How To Make Money: Guides to Feminism are Everywhere, But Do They Actually Help?
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Feminism has been pulled in many directions, co-opted by trends, brands and influencers across the board to suit differing, misleading needs. None more subtle however, than the glossy pages and bubble font of the countless guides, manuals and bitesize depictions of feminism that have creeped onto bookshop and coffee table shelves in the last few years.
When thinking about the guide form, the self-help and pop-psychology genres spring to mind. You might think of the close-but-no-cigar efforts of ‘feminist’ influencers such as Florence Given’s ‘Women Don’t Owe You Pretty’ (2020) as an ’accessible entry point’ into feminism or ex Love Islander Molly-Mae Hague’s girlboss memoir/manual Becoming Molly Mae (2022).
However, despite the clear line between feminism and capitalism, when social topics are diluted, marketed, and commercialised, I fear there is more to the fetishism of ‘guidance’ than meets the eye. For example, with texts like How to Have Feminist Sex (2019) by Flo Perry or Feminism: A Graphic Guide (2019) by Cathia Jenainati, the intention is there, and the content may have helpful takeaways, but there is a clear assumption that this is the way to do it, to win at feminism.
In the same way that you’ll visit a sweet shop and pick up a bon bon or a button, ‘types’ of feminism are popping up everywhere. Financial Feminism: A Women’s Guide to Investing for a Sustainable Future (2021) by Jessica Robinson or the Menopause Manifesto: Own your Health with Facts and Feminism (2021) by Dr Jen Gunter (interesting subheading distinction here) are two examples of topics that are demarcated but heavily under-researched; feminism can be seen everywhere and nowhere.
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What connects all these books - small enough to fit on a dollhouse nightstand - is not only their marketability, but their approach to education. With the word count used up by key terms, it makes it easy to assume that following these steps will result in social catharsis. However, I find that texts like writer Lola Olufemi’s Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (2021), which tackles topics such as work, racism, and education in a distinctly poetic, experimental prose, are more effective in approaching feminism politically and in a circular way, allowing for non-linearity.
So why not just ignore guidebooks? Maybe I am spending too much time on a genre that is easily passed by in a bookshop, as many of the books themselves attest, they are just ‘entry points’ and ‘introductions’ so we shouldn’t expect anything in-depth. In some ways these texts might even be a rejection of excessive navel-gazing and offer a practical and collective approach to the over-use of the self in relation to love or care.
However, what happens when a default reader is assumed in these guides is that it leaves no room for people who use their minds and bodies ‘atypically’. Researcher and zine-maker Lea Cooper refuses to define the zine in their article series In the Zine House, saying that “Whilst genealogies of zines often identify them as the descendants of political pamphlets, perhaps an alternative history can be found in the cultural or creative products of bedrooms and sick rooms.” This says something powerful about what makes a zine, or what makes something ‘feminist’. Does it need to be framed in a predetermined style, or can social change happen unintentionally and indirectly, or if with intention then in unconventional spaces, acknowledging the supposed ‘wasted’ or spilt time of mental illness and sickness. Books like Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent’s Guide to Embracing your True Self and Finding your Happily Ever After (2022) by Chloe Hayden assume an introduction but present a conclusion, an ‘ever after’, leaving little room for the alternative forms of learning they claim to represent.
If guiding is like leading, many want to lead but with little to say. A brilliant piece on the hidden labour of women’s writing in Penguin’s post-war psychiatric books shows the guide form’s sexist history. Yet today, many ‘social justice’ manuals are written by women and non-binary people, with knowledge and expertise (thankfully) travelling beyond the elite. A lot of these contemporary guidebooks are in a way erasing history as well, acting as what Munford and Waters in their book Feminism and Popular Culture term ‘a kind of palimpsest’ (2014: 30) in relation to ‘post-feminist’ texts, meaning a text scraped clean and written over. Feminist guides mimic this, presenting a distinct plan and squeaky-clean feminism that prioritises future over history.
“If guiding is like leading, many want to lead but with little to say.”
Is this guide-fetishism only happening in physical form? Simply put, no. Online, where everything in paper form goes to reproduce, guidebook style is rife. Online communication is packed with ‘therapy speak’, popularised psychology terms such as ‘boundaries’ and ‘gaslighting’ misused in an excuse to end social connections.
Digital spaces should offer a reprieve from the marked pages and endpoints of feminist manuals. Yet, as we know all too well the internet can be a place of information manipulation. Joanna Walsh, author of Girl Online: A User Manual (2022), beautifully charts the narrative of a woman negotiating various identities in cyberspace, and one review perfectly sums up this alternative guidebook’s effect, ‘Girl Online is as much about questions as it is answers’. I think if any form of text isn’t leaving you with questions or a (good) furrow in the brow then it’s doing something wrong and is assuming a simplified and singular user.
Ultimately, I don’t think we should have unguided or directionless feminisms or glorify meandering texts with no obvious point or end. What I feel is that an overemphasis on guidebooks (and books that pretend not to be guides but follow the same patterns) ignores how people come to feminism discreetly or confusingly, through objects or through actions. As Anne Boyer explores in her poem ‘Not Writing’, all the things that don’t seem like work make up who we are. Or how poet Anne Carson’s lecture on ‘still’ moments, such as ‘the stillness of unsent letters’ draws attention to all those ‘mundane’ moments that call us to action.
A less a to b approach to social change can make way for deviations and pausing for thought. Ultimately, if the form of a book is like a body, the guide is perpetuating a damaging beauty image and standard. Rethinking this image shapes a feminism that cares for difference.
Words: Anita Slater
