This week Shameless was lucky enough to catch Jessica Valenti, author of Full Frontal Feminism and founding editor of Feministing, while she was in Toronto this week. Here’s what she had to say.
Tell me a bit about the new book [He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut, and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know].
The new book basically came about because a lot of the response I got from Full Frontal was that what resonated with people, especially with younger women who didn’t really know anything about feminism or never had taken a Women’s Studies class, was the everyday inequities, the kind of everyday discrimination that all women face but don’t necessarily think about under a feminist framework, like the pay inequalities or the stud/slut double standard.
So I was talking to my editor and we were like, “Wouldn’t it be cool to do a double standard book, almost like a sexism handbook so when you’re out at the bar and someone says something ridiculous and sexist you can pull it out and be like, ‘That’s totally sexist and here’s why and here’s something you can do about it.’”
And also with Full Frontal Feminism obviously “feminism” was in the title and it did reach out to a lot of women who didn’t consider themselves feminist, so this one we went super commercial and marketable and didn’t put “feminist” in the title so we thought we could subversively get more women into it and then hit them with the message once they were in the book. Sneakiness was the general theme of the book idea.








