Barreca puts the funny in feminism

Gina Barreca will wear the ugly, polka-dotted bathing suit to the beach. Really, she will, if it makes every other woman over 35 feel better about herself.

“I realized that nobody was looking at me at the beach,” Barreca muses. “They’re all watching those beautiful young people, as I am. It’s like watching Animal Planet. The only people looking at women over 35 at the beach are women over 35, all of whom are poking other people going, ‘Do I look like her?’ I realized I could make them all happy because they’d say, ‘I might not look good, but I don’t look like that woman with the polka dots.’”

As a humorist, feminist and Ph.D. scholar, Barreca has dedicated her latest book of essays, titled “It’s Not That I’m Bitter … or How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Visible Panty Lines and Conquered the World” (St. Martin’s, $24), to topics ranging from chin-hair tweezing to the men that come between women and success in the working world.

“The only way is to laugh bullies off their pedestals,” Barreca says of the modern feminist’s challenge. With her razor-sharp skills of observation and wit, the author hopes to open up a dialogue about the suppressed frustration many women feel with themselves.

For her own writing inspiration, Barreca points to literary luminaries such as Dorothy Parker, who insisted that real humor must have truth in it. “I don’t write fiction because I think if you listen carefully enough in life, you don’t need to make anything up,” Barreca says.

True to form, she then details a highly relatable female quirk: “If you go up to a woman and say, ‘Nice jacket!’ — she doesn’t say ‘Thank you,’” Barreca explains.

“She says, ‘On sale, Filene’s Basement, 20 percent off and I had a coupon — but look at my ass! I look like a house.’ We give the providence of our clothing like we’re art historians.”