Feminasty is an easy book to inhale. Gibson blazes across the page like a firework shooting over a landscape of ALL CAPS and italics for emphasis. It can be hard to keep up at times, but it works for her. It isn't hard to backtrack as necessary. Feminasty reads like the Erin Gibson rants we’re frequently treated to on Throwing Shade, but the writing itself is much tighter. The asides and footnotes are all pertinent and charmingly snide. And there are sources. Gibson brought the realest weapon to the feminist fight: citations in the back. Feminasty is a Best-Friend Book. Reading it feels like having a feminist hype-woman in your corner. She’s taking patriarchal bullies apart with the catty, flippant venom they deserve. She’s pouring you a glass of something bubbly. She’s making you laugh 'til it runs out your nose.
...A self-proclaimed 'feminasty' whose superpower is 'repackaging lady sadness into digestible comedy,' the author leverages her outspoken Southern persona and her less conventionally feminine characteristics (including a predilection for swearing and gross-out humor) as weapons in the fight for gender parity. In a series of rambling, casual essays, Gibson rages against those she sees as having committed or enabled crimes against women, with the most vituperation reserved for right-wing journalists and politicians, especially Mike Pence and Betsy DeVos ... Gibson is still sussing out her transition to the printed page, and this debut embodies her trademark awkwardness, but she speaks to a generation of women too angry to accept any cultural commentary that isn’t somewhat raw and deadly sincere under its veneer of sarcasm. Flawed but funny diatribes from an emerging comedic voice.
...a collection of essays about the damage wrought by the patriarchy that will have like-minded readers laughing because she’s funny, and crying because it’s true. From the prevalence of the May/December romance in the media to an alarming and hilarious letter to Betsy DeVos about campus sexual assault to Mike Pence and his 'Christian mullet' ('religion in the front, evil in the back'), Gibson attacks far-right hypocrisy with frenetically on-target similes. She writes frankly about female anatomy and sexuality, particularly her own, to combat the notion that things like menstruation and ill-advised sex partners are best not discussed. Gibson uses her very presence as an act of defiance—she’s a loud Southern lady with size-11 feet who grew up poor white trash—and readers will be grateful that she can’t keep her mouth shut.
In her edgy, fierce, and funny debut essay collection, comedian...Gibson serves up scathing wit and graphic observations on the 'insane ways people try to control' women. Part memoir, part consciousness-raising handbook, the 18 essays repackage 'lady sadness into digestible comedy.' ... The result is a bubbly acid bath of clever invective encouraging her fellow women to make the world a better place.
