Please Stop Calling Yourself a ‘Feminist Badass’:
Let’s consider the case—or at least the memeification—of the badass for a moment. The badass is—and in many ways remains—the face of fourth-wave feminist sanctimonium, the symbol of all that is righteous and unassailable about modern womanhood. She is the state-of-the-art version of liberated femaleness, the ne plus ultra of self-sovereignty and zero EXPLETIVE giving. The best thing about the badass club is that just about any female possessed of a scintilla of self-sufficiency can qualify. Once upon a time, when the word was rarely used, you more or less had to escape captivity in North Korea or sit in a Greenpeace raft in the Southern Ocean facing down the harpoon of a Japanese whaling ship in order to be designated a badass. Today, no such bells and whistles are required. A woman need only take it upon herself to educate a man on the ways in which he is mansplaining, wear a “Nasty Woman” T-shirt, or just say the word “vagina” a lot, and she, too, will be conferred badass status.