I do not think Roxanne Gay is a bad feminist. In fact, think she is one. Gay says she agrees with most of what a feminist is pushing for, “I am deeply committed to the issues important to the feminist movement. I have a string opinion about misogyny, institutional sexism that consistently places women at a disadvantage, the inequity in pay…” (174) I think that this is what makes Gay a feminist. She agrees with the overall idea of feminism. The idea that turns Gay away from being a feminist is the fact that the word “feminist” can be associated as bad. Some people really get into the idea of feminism to the point where they are saying that men are bad and just get to the pint where they are anti-men. That’s not really what feminism is about. It is about trying to get men and women to have equal rights, not to make sure one gender is better than the other. This doesn’t make her a bad feminist because in my opinion, I don’t think anyone can really be a “bad feminist”. I think that the tension that Roxanne Gay is talking about with autonomy and belonging in the article is that in the article, she is talking about how she does describe herself as a “bad feminist”. Like I said before, she doesn’t want to be called a feminist because it can be associated with other bad things, but she wants to be one at the same time because she sees the problem and agrees with what feminism is trying to accomplish.
