A quotation from columnist Dan Savage has been circulating again in recent months, as democracies wobble and the atmosphere feels bleak. “During the darkest days of the Aids crisis,” Savage recalls, “we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for. It didn’t look like we were going to win then and we did. It doesn’t feel like we’re going to win now but we could. Keep fighting, keep dancing.”
This idea of the necessity of embracing joy runs rampant across feminist and anti-fascist circles. Toi Derricotte’s oft-shared line, “Joy is an act of resistance”, repeatedly crops up in black feminist and queer networks; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently declared on Latino USA that “You’re allowed to be happy. You are allowed to cultivate joy. In fact, you need to”; and Adrienne Maree Brown’s book Pleasure Activism is consistently revered and recommended for its emphasis on embodied pleasure. Rebecca Solnit’s 2025 book No Straight Road Takes You There reminded us that despair is immobilising, and that we must hold on to our victories. “Today might seem the same as yesterday,” Solnit writes, “but this decade is profoundly different than the last, so you must take your measurements in large increments.”
The argument is that progress has occurred, a better future is still worth fighting for, and that joy fuels that fight.
Zoe Strimpel’s Good Slut claims to hold a similar ethos, promising to challenge narratives of female victimhood and to remind women to celebrate modern freedoms they once only dreamt of. But where Solnit and Brown position joy as insurgent practice, Strimpel turns it into a scold. Her thesis is simple: women in the West have never had it so good; capitalism is great for gender equality; contemporary feminism exaggerates harm; therefore women should just stop whining so much.
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The dissonance and dismissal begins almost immediately. In her introduction, Strimpel declares that the “conspiracy of old ... to hold women in contempt, to treat them as chattel ... has collapsed. There is no conspiracy now.” In a month where Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir is released; a couple in Kentucky were arrested for a miscarriage under Republicans’ ongoing criminalising of women’s bodies; and the Epstein files have revealed extensive sexual exploitation, institutional cover-ups, and an organised backlash against #MeToo, Strimpel’s assertion feels maddeningly dismissive.
It’s very possible to argue that conditions for many women have improved while still acknowledging structural misogyny, but Strimpel implies that the latter is the action of a hysteric. The implicit subject of her book is a woman who benefits from the current social order, and anyone with less privilege – women of colour, women in poverty, younger women navigating rising misogyny among peers – appear mainly as abstractions whose complaints annoy. Legal rights are conflated with lived relatives – there are laws against rape, so the problem must be overstated, apparently – while persistent inequalities such are dismissed as mere perception.
Her tone does not help. Throughout the book, she insists on toxic gratitude, asserting that because women’s formal rights have historically progressed, any ongoing critique or activism is ungrateful and unnecessary. Her naivety and ignorance of her own privilege (a word she tellingly presents in inverted commas) are sometimes astounding.
At one point Strimpel writes that she has never experienced sexual violence before telling women concerned about rape culture to simply take up martial arts. Elsewhere she states that her experience attending a genteel boarding school in the 1990s felt safe, therefore girls’ reports of increasing harassment in schools today must be exaggerated. Pics in Strimpel’s personal photo album, or it didn’t happen.
It’s a shame, because at times Strimpel’s training as a cultural historian of sexuality impresses. Her best chapter highlights the abuses of evolutionary psychology, showing how it is weaponised to justify traditional gender roles, particularly in right-wing circles. Her writing is clear and her argument is well-supported, but her blind spots and biases quickly reveal themselves, notably her anti-trans insinuations. Essentialism is bad only until Strimpel herself wants to police the boundaries of womanhood.
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Where the book turns explicitly political, Strimpel fervently defends neoliberal feminism, claiming that capitalism has expanded women’s horizons and that critics of capitalism unfairly judge financially successful women. Some of these points have merit – Strimpel is right that individual women are often expected to solve systemic injustice through personal perfection, and that moral policing can divide feminist coalitions. But she rarely develops these insights, preferring instead to caricature both “progressive literati” and “chastity belters”.
What’s most striking about a book ostensibly about celebrating women’s freedom is its utter joylessness. Strimpel complains that contemporary discourse dwells excessively on stories of women’s pain – endometriosis, infertility, cancer, assault – but seems completely ignorant of the bountiful discourse on pleasure, embodiment, queer kinship, and erotic agency that has defined feminist culture for decades.
She asserts that narratives of suffering dominate because women position themselves as victims, ignoring that the media highlights harm across all subjects, and that it’s politically necessary to name injustice. She herself offers nothing positive, affirming, or hopeful – no accounts of collective joy, no opportunities for solidarity, no dreams for the future, just snark towards other women writers and anyone with beliefs or experiences other than her own.
In Strimpel’s conclusion she claims to have argued for a “fearless new paradigm of unapologetic ambition and confidence” when in fact her book does the opposite. It defends the status quo by devaluing ambitious activism, dismissing challenging ideas and silencing bold visions of an alternative future. The result is myopic and rebuking, less a celebration of freedom than a snide attack on those still fighting for it.
Roe McDermott is a columnist on The Irish Times and a freelance journalist
