The International Journal of Trolling and Online Participation 2(1)

Review: Do It Like a Woman by Caroline CriadoPerez

Jeremy McDonagh1
Abstract: Do It Like A Woman (and change the world) is part
of a contemporary wave of populist feminist writing which
also includes How To Be a Woman (Caitlin Moran, 2012), Bad
Feminist (Roxane Gay, 2014), Men Explain Things to Me
(Rebecca Solnit, 2014), Not That Kind of Girl (Lena Dunham,
2014), and We Should All Be Feminists (Chimamanda Ngozi,
2014). Where Criado-Perez differs from her peers is in
choosing not to write from a first-person perspective, despite
the personal experiences that inspired the book, and instead
bringing together a collection of stories from over 25 different
sources to carry her theme.
Keywords: Caroline Criado-Perez, Feminism, Women.

Introduction
The stories in Do It Like a Woman come from women who have attained
high levels of education, and further to this have undertaken roles and
responsibilities which have given them high profiles in national media.
There are stories from women who have achieved record-breaking feats
of physical power, for example Felicity Aston, who was not only the first
woman to cross Antarctica alone, but the first person to ski alone across
Antarctica using only personal muscle power. With apparently so much
being accomplished by individual women across the world, one might
wonder what need there is for a book exhorting more change?
It was in 2013 that Criado-Perez took on a campaign with the highest
profile of any of her projects to date. With the removal of the image of
Elizabeth Fry from the reverse of the Bank of England 5 note, in favour
of one of Winston Churchill, all images on British currency were of men,
1

Centre for Research into Online Communities and E-Learning Systems, jmcdonagh@crocels.com

