Babes In Boyland

A bit of an uninspired title for this post, I know, but I'm flabbergasted.

Impressed, actually. Gina Barreca writes phenomenally. That needs to be said first. She handled the dodgy issue of feminism and male perceptions of feminism with extraordinary wit and keenness of observation. I am slightly ashamed to say that before I read this book, I had a quite negative perception of feminists. To me, they were the oversensitive females responsible for removing specificity from the English language by destroying such words as "actress," "empress," and any other word whose root could be turned female by changing the ending to "ess," replacing all the gender-based words with gender-neutral counterparts. Feminists were generalized into the same camp as the stubbornly misguided "political correctness" activists, and therefore seemed unequivocally harmful to the English language, something I never really forgave them for.

Barreca, however, has singlehandedly changed my view on feminism as a movement, if not entirely on feminists themselves. Pages 49 through 52, therefore, affected me especially, although the whole book astounded me with its astuteness and wit. "Women have a particular way of using humor to survive," Barreca says, and I believe her, having read such snappy comments as "Gina figures she has plenty of time to decide whether Dartmouth College is the right place for her. Nobody expects her home for nine months." and Tiger's response to the question, "Anybody ever mistake you for a guy?": "No. How about you?" The women central to this novel, in fact, are all intelligent, lash-tongued humans using humor to cope with surroundings both uninviting and unforgiving (although, as Gina's father said, you can always take the next bus home).

The sentence that really endeared me to Barreca's feminist view, however, which is not a feminist view at all, but rather a human view, was this:

Any time a woman breaks through a barrier set by society, she's making a feminist gesture of a sort. And every time a woman laughs out loud--any time a woman makes a noise that isn't a whimper or a cooing sound--she's breaking down a barrier.

In fact, Barreca uses her "feminist" lens to deal tactfully and warmly with male camaraderie and privilege. The students are shown to be thought "faggots" if they like spending time with women more than watching male friends vomit beer, somewhat ironically. And everyone caves in to social pressure. The professors always ask the girls how they, as representatives of womankind, view issues, and the guys were, well, sheltered, overprivelaged, and understandable, in a strange sort of way. Barreca has an interesting way of writing empathetically without commiserating.