its-a-jungle.thumbnail.jpg[Please welcome Amanda Marcotte to our comments. -- dn]

Damn, I wish we'd had this book 20 years ago.

Back in the '70s and '80s, an earlier generation of young feminists donned sturdy discrimination-proof (at least, we hoped) dark suits, sensible heels and floppy bow ties; armed ourselves with graduate degrees, expensive briefcases and game smiles; and set out for the newly-opened wilderness of the working world in the jaunty assurance that with just the right amount of spunk, smarts, and sex appeal, we'd soon convince the boys that there was plenty o' room in the wide world of commerce for everybody. Sure, there'd be adjustments -- and the odd snake-in-the-grass or dinosaur encounter to tell your granddaughters and the EEOC about -- but by and large, we were pretty convinced that taking or rightful place alongside the men was going to be good for everyone, once the guys got over the initial shock of seeing us there.

Of course, the old joke says that you can always tell the pioneers by the arrows sticking out of their backs. It soon became clear that the wilderness we were breaking wasn't a wide-open prairie readily welcoming new homesteaders; it was a treacherous swamp, dark and mysterious and filled with venomous creatures we'd never seen before -- stealthy and dangerously territorial beasts that would rise suddenly out of calm waters, drop unexpectedly out of trees, or come streaming out of the ground in numberless hordes to halt your progress at the moment you least expected it.

It was a jungle. And the weapon we needed most was the one we were most specifically forbidden to wield: a sharp sense of humor, flexible enough to adapt to a vast range of circumstances and pointed enough to draw some real blood and stop predatory critters in their tracks.

Amanda Marcotte, who broke a lot of tough new trail herself as member of the first wave of progressive feminist bloggers, has finally written the guidebook to this jungle as it stands now (and oh, yes, you better believe it still stands) in 2008. It's A Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments is a brave, insightful, and comprehensive tour of the whole swamp. And what I got out of it was what Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, knew all along -- that floppy bow ties, sensible heels, and even graduate degrees won't get you nearly as far in this jungle as a cheetah-print loincloth, matching gold bicep cuffs, and swift and deadly aim when sinking a well-honed arrow of laughter straight into the black heart of looming and fearsome stupidity.

And oh my goddess, is that stupidity ever out there. Marcotte has an uncanny instinct for homing in on the various double binds and rank hypocrisies that sustain the patriarchy, and there's not a rock, bush, or thicket of modern feminist life she leaves unexplored. High school. College. Abstinence-only education, the anti-choice cult, and other high fundamentalist weirdness. Obnoxiously conservative family members who ask unanswerable questions about your love life, family intentions, or politics. Dating strategies -- and the men who try to run "feminist" head-fucks on us. Men's rights activists, women's magazines, Playboy, and the Girl Scouts. And the full range of modern female bonding rituals, including cooking, shoe shopping, sororities, motherhood, and weddings.

Marcotte, who grew up in West Texas and now lives in Austin, says that she set out to make feminism appealing to younger women who are facing a different landscape -- and have recourse to different weapons and tactics. I was hooked in the very first chapters, when she went straight to a truth that's been formative in my life, but I've never seen discussed in any feminist book in the Official Canon. That truth is that Red America is, if anything, more intransigently patriarchal than ever -- but also produces feminist heroes of its own, and offers its own unique contexts (e.g. when all the women are stuck in the kitchen together doing dishes while the men laze around the porch) for feminist dialogue. Feminism does exist out there in the boonies; it just doesn't look, dress, or talk anything like the feminism you see in more educated and urban areas. It has different issues, and it deals with them in different ways, many of which are invisible to feminists from the city. As a result, America's two feminisms tend to talk right past each other, when they're not eyeing each other with deep suspicion and contempt.

An early musing on country music stars brings this home. "It's a sick obsession and I know I should abandon it, but it's hard," writes Marcotte. "Many of them are Republicans. Many of them are badly educated rednecks. And pretty much all of them are sanctimonious Christians. But I love me some sassy female country music stars. And they are a source, for many a red-state-surviving feminist, of tips for hanging in and kicking ass."

As a daughter of the rural West myself, I've always known that that the sturdy ranch women who raised me were unbelievably independent and tough, and had their own ways and means of keeping the men on their side and out of their way -- most of which would never be found in any women's studies syllabus. But Marcotte knows that towns like Lubbock are where the biggest battles are still being fought -- and that country music stars are probably doing a better job than anyone of pointing up the similarities between the two camps.

Deconstructing consumer culture is a fine old feminist sport, but Marcotte skewers its seductions with a light and easy hand that's seldom angry or mean. By now, it's a given that $27,000 weddings, four-inch-heels, and college sororities are symbols of patriarchal oppression. Nobody needs to tell us that anymore. So Marcotte spares us the academic exegesis and goes straight to the more visceral point, which is: this stuff is patently, simply, undisputably absurd. It's expensive, distracting, and adds almost nothing to a life well-lived. Decades carefully-inculcated princess dream bubbles have proven surprisingly durable in the face of stern feminist finger-wagging; but Marcotte shows just how fast a quick spritz of derisive laughter can make them pop.

Your mileage will no doubt vary, but the part of the book that spoke most deeply to me was Marcotte's deft explanation of why and how we ended up in that 1980s work jungle without the most devastating and useful weapon of all -- our sense of humor. The root of the problem, she notes, is a double standard in how we define "a sense of humor." Men are display their sense of humor by telling jokes. Women show theirs by laughing at men's jokes. Which sets up a great double bind where:

  • Women who don't laugh at men's jokes (even when they're mean and sexist and not funny) are Not Funny.
  • Women who tell their own jokes are, by definition, Not Funny.
  • Women who tell jokes that make fun of individual men, the patriarchy, or men's sacred cows are dangerously, seriously Not Funny.

I learned this hard way once -- I gently teased a hip, young, high-tech CEO in front of other people. (Actually, the remark was self-depricating; but he misinterpreted it to think I was talking about him -- it's always about them -- and not myself.) Miscommunication aside, I'd been at the company for quite a while -- long enough to know men at all levels kidded this guy all the time, in ways that were far rougher than anything I'd dare to dish out. But coming from a woman, it was Not Funny. In fact, it was so Not Funny that the entire executive staff was outraged at my apparent cheek....and I was out on the street in a matter of weeks.

Marcotte lays out the consequences for would-be subversives. Being a funny woman makes you insufficiently pious, possibly crazy, and almost certainly unfuckable -- though men won't hesitate to steal your jokes if they're the least bit good, and completely forget that they didn't think them up themselves. It also makes you a mortal threat to male pretensions of competence and power. The more seriously a man takes himself, the more viscerally he dreads being laughed at.

And that's what makes funny feminists like Marcotte an asset to the struggle. It's a Jungle Out There is a fast, easy, breezy, and very rewarding read that clarifies where our battles remain -- and ensures that the next feminist generations won't be sent out into that wilderness unarmed.