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with the exception of the serving Queen of England, a constitutional
monarch. Criado-Perez set out to challenge this as an act of
discrimination, with the creation of a petition which received enough
support to convince the Governor of the Bank of England to announce
a change of plan, with the intention to feature the novelist Jane Austin on
the Bank of England 10 note from 2017.
According to Criado-Perez, it was the day after this announcement that
she received her first online rape threat, and soon after that a deluge, and
that the same dynamic that had enabled a group of people... to take on
the Bank of England and win was now turned against her with terrifying
speed. It is her belief that this response, to what was a small issue,
shows it's not about what women are doing, not about feminism. It's that
some men don't like women, and don't like women in the public domain.
So, whilst Do It Like a Woman is a work that, in the view of one reviewer,
has had the good sense to deliver an overview that grasps the essential
impetus of feminism as collective, connective action by a diversity of
women it is clearly a work that has been motivated by personal
experience. Criado-Perez recounts it in passing to make a wider point
about how victims often end up being blamed for the abuse they suffer,
and otherwise allows her interviewees to speak at length and for the most
part their stories are told in their own words, but, inevitably, she has a
point to make.
It has been said that the profiles are a useful way to illustrate the kinds of
barriers women come up against and howthough the manifestations
vary in severity in different countries and regionsthe underlying themes
are often the same.
Whilst it has been noted that a strength of Criado-Perezs perspective is
in her own multicultural upbringing, and the related decision to bring an
international perspective to Do It Like A Woman, I consider it to be
irrelevant at best, and harmful at worst, to the core argument of the text.
In chapter 3, Leading Like a Woman, in particular, the concentration is
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on the stories of Middle Eastern women, several of whom have had
adverse experiences within the UK asylum system, and the complexities
involving potential cultural clashes, disputes around refugee laws make
the imposition of a strictly feminist perspective almost impossible to
scrutinize independently.
Do It Like a Woman is organised into 5 sections, corresponding to the
defining ways in which the subjects have, and the reader can, be assertive
of either their femininity, or their individuality as a woman. The ways are
by doing it like, speaking like, leading like, advocating like and choosing
like a woman. These sections correspond approximately to 5 main points
of Criado-Perezs argument.
The first is that, in order to be recognised as a strong individual, a woman
is perceived in terms of the male stereotype, or rather that a strong woman
is often reduced by reference to the female stereotype. The second is that,
in an inversion of the unattributed quotation that an eloquent woman is never
chaste, sexual violence, and threats thereof, are a symbolic attack on a
womans right to free speech. The third and fourth are that the world looks
very different when it has been designed around you and your (referring to the male)
needs, and that there is the need that women should fight for justice in a system
designed without them in mind, and fight for it to be changed. The fifth is that
choice means removing the barriers, to action and to speech, which
prevent women being free.
The main subject of the first argument, that strong females are reduced
by reference to their stereotype, is illustrated by the stories of Felicity, the
Arctic skier referred to earlier in this review, and of Victoria, a Greenpeace
activist who climbed The Shard in London. It is explained that the feats
of these two women were promoted in the print media with reference to
their emotional states; Felicity wept her way across the Arctic, whilst
Victoria was an angry activist.
That women still tend to be represented as weak and inferior, and seen
primarily through body images and sexual connotations produced by the
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mass media ruled mostly by men, is supported by the work of Marijana
Dragas. However, Criado-Perez undermines her argument with a number
of hypothetical references to imagined headlines, and to what-if scenarios
involving gender-swaps (i.e. what if it were a group of men who had skied
across the Arctic, or climbed the Shard?)
It could be interpreted that the women whose stories feature in Chapter
1 of Do It Like a Woman are succeeding in spite of their gender, and that
they are neither stereotypes of women or of men, but are representative
only of individuals. The stories of Felicity the skier, Candie the artist,
Dana the beatboxer, and Victoria the activist are of goals reached. Where
problems are surmountable, they are resolved. Where they are not, the
individuals simply move on, and to find higher, more rewarding
challenges to utilise their skills. It is therefore arguable that it is only
through the collectivising of their gender identity that they are subjected
to stigma.
An eloquent woman is never chaste is the quotation used by CriadoPerez to develop her argument in chapter 2. The quotation is
unattributed, and claimed in the book to have originated in Renaissance
England. The apparent anonymity of the source is significant, as it
appears to Criado-Perez that the sentiment is held in the present day, in
the shape of those who use online social media to abuse her and other
women like her.
In exploring examples of where women have been subject to physical or
verbal violence of a sexual nature, Criado-Perez makes two surprising
concessions. In an example of the practice of Female Genital Mutilation,
it is explained that group of women were responsible for enforcing the
practice (p.78). In another, it explained how little support was offered by
white feminists for Inspire, a counter-extremism organisation aiming to
provide a voice for British-Muslim women, with some accusing the
organisation of racism (p.97).

