Can you be a feminist and care about your appearance? Yes. Can you be a feminist and be attracted to men, great big hairy oppressors that they are? Yes. Does caring about your appearance or being attracted to men make you a better feminist? Of course not. Right, glad we’ve got that sorted. What’s for lunch?
Ah, if only it were that simple. Because Polly Vernon knows that you can’t get a book published unless it’s at least, ooh, 60,000 words long (yes, Ian McEwan got away with On Chesil Beach, but he is Ian McEwan). And so her theory of “hot feminism” – which would probably struggle to sustain a long magazine feature – is stretched on the word-count rack until its rhetorical joints pop out of their sockets, spilling endless paragraphs about the importance of grey marl jersey and words like “chillax”, “gorge” and “atmos”.
But I am getting ahead of myself. What is a “hot feminist”, I hear you whimper from beneath a fortress made of unread copies of Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex? I’ll let Polly explain:
“Hot like: hot yoga, and hot topic, and also ‘hot’ as in ‘sexy hot’, obviously,” I told my favourite, longest term editor, N. “Hot as in ‘potato’ and ‘dangerous’ and ‘relevant’ and ‘ouch’. Hot Feminist!”
The “hot feminist” is not afraid to worry at endless, tedious length about her appearance and she is definitely not at all defensive about being a “shavey leggy, fashion-fixated, wrinkle-averse, weight-conscious kind of feminist”. She even has her nostrils professionally waxed, which I would have thought would lead to rivulets of snot running down your face like a toddler at a birthday party. But what do I know? I’m a “presentable feminist” at best.
Later, we will learn that Vernon is very down on feminism that involves telling other women what to do – because heaven forfend a revolutionary movement should do anything other than validate your existing life choices – and she doesn’t mind being wolf-whistled at “if I consider the wolf whistle to have been delivered with profound reverence”. She is totally on board with men opening doors for her, positively chillaxed about Photoshopping because she has watched Steven Spielberg films, duh; and she legit doesn’t care if there aren’t enough women on panel shows because “I can’t stand TV panel shows”. She’s also unbovvered by Page 3 because internet porn exists, although she does generously concede the possible existence of patriarchy, noting that “of course, it may well be that the smaller things and the bigger things are interconnected”.
At this point, I wondered if Vernon had recently read Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl, and simply decided to present herself as the living incarnation of its “Cool Girl” stereotype:
I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot.
The only reason I don’t subscribe to this theory is that if it were true, seven pages of Hot Feminist would surely be devoted to outlining the plot of Gone Girl and making winsome remarks about Ben Affleck’s penis. You can’t waste material like that.
The whole marketing strategy of this book relies on winding people like me up; yet at the same time Vernon tries to pre-empt any potential criticism by insisting that contemporary feminism is too judgmental. Criticising the book not only marks you out as not hot (not even hot like a hot potato) but also unsisterly. Well, sorry. Contemporary feminism can feel brutally critical, but that is partly a feature, not a bug. There are hard conversations to be had within any radical movement about how much accommodation with the status quo is desirable, or even necessary. You can heed the words of Audre Lorde – “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” – or you can concede that small victories are worth more than unfulfilled ambitions. What you cannot do is rewrite feminism into a sloppy self-help movement whose main aim is to make you feel better about your thighs.
After bravely demolishing a succession of feminist straw men (straw women? straw persons?), Vernon moves on to enumerate the causes she is reserving her energy to tackle: the gender pay gap, rape and abortion. It quickly becomes clear, however, that their only purpose in the book is to act as a rebuke to other, lesser grievances, because aside from a general sense that Bad Things Happening Is Bad, Vernon does little more than espouse the current orthodoxies about them. That two of the Real Problems are concerned with the negative, unsexy side of sex also rather undermines the Hot Feminist spirit, sorry “atmos”. Maybe sex isn’t just a cool, fun thing that cool, fun women should be more cool and fun about?
But onwards, because there’s no time for banging on about rape when there are fashion tips to be handed out! Here we learn about Vernon’s adolescence in Exeter, complete with early forays into fashion – “the major downer on my Sharon stretch, as I recall, was that Lycra technology had yet to reach Devon” – and the news that her biggest style influences are Han Solo and the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Then there is a whole sequence of unimprovably banal nuggets of advice, including an injunction to “shoulder robe” your coat by refusing to put your arms “through the relevant holes (which you may also know as ‘sleeves’)”. We are sternly told not to buy anything in the sales that we didn’t want at full price, a hoary piece of wisdom that is probably older than this book’s target readership. “A spectacular belt,” by the way, “is like an exclamation point holding up your pants.” And if you think that sentence is pure Alan Partridge, try this on for size: “I truly learned the importance of listening later when I started working as an interviewer.” Or perhaps this: “Eat avocado, whenever and wherever it’s an option. Tastes like heaven, plumps out the epidermis.”
The final sections cover motherhood (a great divide, with all kinds of ramifications for feminism, here boiled down to the emblematic fight between mothers and non-mothers for table space in her local coffee shop) and Vernon publishing in 2003 a controversial article about how great it was to be thin, but the backlash was horribly unfair because a) the piece was largely made up; and b) anorexia hadn’t been invented then. She concludes: “Oh, I could go on! I really could. There is so much more to say and a few more tales of the Funny Shit I Did In the 1990s variety to tell … But you’d get bored and I’d get tired.” That landmine not entirely dodged, we then get five pages on how she can’t say no, a process that was obviously brought into sharp relief when her agent said, “Do you really want to wrap a wafer-thin cloak of political theory around a book about waxing your nostrils?”
The worst of it is that underneath the patois and the posing, Vernon is clearly a talented writer. It’s just that the mood of the age and cold, hard economics offer greater rewards for producing a bad, but marketable, book (there’s a bit where she describes what “clickbait” is, and it’s as if you can see the pained eyes of the real Wizard of Oz staring out from behind the giant head). A flash of something different comes in a short sequence where Vernon has left university and gone to work in a bar during the Wonderbra-addled 1990s, where she experiences what it’s like to be objectified while in a low-paid job: “I stropped out of Rumours because a year and a half of being mistaken for the hazy impression of a backdrop for your own tits is long enough.” Here, the writing has an honesty and simplicity not found elsewhere. For once, Vernon drops the manic chirpiness – which is like being locked in a bathroom during a police raid with a children’s TV presenter who has swallowed their whole stash – and admits to feeling less than empowered by her hotness. It feels real.
And that is the unspoken truth at the heart of Hot Feminist: it turns out that what is most empowering, really, is money, and the choices that money can buy you. When Vernon counsels her readers to eye up men in the same way that men ogle women, to sleep around without worrying about the need to settle down, or to buy as many lipsticks and razors as they want, she is advising the small section of developed-world women who have disposable incomes and no caring responsibilities to enjoy their historically unusual economic power. “Raging, shameless sexiness” is only empowering as a leisure activity, alongside a job that pays enough to cover your rent and bills. Otherwise, it is yet more unpaid work; the way that you try to attach yourself to a man and siphon off a little of his economic power for yourself.
Deep down, I suspect Vernon knows this. But Conventional Feminist isn’t going to set the tills ringing. Then again, neither is this book’s true title: Stop Me When I’ve Hit the Word Count.
• Helen Lewis is deputy editor of the New Statesman. To order Hot Feminist for £11.99 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
