Our favorite feminist mom, Tina Fey, spent this Mother’s Day week being even awesomer than usual, wrapping up another season of 30 Rock with a hilariously weird finale and hosting Saturday Night Live for a third time — while six months pregnant. Oh, right, and she’s got the No. 1 book in the country, the uproarious essay collection Bossypants. Here, we celebrate it all with five feminist quotes to live by from her bestseller:
1. “If you are a woman and you bought this book for practical tips on how to make it in a male-dominated workplace, here they are. No pigtails, no tube tops. Cry sparingly. (Some people say, ‘Never let them see you cry.’ I say, if you’re so mad you could cry, then cry. It terrifies everyone.) When choosing sexual partners, remember: Talent is not sexually transmittable. Also, don’t eat diet foods in meetings.”
2. On a group workshop exercise in which women were asked to write answers to the question, “When did you first feel like a grown woman and not a girl?”: “The group of women was racially and economically diverse, but the answers had a very similar theme. Almost everyone first realized they were becoming a grown woman when some dude did something nasty to them. ‘I was walking home from ballet and a guy in a car yelled, “Lick me!”‘ ‘I was babysitting my younger cousins when a guy drove by and yelled, “Nice ass.”‘ There were pretty much zero examples like, ‘I first knew I was a woman when my mother and father took me out to dinner to celebrate my success on the debate team.’ It was mostly men yelling shit from cars. Are they a patrol sent out to let girls know they’ve crossed into puberty? If so, it’s working.”
3. On going to the beach at age 13 with her older cousins: “One afternoon a girl walked by in a bikini and my cousin Janet scoffed, ‘Look at the hips on her.’ I panicked. What about the hips? Were they too big? Too small? What were my hips? I didn’t know hips could be a problem.”
4. On her remorse for edging a female rival out of a community theater role in high school: “Obviously, as an adult I realize this girl-on-girl sabotage is the worst kind of female behavior, right behind saying ‘like’ all the time and leaving your baby in a dumpster. I’m proud to say I would never sabotage a fellow female like that now. Not even if Christina Applegate and I were both up for the same part as Vince Vaughn’s mother in a big-budget comedy called Beer Guys.”
5. “In 1995, each cast at The Second City was made up of four men and two women. When it was suggested that they switch one of the companies to three men and three women, the producers and directors had the same panicked reaction. ‘You can’t do that. There won’t be enough parts to go around. There won’t be enough for the girls.’ This made no sense to me, probably because I speak English and have never had a head injury. We weren’t doing Death of a Salesman. We were making up the show ourselves. How could there not be enough parts?“