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The threat to a womans act of speech is presented in the severest terms
within the book. Whilst the examples of women who do have their
actions scrutinised in the hope that they will resort to an emotional
stereotype, the examples of women who speak are mixed with those who
are silenced. The problem with the argument is contained within the
excessive context from which the examples are drawn. Whilst the
aforementioned contention that the abuse targeted at Criado-Perez came
about because some men don't like women, and don't like women in the public
domain is a good inference to the best explanation, it does not provide
for a good generalisation.
To take as an example the issue of Female Genital Mutilation, it is argued
soundly that female genital mutilation is a ritual act practiced specifically
on woman, and that genital mutilation is a harmful practice, therefore it is
a misogynistic act. Through examples, it is further argued that FGM is a
widespread problem in Africa, and that groups of women are to be found
enforcing the act, therefore this is evidence that even women are
inculcated by perpetual, institutionalised misogyny.
But, despite that the practice of FGM is also prevalent in those countries
from where many other of the stories in the book originate, it is not a
problematic practice within the UK, except as a hidden problem. Not
only is FGM a problematic example to illustrate a universal concept of
misogyny, but its legal status within the UK is one shared by the abuse to
which Criado-Perez, along with other featured women such as Laura
Bates and Mary Beard, was subjected.
As previously suggested, the stories of chapter one can be seen to show
the success of the individual. By arguing, as is the stated purpose of
Chapter 3, that the 'world looks very different when designed around your needs',
Criado-Perez draws attention to the biological (as suggested in an example
by the roboticist Angela Lim, p.168) and socialized differences of sex
which necessitate a collective identity. And, in choosing to tie this
argument to chapters entitled "Leading Like a Woman," and "Advocating
Like a Woman," the suggestion is that a greater representation of women
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in senior, decision-making roles is what is required. Whilst continuing to
provide the same mix as in chapters 1 & 2, of citing research into the
damage lack of female leaders can do, whilst providing case studies of
successful individuals, what the book does not do is provide solutions to
increase female representation overall.
A positive review in the British left-of-centre news-weekly The New
Statesman has compared Criado-Perezs work to the 1970s feminist
publication, The Dialectic of Sex (Shulamith Firestone, 1970), in how
both recognise technology as an unpredictable but certain force for
feminism & gender equality. Whilst Firestone mused on revolutions in
reproductive technology, Criado-Perez shows that for better and for
worse, it is the internet, not in vitro fertilisation, which has become the
enabler of the new 21st-century feminist movement.
The significance of the Internet and social media is present in stories
throughout Do It Like A Woman- in the use of Instagram by graffiti
artists (p.30), the Everyday Sexism Project (p.112), political campaigning
(p.143), and taken in the positive light of the above mentioned review, Do
It Like A Woman can be taken as a popular manifesto for networked
feminism, as described in its American form by the Barnard Centre for
Research on Women. Building on research by the Pew Research Centers
Internet & American Life Project, which suggests that it is women aged
18-29 who are the power users of the social Internet, its own research
suggests that almost half of this demographic has engaged in participatory
politics, and that the major strength is a decentralised, accessible and
intersectional ecosystem which catalyses rapid and large-scale action.
A negative review in the online libertarian magazine Spiked, citing claims
by its own journalists into how in the West at least, feminism has never
been less necessary, and backing this claim up with statistics which seem
almost as if they were designed to gainsay those in Do It Like a Woman
at every turn. The Spiked review goes on to suggest that the central force
behind contemporary feminism is the desire to be nice to women. This is
not a radical or world-changing idea. It doesnt seek to better society, but
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instead focuses on sanitising the world in order to make it a bouncier,
safer place.
With over 250 citations, Do It Like a Woman provides a lot of facts and
figures for the reader, though as suggested previously, these can seem like
straightforward contradictions of statistics wielded on the opposite side
of the debate. Part of the problem is that, though the proportions are not
excessive, a significant number of these facts and figures are drawn not
from primary resources, but from media organisations on the same side
of the debate. On this basis, whilst it will appeal to those who already
share its politics, it is improbable that it shall win many new supporters to
its cause, and will instead feed back into the kinds of circular channels of
which the book is critical.
There is a danger that the current prevalence of books about populist
feminism could have the opposite effect to their desired outcome, by
bringing the level of popular understanding of feminism back to the level
of Feminism 101 discussions. According to the website GeekFeminism,
discussions in which the elementary ideas of feminism are discussed, often
to sceptics or critics but sometimes to potential allies, can frustrate
detailed specific discussion of issues between feminists, and furthermore
allows concern-trolls to take over discussion space. A concern troll, whilst
significantly different from the abusers described in Do It, is defined by
GeekFeminism as a participant in a debate posing as an actual or potential
ally who simply has some concerns they need answered before they will
ally themselves with a cause, in reality being a critic, who frustrates
attempts at more serious discussion.

References
Dragas, M. (2012) Gender Relations in Daily Newspaper Headlines: the
Representation of Gender Inequality with Respect to the Media
Representation of Women. Studia Humana 1(2), 67-78
Martin, C.E. & Valenti, V. (2013) #FemFuture: Online Revolution,
New Feminist Solutions 8. Barnard Centre for Research on Women.
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Documentation
Holmes, R 2015, What does it mean to Do It Like A Woman in a sexist
society?, New Statesman, Retrieved from
http://www.newstatesman.com/2015/05/she-bangs-drums

Whelan, E 2015, Do It Like A Woman! You Know, While Crying...,

Spiked-Online, Retrieved from http://www.spikedonline.com/newsite/author/Ella%20Whelan

Feminism 101 discussions, Geek Feminism, Retrieved from

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Feminism_101_discussions

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