At what point does a book become unreadable? When the reader can think of quite literally anything<\/em> \u2013 however degrading, however painful \u2013 rather than sit down and read it. By the time I reached chapter two, \u201cLet\u2019s Be Careerist, Bitches!\u201d, of Zoe Strimpel\u2019s latest non-fiction offering, Good Slut<\/em>, I had scrubbed the toilet, cleaned the gutters, submitted to a full-body wax. None of these ordeals proved as punishing as trudging through Strimpel\u2019s hectoring defence of the capitalist logic behind the female sexual revolution, and the lusty argument for greater sexual promiscuity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For those who look on the bright side of life and are unfamiliar with the columns of the Spectator <\/em>and Telegraph<\/em>, Zoe Strimpel is a conservative writer and a historian of dating, gender, intimacy and feminism. Her knowledge of feminist theory is substantial and wide-ranging; Good Slut<\/em> is peppered with references spanning the feminist spectrum. In her journalism, she more often swings her bat at general grievances with the world, which include \u2013 but are far from limited to \u2013 the tyranny of modern airports; museum gift shops \u201cpromoting the audacious lie that Israel is committing genocide\u201d; Italian cuisine (\u201crevolting\u201d); people who love sharks (\u201cthey are truly hideous killers\u201d); Brooklyn Beckham (brat); Emma Watson (banal); Le Creuset (basic); farmers\u2019 markets (cultish); and Germany (\u201cweird, yet dull\u201d).\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n But in these so-called \u201canti-rational times,\u201d Strimpel laments, it is vital to get \u201chot takes right\u201d: to \u201cmake sure the wrong ones don\u2019t just swirl unchallenged around the ether, seeping into sensibilities, discourse, and norms\u201d. In her attempt to do so, Strimpel has produced Good Slut<\/em>. In this purported antidote to contemporary feminist debates across the West, both ends of the political spectrum have barricaded themselves in, immobilised by fear-mongering and a fixation on victimhood. To summarise it more clearly than Strimpel manages, on the left-hand side of the ring are the MeToo leftists, concerned primarily with the intervention of the state and bureaucracies in women\u2019s lives. They see structural inequalities, such as capitalism and the patriarchy, as the root causes of women\u2019s economic exploitation and the violence perpetrated against them. On the right-hand side are libertarian feminists, who believe they are protecting women from threats reinforced by cultural norms. They seek to strengthen the traditional nuclear family, often resisting multiculturalism, and aim to empower women through entrepreneurship and personal responsibility rather than through systemic reform. What unites them is the idea that women need protection from external forces, which systemically discriminate against them.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n But it has unequivocally never been a better time to be a woman, Strimpel argues. \u201cWomen\u2019s pain, injustices, experiences and achievements are taken more seriously now than ever before. What\u2019s more, the opportunities in free societies are endless: whether sexual freedom, bodily autonomy or financial independence, women can, should and will \u2013 if they desire \u2013 have it all.\u201d This argument, of course, is not her own, but a Lidl-grade dupe of Helen Gurley Brown\u2019s <\/em>1982 self-help guide, Having It All: Love, Success, Sex, Money\u2026 Even If You\u2019re Starting With Nothing.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n For progressives, as Strimpel outlines in a chapter yuckily titled \u201cTrad femmes and the Menstrual Left\u201d, the \u201cleft gale\u201d is now blowing in an \u201canti-girlboss\u201d direction, rendering ambition no longer \u201ccool, or even acceptable\u201d. These whingeing, wallowing lefties, still nursing the wounds of MeToo and stubbornly insisting that the patriarchy exists, remain unable to move on. They hate catcalling and pervy bosses. Yet what the slim, attractive idiots apparently fail to grasp is that thousands of women \u2013 \u201coverweight, older, handicapped, or otherwise deemed sexually invisible\u201d \u2013 would simply kill <\/em>to be ogled by a pervert on the street. One might foolishly suggest that women deemed unattractive are also subjected to sexism \u2013 often more insidiously so. But no matter. In this telling, objectification exists only through the narrow prism of privilege.