Terry is all puffed-up sexual entitlement Jeff oozes chivalric “nice guy” condescension and Van is your bog-standard faux-innocent demanding to be educated. The narrator, Vandyck “Van” Jennings, and his two companions, Terry O Nicholson and Jeff Margrave, are such perfect, brutal caricatures of masculinity, they feel fresh and relevant enough to populate any sarcastic modern-day feminist blog post. Gilman goes for it in a way that even some 21st-century progressives shy away from in the name of diplomacy. Though it reads like a plucky sci-fi adventure serial, at Herland’s heart is an unapologetically feminist treatise.

I think that’s what is so deeply, viscerally empowering about Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 novella Herland, in which three swaggering male explorers discover a lost civilization populated entirely by women. “Cool” girls don’t complain.Īs a loud, stubborn, happily non-cool girl, I’ve grown accustomed to almost never seeing myself represented in media (except as a hairy, bra-burning punchline). Body positivity is not a “cool” segment of identity politics.

It’s not “cool” to complain about sexism in the current blockbuster movie. It’s not “cool” to call out your friend’s racist joke. Cultural messaging is powerful, and for decades (centuries?) the message, not coincidentally, has been that being a feminist is profoundly not cool. Even in 2015, the word feminism still has a chilling effect on most rooms: in certain internet circles, it’s thrown around like a slur female pop stars and actors bend over backwards to emphasise that they’re into equality and stuff, but not in a scary way.

Herland novel