Jessa Crispin: ‘Today’s feminists are bland, shallow and lazy’ | Rachel Cooke

Rachel Cooke talks to Jessa Crispin about her incendiary new book, Why I Am Not a Feminist

In her slender but merciless new book, Jessa Crispin pours petrol over pretty much the entire surface of 21st-century feminism, and then gleefully sets it alight. Boom! Up it goes, leaving behind only scorched earth. What she hopes will grow in its place isn't completely clear. "I know! I know!" she wails, when I tell her she offers more questions than answers. But having no desire to be an activist, she doesn't see it as her business to fix the patriarchy. "Maybe this sounds disingenuous, but I was writing for myself," she says. "I just wanted to be clear about what I believe."

The book is called Why I Am Not a Feminist, which is, of course, a lie as well as a provocation, for its author's feminism runs through her veins like blood. Crispin's principles, however, have their roots, radical and angry, in the second wave of feminism, not the third: she, for one, is not about to renounce the likes of Andrea Dworkin and Shulamith Firestone, whose uncompromising books she has, incidentally, actually read.