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The central thesis of Good Slut<\/em> is both simple and confused: toughen up, bitches. It\u2019s time to \u201cgrab life by the ovaries\u201d. Preventing sexual assault, in Strimpel\u2019s telling, is not about challenging masculinity but about creating a deterrent. In one of the book\u2019s most absurd passages, she proposes mandatory martial arts training for all women, specifically designed to \u201cdisable male genitalia\u201d. This is a dispiriting regurgitation of Camille Paglia\u2019s 1990s theory of \u201cAmazon feminism\u201d, which emphasises female physical prowess as a route to achieving gender equality. But Strimpel\u2019s version pushes the idea beyond the point of being both cuckoo and logistically herculean \u2013 it is fabulously insulting. To suggest that all victims of sexual violence could have avoided their fate had they been better at executing crotch-disabling \u201cbites[s] to the groin\u201d, eye pokes, punches and headlocks is a fundamental misunderstanding of the complex ways in which sexual assault occurs. If that were not enough, Strimpel calls for women to be empowered by example of \u201cwomen in serious combat roles\u201d in the United States and Israeli militaries. Let little girls no longer grow up in fear; let them be inspired. They too, just like the boys, could one day mow down civilians in the street.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n The right, in case you missed it, are advancing a \u201cregressive, illiberal domesticity utopia\u201d, one in which women are expelled from the workforce, compelled into motherhood and deprived of birth control. \u201cThere is more respect for mothers in ancient Talmudic Judaism,\u201d Strimpel observes, \u201cthan there is in contemporary Texas.\u201d The new feminist right also commits the greatest sin in Strimpel\u2019s view: they think casual sex might not be good for women. Consequently, they regard its fallout \u2013 \u201cabortion, the morning-after pill, being ghosted, dumped or otherwise dropped after sex\u201d \u2013 with some degree of caution.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Simple fools. As Strimpel repeatedly makes clear, in a tract that could more honestly have been titled Everyone Else Is Wrong Except Me<\/em>, none of these things could possibly be harmful to other women, because they are not harmful to her. Sexual promiscuity is, at base, good \u2013 because she enjoys it (this is made very, very <\/em>clear, with paeans to \u201criding the cock carousel\u201d aplenty). That being ghosted might make another woman hate herself, that multiple partners can lead to UTIs, or that abortions can be traumatising? Irrelevant. There is no middle-ground argument, no acknowledgment that yes, it can be positive for women in the West to explore their sexuality and have access to a full range of contraception, while also recognising that some women are perfectly content with one partner for life, happy to stay at home, and uninterested in becoming a \u201cGood Slut.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n If only these women \u2013 on both left and right \u2013 would prostrate themselves before capitalism, \u201cthe most dynamic, promising system the world has ever known\u201d. Perhaps then they might finally recognise how enviably cushioned their lives are. The left\u2019s hostility to neoliberalism, in Strimpel\u2019s telling, casts women as \u201cfundamentally objectified and preyed upon, due to the operation of the \u2018system\u2019 in its many guises, especially capitalism and patriarchy\u201d. They believe, apparently, that every sexual and moral problem is systemic, capitalist in origin, and that \u201censlavement to a demonic market has perverted us with the idea that motherhood is comparable with careerism.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The real problem with neoliberalism is that it parades \u201cchoice\u201d and \u201cempowerment\u201d for the privileged few while ignoring the structural barriers that constrain the majority, reducing collective liberation to little more than personal advancement. But any attentive reader of Good Slut<\/em> will quickly discover that working class women \u2013 and any women outside the \u201ccock carousels\u201d of the metropolitan West \u2013 do not figure nearly as prominently in Strimpel\u2019s concern as the city-dwelling girlbosses climbing the ranks at Goldman Sachs. That capitalism enriches already wealthy women while leaving poorer women further behind; that increased industrial production can wreck the quality of life of factory workers outside the West, many of whom are women and girls; and that unchecked capitalist expansion accelerates climate change \u2013 all of this goes unmentioned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the solutions Strimpel offers for women in the depths of poverty \u2013 when she finally remembers to acknowledge them, some 170 pages in \u2013 is liberation by OnlyFans. In one particularly gross-out section, she cites a statistic claiming that \u201cnearly half a million people per year in England alone say they consider suicide because of financial stress.\u201d Her proposed solution? \u201cA DIY subscription model for explicit material [which] offers considerable financial relief that could potentially be literally life-saving.