

In junior high, having never grown into my massive feet, I tried to be acceptably cool, not the way I want to be cool, cool by getting contact lenses, which allowed me to see that even without glasses, I was still a gangly geek with a bad home perm who played the clarinet and wore paisley MC Hammer pants. I was made fun of, had chronic nosebleeds, and was known for farting as I tripped up the gym bleachers. Shitty preteens made fun of my nose hairs, told me I was ugly, and one seventh-grade boy threatened to murder me in science class once a week in graphic detail. My sister was also having a hard time, so we held our own school dances in the yard space under our A-frames deck, and a trickling of other white trash children would wander over after WrestleMania to eat pigs in a blanket and dance to C+C Music Factory.

I stumbled through high school an unfuckable dork, and in college I blossomed into a functional alcoholic with a sporadic sex life and a complicated eating disorder that involved taking daily double doses of appetite suppressants, drinking Starbucks venti vanilla lattes, and smoking more cigarettes than Humphrey Bogart and Kristen Stewart combined. I wanted to go to college to study photography but was scared people would think I was weird (I was weird; I am weird), so I got a useless marketing degree.

I was on a very specific life track. A track that ensured I would marry the first guy who was nice enough to hold my chunky highlighted hair as I vomited spaghetti and vodka into my Nine West pumps in front of the dumpster behind Club Europa. Then wed have three terrible children, all of them different combinations of the worst things about both of us. Hed have the NERVE to divorce ME at forty-five, and Id be relegated to taking my kids to soccer practice wearing oversized T-shirts printed with things like I Gave Him the Skinniest Years of My Life while watching him and his new girlfriend, a twenty-five-year-old Toyota repair shop receptionist named Mollee, feed each other corn dogs in the bleachers.

But before I headed down that path, my Feminist Jesus carried me on the beach of life just when I needed her. Tria Wood, a fierce, independent feminist, came into my life and set me on another road. She gave me a copy of Susan Faludis Backlash, which I read in three days. The book unraveled the suppressive gender sweater Id been sweating in my whole life. I stopped hating myself and other women and redirected my rage at the dumbass, cis straight white men in authority who were ruining my life with their power, religion, wealth, and sex eyes. I started figuring out who I wanted to be and erasing the person I