“…feminism, she argues, has been rebranded into banality. The universalising of feminism has been a kind of declawing. It has made it pointless … [Crispin] rails against feminism as self-empowerment, and is determined to rediscover its true and radical potential … Crispin is unafraid to say that if feminism did actually make women happier, giving us better jobs, marriages and orgasms, ‘the proselytising would be unnecessary.’ This book’s real bite comes when she talks about power and how women use it. The more money we have, the more we are able to buy our way out of patriarchy. The notion that equality is about living the way men live is not radical – we have to reset the values and dismantle the whole shebang … Some of these ideas are just floated in the book, and they need more work. But she is always sharp. Her discussion of ‘outrage feminism,’ which exists primarily online, is a breath of fresh air … Crispin is telling us that we have to imagine something better in order to build it. Feminism as self-absorption, as an add-on label to a new lifestyle, has got us … where exactly? Where we are now. Stalled. Look how quickly we can go backwards. When did feminism get so small? When it became polite, unthreatening and marketable. Crispin blasts through all this by asking us to think big, properly scarily big.”
–Suzanne Moore, The Guardian, February 15, 2017
