Bad Feminist

Introduction

1. Feminism (n): Plural

Me

1. Feel Me. See Me. Hear Me. Reach Me.
2. Peculiar Benefits
3. Typical First Year Professor
4. To Scratch, Claw, or Grope Clumsily or Frantically

Gender & Sexuality

1. How to Be Friends With Another Woman
2. Girls, Girls, Girls
3. I Once Was Miss America
4. Garish, Glorious Spectacles
5. Not Here to Make Friends
6. How We All Lose
7. Reaching for Catharsis: Getting Fat Right (or Wrong) and Diana Spechler's Skinny
8. The Smooth Surfaces of Idyll
9. The Careless Language of Sexual Violence
10. What We Hunger For
11. The Illusion of Safety/The Safety of Illusion
12. The Spectacle of Broken Men
13. A Tale of Three Coming Out Stories
14. Beyond the Measure of Men
15. Some Jokes Are Funnier than Others
16. Dear Young Ladies Who Love Chris Brown So Much They Would Let Him Beat Them
17. Blurred Lines, Indeed
18. Trouble with Prince Charming, or He Who Trespassed Against Us

Race & Entertainment

1. Solace of Preparing Fried Foods and Other Quaint Remembrances from 1960s Mississippi: Thoughts on The Help
2. Surviving Django
3. Beyond the Struggle Narrative
4. The Morality of Tyler Perry
5. The Last Day of a Young Black Man
6. When Less is More

Politics, Gender & Race

1. The Politics of Respectability
2. When Twitter Does What Journalism Cannot
3. Alienable Rights of Women
4. Holding Out for a Hero
5. A Tale of Two Profiles
6. The Racism We All Carry
7. Tragedy. Call. Compassion. Response.

Back to Me

1. Bad Feminist: Take One
2. Bad Feminist: Take Two

Critical response

Gay was praised for her "wry and delightful voice." The Boston Globe wrote that "there is much to admire," such as her "insightful" essay "What We Hunger For," Bad Feminist "signals an important contribution to the complicated terrain of gender politics." The Huffington Post was more effusive in its praise, writing, "Gay's essays expertly weld her personal experiences with broader gender trends occurring politically and in popular culture," and gave it an 8/10 rating. The Boston Review wrote that "Bad Feminist surveys culture and politics from the perspective of one of the most astute critics writing today." In the United Kingdom's The Guardian, critic Kira Cochrane wrote, "While online discourse is often characterised by extreme, polarised opinions, her writing is distinct for being subtle and discursive, with an ability to see around corners, to recognise other points of view while carefully advancing her own. In print, on Twitter and in person, Gay has the voice of the friend you call first for advice, calm and sane as well as funny, someone who has seen a lot and takes no prisoners."

Time magazine dubbed Bad Feminist “a manual on how to be human” and called Gay the “gift that keeps on giving.” In a 2014 interview with the magazine, Gay explained her role as a feminist and how it has influenced her writing: “In each of these essays, I’m very much trying to show how feminism influences my life for better or worse. It just shows what it’s like to move through the world as a woman. It’s not even about feminism per se, it’s about humanity and empathy.”

The New York Times Book Review wrote that Gay relied too heavily on an "unreasonable strawman" to make her point, and The Independent found that Gay's own contradictions within the book comes off as "intellectually flimsy." The Chicago Tribune noted that while "Gay writes incisively, fearlessly, sometimes angrily, often wittily and always intelligently on an incredibly diverse array of issues: race, domestic violence, pop culture, food, social media, child sexual abuse, the Obamas and, of course, feminism" in her columns, Bad Feminist is somewhat lacking: "why, then, is there not more to admire in this collection of Gay's new and previously published essays? One problem is the aforementioned recapitulation of tried and true analyses, opinions and memes, any or all of which might bear reprising if Gay brought to them a new and original take."

The book was noted for its popularity in feminist circles, with the satirical site Reductress publishing a story about how a woman was a bad feminist because she hadn't yet read Bad Feminist. A group of feminist scholars and activists analyzed Gay's Bad Feminist for "Short Takes: Provocations on Public Feminism," an initiative of the feminist journal Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.