Zadie Smith

I don't know what to, you know, people have to come to these conclusions themselves.

It takes a minute, I think.

So I just don't believe in that kind of neoliberal idea of progress builds on progress.

I think each group of people has to figure it out themselves.

And your job, if you've already been through it, is to say, you know, offer support, say, yeah, yeah.

Or when you can see something going a bit south, go, oh, maybe not.

But enforcement, as you learn as a parent pretty quickly, doesn't work.

People will just go in the other direction.

This is what I say.

The difference, I think, between my generation feminists and some of the ones that came afterwards is that we have the concept of false consciousness.

So the belief that you could do something and think it was something that you wanted, but it turns out it's not really exactly what you want.

Willing is a very complicated thing.

It could be influenced by how you want to seem to be, by pressures from other people, by the male gaze, that there is such a thing as false consciousness.

So, I mean, the ultimate example would be

a feminist of my generation might say, even if this person, this particular person says she really enjoys this act, which I find degrading or depressing or self-harming, even if she really enjoys it, says she enjoys it, her saying that

does not end the debate because she might be under false consciousness.

Now, there's a whole generation of women who think false consciousness is just a nonsense concept.

So that's fine.

But I think once you understand that that's a difference, I do believe in false consciousness because I experience it as a human being.

I know that sometimes I say, I really like this.