Bad Feminist

Gay reflects on niche dating sites and how the Internet affords people the opportunity to feel less alone in their interests. While she often thinks about connection, loneliness, community, and belonging, she hasn’t done a lot of dating, online or in general, and she prefers to date people who are different from her because she finds it more interesting.

The reflection on dating leads to a reflection on television programming. While Gay doesn’t watch a lot of BET (Black Entertainment Television) because she finds the programming low quality, she understands why Black people gravitate towards BET: They and other people of color are often erased and/or stereotyped on other networks. Gay posits that BET fails to represent the full spectrum of Black experiences, portraying Black success only as being a professional athlete or a music artist (or being romantically connected to either).

Gay recalls working as the advisor for the Black Student Association during graduate school. The experience helped her understand why few Black faculty members are interested in advising Black students. Nevertheless, she maintains that this is the duty of Black academics. Her experience with her own students was both respectful and teasing, though they found her demanding because she insisted on their excellence. She attributes this to her upbringing in an immigrant Haitian household, where she learned that she must work three times as hard as her white peers for half the recognition. Gay sees her support network as a privilege many of her students didn’t have. While she was burnt out by the end of graduate school, she felt like she and her students had influenced each other meaningfully.

As a faculty member, she hasn’t sought out or established a Black Student Association on campus, which makes her feel guilty, weak, and like she’s falling short on her responsibilities. She recalls feeling put off by one of her Black students, noting his sense of arrogance and the undertone of respectability politics in his urge to show that he was “different” from other Black people. However, she also empathizes with this student, reflecting that she ended up in academia by displaying an inordinate degree of excellence to impress her white colleagues. Her loneliness and desire to belong make her wonder about the world of the Internet again, and she wishes that finding community were as simple as using an algorithm.

As a youth, Gay visited Haiti during summers, which allowed her to understand the difference between relative and absolute poverty. Her first visit left an indelible mark that she only came to understand many years later in terms of privilege. She defines privilege as “a right or immunity granted as a peculiar benefit, advantage, or favor” (16), and after providing examples of different kinds of privilege, she posits that nearly everyone in the developed world has privilege to some degree. However, the cultural and critical discourse on privilege has diluted the term so much that it is essentially meaningless.

Many people respond to the idea of privilege as though it were an accusation that they have it easy in life, which they resent. Gay clarifies that awareness of one’s privilege doesn’t mean that the privilege is total or that people have to deny the hardship they experience. Instead, it is simply a call to understand the consequences of their privilege. Thus, playing the “Game of Privilege” (similar to the “Oppression Olympics”) is unnecessary and harmful. Multiple truths can coexist, and privilege is both relative and contextual, so it’s better to discuss privilege through a framework of observation and acknowledgement. She encourages her readers to recognize their own privilege.

Gay reflects on her first year of teaching and all of the feelings and awkwardness that accompanied it, despite the constant “reminders” from people that she was fortunate to have a tenure-track job. Entering her classroom for the first time, she realizes that she is the authority figure. Her students don’t know what to make of her, partly because of her appearance. Furthermore, she realizes one day that she is the boring, droning professor that she was so determined not to be. She and her friends from graduate school talk about their similar experiences teaching; they often use the metaphor of drowning to describe the experience.

Gay discusses her relationship with her students, humorously noting that she worries about their wardrobe, their use of phones in class, and the number of times they’ve used the excuse of a dead grandmother to explain late or missing work. A more crucial issue is how many of the students seem to be there only because they’ve accepted the idea that college leads to success. She wishes that she could teach more students who want to be there and that there were more viable alternatives for those who don’t. She does, however, find some of her students charming, although being around them challenges her to maintain professional boundaries and makes her grateful for already being in her thirties. One course evaluation after her first semester teaching describes her as “a typical first year professor” (26). Gay doesn’t know what that means.

Commiserating again with a friend from graduate school, she reflects on having secured a professorship only by teaching in a small town. She goes out to a bar with another friend and drunkenly laments that her students hate her even as she insists everything is great. When the new semester begins, she relives the awkwardness of her first semester, in addition to having to assemble a portfolio out of one semester’s worth of work. When summer comes around, she teaches two more classes and writes a novel instead of resting. The next fall, she finds herself in the same nervous and awkward position but with new responsibilities, still wondering how she came to occupy this position of authority.

In Gay’s loneliness, she accepts a colleague’s invitation to begin playing competitive Scrabble. She didn’t know anything about competitive Scrabble before, but Daiva and Marty, the colleague and her husband, are gracious in explaining the rules, etiquette, protocol, and procedures. Gay finds the formality amusing at first, but she soon realizes the seriousness at her first small tournament in Danville, where she also happens to meet her Scrabble nemesis, Henry.

She arrives to the first tournament with a “dangerous level of confidence” and a self-proclaimed competitive nature (34), although she is the lowest-ranked player in the room. Her first opponent is the top-seeded player in their division, and Gay notes her cockiness and intimidation tactics. Gay loses the match and becomes determined to win her next one, which she does. She loses the third match, but she also wins the next four. Her feeling of increasing invincibility is a distraction from the news and updates from home about her father’s health.

In the last match of the day, she plays against Henry. When she wins the match, Henry refuses to shake her hand in a display of male anger and bad sportsmanship. She’s shaken by his reaction but quickly gets over it. The confidence boost of winning contributes to her self-proclaimed “insanity” in believing she’ll win a much larger tournament three months later. At this tournament, many of the players get under her skin, including those who decide to mansplain Scrabble to her, but she beats Henry again.

At her third tournament, Gay is tired and hungover from her activities the night before. This tournament also creates her new nemesis, the unseeded player she competed against in the first match. Gay makes the same mistake twice, which the other player challenges. Her opponent wins, but it’s her tone—the way that she implies Gay is unintelligent—that Gay finds most upsetting. The loss sets the tone for the rest of the tournament, which Gay finds a painful and humbling experience.