\u201d That Strimpel cannot see the glaring flaw in this hyper-capitalist prescription is\u2026 astounding. The notion that women sliding toward suicide might be rescued by uploading pictures of their boobs for a \u00a32-a-month subscription is a dystopian offering. Feeling empowered yet?<\/p>\n\n\n\n This Good Slut, then, is a confused and unhappy creature. It cannot decide whether it wants to be a serious, academic study or a wet papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 combo of leftover columns. The cover \u2013 three chillies sidled together to suggest a vagina (vegetables artfully arranged to resemble genitalia; another retro throwback, Georgia O\u2019Keeffe was doing this a long<\/em> time ago) \u2013 rather unsubtly signals that this is, fundamentally, a book about having lots of sex as often as possible. Miraculously, though, Good Slut <\/em>manages to be both boring and outrageous at the same time.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n And who, exactly, is it for? The ideal reader of Good Slut<\/em> would need to be staunchly individualistic, concerned primarily with her own enjoyment, pleasure, and upward mobility, serenely untroubled by whatever \u2013 or whomever \u2013 might bear the consequences of that trajectory. She would also need to be able to poke out men\u2019s eyes, while also placing their seduction at the altar of her entire life. (She would, come to think of it, be a lot like Zoe Strimpel.) Perhaps she is Kemi Badenoch, who described the book as a \u201cchallenge to the culture of victimhood and pessimism around young women\u201d, which is \u201cwell made and worth serious thought\u201d. But in the fractured, divided feminist landscape of 2026, it is striking to encounter a text so furiously sure that it is modern, while being in reality curiously out of step with contemporary debate. This book is devoted to a preoccupation that few feminists seem especially animated by, not thoroughly chewing down on hot topics such as the trans debate, surrogacy, grooming gangs, religious oppression or abortion access.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n But these feminist tendencies didn\u2019t come from nowhere to oppress women, as Strimpel seems to imply. These are semi-rational responses to the problems women see around them, and they won\u2019t be wished away by telling women how grateful they should be to be free. They\u2019re not asking for freedom. In their imperfect way, they\u2019re advocating for political and cultural changes to improve women\u2019s lives. While this may technically be the best time to be a woman in the West, that\u2019s like saying it is the best time in history to have a vital limb amputated. You may survive; you may even adapt. But you would be forgiven for wishing it did not have to be this way.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Strimpel\u2019s supposed utopia, the United Kingdom, police in Northern Ireland attend a domestic abuse incident roughly every 17 minutes. In 2024, Unison reported that violence in the workplace, rape, violent assault, honour killings and forced pregnancy were all rising in England and Wales. In the end, Good Slut<\/em> feels less like a manifesto, or even an autobiography, than a monologue. In this promised land, it is hardly surprising that feminists remain troubled \u2013 still preoccupied not with the \u201ccock carousel\u201d or girlbossing, but with violence, power, and the stubborn endurance of harm. To suggest that money, sex, and individual power might solve this is naive and shallow. If freedom \u2013 narrowly defined as choice, consumption and upward mobility \u2013 had been the answer all along, why do the fundamental injustices that animate feminism persist, mutate, and, in some cases, intensify? And if those problems mutate, so does feminist thought, well beyond the ladette absolutism of Zoe Strimpel, yet another aspect of Nineties politics that is well beyond its sell-by date.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Good Slut: How Money, Sex and Power Set Women Free<\/strong> Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n [Further reading: Gis\u00e8le Pelicot is not your hero<\/a>]<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\r\n
Zoe Strimpel
Constable, 256pp, \u00a322<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Source link www.newstatesman.com<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At what point does a book become unreadable? When the reader can think of quite literally anything \u2013 however degrading, however painful \u2013 rather than sit down and read it. By the time I reached chapter two, \u201cLet\u2019s Be Careerist, Bitches!\u201d, of Zoe Strimpel\u2019s latest non-fiction offering, Good Slut, I had scrubbed the toilet, cleaned the gutters, submitted to a…","protected":false},"author":243,"featured_media":785,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_analytify_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/243"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=784"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}