Remember when Lauren Duca wrote about the gaslighting of America and suddenly social media lit up with everyone making the same "Who knew that Teen Vogue could do serious political journalism!" half-joke? (It was the new "Who knew Buzzfeed could do [literally anything other than listicles]!") The reason I wasn't surprised and/or patting myself on the back for my intellectual generosity was that I'd had my own version of that moment a few years earlier, when Jill Filipovic -- then a politics writer for Cosmopolitan, something I mostly heard described by women I knew as a guilty pleasure -- made an appearance on MSNBC's Krystal Clear. I had recently finished a graduate program in philosophy and was the social media guy for a feminist campus club, trying to absorb as much feminist journalism as possible, and Filipovic's clarity and insight grabbed me immediately. It was not unlike the first time I'd read Ann Friedman, or the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, which is not as random a second comparison as it might sound.
Filipovic, an attorney before she became a journalist, is always a thorough but uncondescending explainer, with a writing voice that's engaging without being self-consciously showy, and a knack for careful but forceful argumentation. But my favorite thing about The H-Spot in particular, which I didn't know before ordering it, is that -- like the work of Martha Nussbaum -- it's fundamentally and explicitly an Aristotelian ethical project, which is to say that it takes the starting position that political organization should be aimed at the goal of human well-being (as opposed to, say, economic growth). From there Filipovic builds a case, or maybe it's better to say several cases, for specific ways in which American policy fails women and disproportionately women of color in this aim, and concrete ways in which it could address this failure. She does so largely through first-hand accounts of several women across America, in a wide range of socioeconomic circumstances. Because although the institutions and less formal systems in play are complicated, the questions at the heart of all this are simple: What do women want? What do women need?
Filipovic asks these questions without pre-judgment, and without assuming that there are any answers that are too unrealistic to consider. Not that anyone she talks to asks for anything "unrealistic." Partly this is because they often speak from too much experience for the unrealistic to occur to them as something they deserve to ask for, but also, the idea that woman-friendly policy is unrealistic is a Bad Take to begin with. Filipovic doesn't need to be pie-in-the-sky utopian to show how things could be much better for women (and by extension, it should but still doesn't go without saying, for everyone), and many solutions to the problems she lays out would in a different political climate be relatively easily within reach.
The H-Spot is the most interesting applied ethics text I was never assigned. I have admittedly been out of academic philosophy for about five years now, but I really think each chapter (built around topics like friendship, sex, parenting, and food) is brimming with potential paper topics for grad and undergrad students of ethics and/or political philosophy. Even if you're not interested in that angle, if you think "Women should be happy" and "the point of civilization is to make happiness easier for everyone" are uncontroversial claims, but also see that not enough of the world seems to agree with you, The H-Spot is the book for you.
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