Cultural critic Jessa Crispin has long been an astute appreciator of the intersection of popular culture and contemporary politics, and when she lowers her opera glasses it’s to issue observations that are inevitably zeitgeisty and witty. She founded the influential literary website Bookslut, which ran for 15 years, and has written several books, including “Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto” – and now wades through a familiar landscape drenched in testosterone in “What Is Wrong with Men: Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity and How (Of Course) Michael Douglas Films Explain Everything.” We talked with Crispin ahead of her Tuesday reading in Cambridge. The interview was edited for length and clarity.
Where did the impulse for this book come from?
I had been asked to write about “Basic Instinct” a couple years ago, when it was being rereleased into the theaters with the director’s cut or something like that. Rewatching it to write that, I was just thinking about how clever it was at understanding the hostility and the animosity between the sexes, that it seemed to speak directly to our moment of #menareacancer, cancel culture, toxic masculinity. I don’t know if anyone has ever embodied toxic masculinity quite like Michael Douglas does in “Basic Instinct.” After writing that essay, I became a little bit obsessed with Michael Douglas movies. It just kind of grew out of that. Like I’d already kind of figured out this attachment between “Basic Instinct” and this current moment, and it just seemed like every new film I watched did something similar – like “Wall Street” kind of explains the crypto bros in a way that I had never really thought about before.
What was your writing process like for this book?
I’m sure it doesn’t look healthy from the outside. My process is that I send a lot of texts that nobody wants to receive to my friends about the sweater Michael Douglas is wearing in “Basic Instinct,” or something I noticed in some other film. I watch things obsessively on repeat, and then I write until collapse.
Because you write such bold criticism, are you ever afraid of a backlash?
Because I have been doing this for 20 years, or something like that – Bookslut started in 2002, so like 23 years – I guess I’m just used to it. Every terrible thing that somebody’s gonna call me, somebody has already called me, and I’ve already had feelings about it and I’ve already gotten over it. So it’s not really shocking anymore. It just doesn’t enter into my brain space. It really did in the beginning, because I had no training to become a writer. I didn’t go to university – or I went for one year, and I didn’t have an apprenticeship – and just started, like a lot of people, talking nonsense on the Internet, and when it became more and more of a job for me, there were certain moments where it felt horrifically vulnerable. But ultimately, there’s only so many times somebody can make you feel bad before you decide that you’re participating in this as well and you can just sort of stop participating in it. Not that it doesn’t hurt if somebody calls you an idiot or sends death threats or whatever, but I just don’t think about it, and it’s kind of easier to shake off at this point.
What is the value of cultural criticism today?
We’re in a slightly strange space. I feel like it has, in a lot of places, replaced actually going out in the world and talking to people who exist. I feel like every time I read something like the New York Times opinion section, I’m basically just reading rich women who live in Brooklyn who are paid six figures to watch Netflix. And they write very serious pieces about how this Netflix show is the most important Netflix show since the last Netflix show, or whatever. And I remember when opinion writers used to have to go to the post office, or the bar, or a diner, and talk to people and see what they’re thinking rather than just watch TV and say whether the TV is good or not. So that part of it I find very alarming. And I like reading criticism, when it’s good, and I feel like a lot of it is not good. I feel like we were kind of in a moment of overproduction of cultural criticism, and I do see people kind of getting bored with it, and so I do see it dying off a little bit. And I think that that’s good – when there’s so much, it becomes harder to find original voices, people who have something to actually say rather than just trying to cram everything through some sort of weak ideology. So yeah, I feel mixed about it. But I think criticism is healthy for entertainment, to culture, to art. You have to have an element of skepticism, you have to have an element of perspective, because otherwise you just get a flabby, lazy culture where nobody feels like they have anything to prove. And you need your artists to feel like they have something to prove.
What have been the biggest influences on your writing?
I’m always reading, I’m always watching, listening, I’m always in a very receptive mode and yet, for the most part, my books would not exist if I didn’t actively pursue being in public and talking to people about what they were thinking, what they’re concerned about, what are their priorities right now. Traveling a lot – and not just traveling in a “taking a selfie in an Airbnb” way, but going out to talk to people. When I’m financially restrained or I don’t have the time or something else has become a priority and I don’t have the opportunity to do that, my work absolutely suffers and I get into a kind of writer’s block. Without the communication and the feedback, I don’t think that my writing has that much to offer.
Like bouncing ideas off of people?
It is more like the idea doesn’t come unless there’s some sort of conversation. For example, I was very angry about – all my books start with some sort of “I’m very angry about …” – how in 2015 or so, and the years right before that, there was this sort of very useless feminist culture. There was this whole idea of “universal feminism”: You just call yourself a feminist and that’s what’s important, it’s the label, you don’t have to do anything feminist, you don’t have to vote as a feminist; just call yourself a feminist, that’ll do the trick, that’ll lead to a better world. I was getting so angry about this, and I was spending a lot of time in Athens and Istanbul at the time, and having conversations with a lot of women in those places about how they perceive Western feminism, how they perceive the sort of writers that are coming out of the United States and being championed as important feminist thinkers because, of course, if you’re an American, you immediately get this international platform to speak for all women. And their books were getting translated and published, and sometimes getting more attention than a Greek writer would receive in Greece, just because they were American. Talking with them about how they felt about this and how they felt about the ideas that the American feminists were putting out was so important to crystallizing something in my brain. The book would either not exist or be worthless if I hadn’t been having those conversations for the year before I started writing.
How do you feel about being given the title “The Patti LuPone of literary critics?”
I mean, I love it. How is that not flattering? I know it’s one of those things where it’s like a slight barb because she’s difficult, she’s abrasive. Whatever, she’s good. There’s no contemporary theater without Patti LuPone, you just can’t even think about it. So I think in some ways it’s an exaggeration, and yet. Yeah, I’ll take being acerbic but good as a compliment/insult any day of the week.
Jessa Crispin reads from “What Is Wrong with Men: Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity, and How (Of Course) Michael Douglas Films Explain Everything” at 7 p.m. at Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Ave., Harvard Square, Cambridge. Free. WBUR’s Emiko Tamagawa joins.
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