In Jessa Crispin’s My Three Dads the personal goes beyond self-expression. Via three male figures variously implicated in her life – her Kansas school teacher Joseph Pianalto, the abolitionist John Brown, and Martin Luther – Crispin interrogates the institutions of family, state and religion. The book came at a time when Crispin was “failing miserably at rejecting those structures”; writing it clarified that “society is not built for those attempting to live outside these systems”.

One reason? Money. “Live outside the family? I tried it for twenty years, it did not go very well. We often think of family in sentimental terms, the holidays, the regular phone calls. But family also means vouching for you to start a small business, inheritance, health insurance”. And when violence exists within the family confines, like in the story of the Pianaltos, common yet uniquely hers, family can be turned into a lucrative industry. “Instead of rethinking families so that women are safe, what we get is a four-part Netflix series that wants us to digest violence, eliminate it from our bodies”.

Even superficial progress can be appropriated, warped, and come undone. Take the MeToo movement. While the term originated from Tarana Burke, a Black working-class woman, the MeToo we all came to know is the version portrayed by cinema and the media. Some believed the MeToo reckoning “would trickle down from the wealthy. It didn’t”. Giulia Perona asks about capital and class. Incapsulating an argument culminated in Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto, Jessa quips “Flirt with capitalism? Feminism is in a monogamous marriage with capitalism!”.

Since her litblog Bookslut, through her manifesto, My Three Dads, and now in a podcast and Substack aptly titled The Culture We Deserve, Jessa Crispin is a contrarian we might not deserve. Intimate, piercing, and gloriously funny. An audience bewitched – Crispin’s fascination with tarot and astrology a story for another time – nods and claps at her oblique, compelling analyses.

Towards the end, Crispin repeats advice from her podcast: “Organise locally as much as you can” if you want to “rethink structures”. In her native Kansas, local organising is what recently enshrined abortion rights in the state’s legal system, something “wonderful, although it shouldn’t be a woman’s job to do that”. A teacher highlights the objectification running rampant in his school: “It’s not feminism’s job to change men’s culture!” Crispin points out. Men see in feminism “a betrayal, rather than simultaneous liberation”. By way of response, Jessa Crispin arms us with pity: “Pity can be a powerful weapon. I feel sorry for men, they are living less interesting lives”.