Female Complaints
Editor’s Note
Loyal readers may recall a little essay we published way back in our November/December 2002 issue. That issue, called The Rebel Sell: The real reason you can’t stop shopping, rang in as our top seller of the year, and the piece by the same name is still the most popular link on our website.
It was also one of the first collaborations of the cultural criticism tag-team of Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter. That essay became the critically acclaimed book, The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t be Jammed, which was released in Canada in September and in the US and the UK early this year.
So it is fitting that we should now publish the “lost chapter” of The Rebel Sell, an excerpt from a piece that didn’t make it into the book. The treatise on feminism’s failings, called “Feminism for sale,” appears on page 20.
As with the rest of the book, the piece calls for direct political action—rather than personal pseudo-political action—to achieve social change. So knitting your own protest sign won’t get you any closer to freedom, but voting just might. (Got your knickers in a knot turning old T-shirts into custom underwear? Then you’ll want to read this piece.)
I have to admit, some of the women on our masthead (proud feminists, all) took exception to parts of the piece. But then, they’re also the first to point out that making your own underwear in 10 easy steps is no way to change the world.
Since its beginning, This Magazine has “welcomed the voices of feminism … the wonderfully loud, shrill and strident opinion of women,” as contributing editor Susan Crean wrote in the 1992 anthology Twist and Shout: A Decade of Feminist Writing in This Magazine.
“This Magazine allowed us a place to write what we think. Call it a vehicle for exposing the status rot, for engendering new insights, angles and tools for surviving it, the magazine’s most important function has been to publish voices and stories that otherwise wouldn’t be heard or seen,” she continued in her introduction to the collection of works largely taken from the Female Complaints column that ran in the magazine from 1986 to 1991. Sound familiar? The modern-day This Magazine can be just as muckraking as the old.
“Female Complaints was not intended as one writer’s preserve,” Crean wrote. It “was meant to circulate; its voice would be plural, its persona an amalgam of the attitudes and preoccupations of all those joining the circle.”
As it happens, not all of the contributors to Twist and Shout were women, and so we do not think it at all perverse that our call in this issue for a more politically minded feminism should be written by men.
One subscriber cancelled after reading a Female Complaints column about women in the Soviet Union by Myrna Kostash that ran our March/April 1987 issue. Another wrote to call the piece a “strident polemic based on false assumptions.” (Interestingly, a letter from Kostash in response to our March/April 2005 cover story runs on page 2). And so it continues. As always, we welcome your complaints.
Patricia D’Souza editor@thismagazine.ca
