This a memoir written by the ex-girlfriend of ex-District Attorney, Eric Schneiderman, who was later accused of abuse by several of his exes, including the author of this book, Tanya Selvaratnam. In this memoir, she writes about how they met, and how his abuse escalated, and what her experiences of living with intimate partner violence were like. Apparently this made pretty big news. Trevor Noah even included a joke about it on his show, because it was considered pretty scandalous that a high-up political official forced his brown girlfriend to participate in master/slave play. She obviously found the joke very distasteful and wrote in to complain, for which she received an apology.
I loved this book a lot. I think she did a great job showing how you can enter a relationship with wide eyes and not realize that your partner is an abusive person until it's too late, because of course we want to forgive the people we love when they hurt us in the hopes that they won't do it again. It was wonderful to hear about the people in her life who worked hard to validate and support her, and get her story out there when she needed it. I also loved that she made the effort to point out that some of the behaviors that happen in abusive relationships can be totally fine in a consensual kinky relationship, but the difference is consent, respect of boundaries, and mutual enthusiasm. That's a distinction that not all memoirs like these bother to make.
Some people complained about her privilege but I think it just goes to show how even with a huge support network, money to spare, and an established career, you can still get suckered in by master manipulators and they can still make it very hard to get away. The racial component is also a valid one, too, and she does point out that brown and Black women have good reason to be leery of law enforcement officials when it comes to making reports of abuse.
The intersection of feminism and pop-culture is one of my favorite topics because so often, when we see popular opinion pieces about pop-culture, the story is told from and about the cisgendered (and mostly white) male perspective. TOXIC was of particular interest to me because I came of age in the late 90s/early 00s, and that shit was toxic as fuck. I am still to this day unpacking some of the harmful messages that I ended up internalizing during that time period. And I don't think anything shows those unattainable and shameful standards for women quite as well as how the media talked about certain celebrities, who either couldn't or didn't want to follow the "rules."
I have mixed feelings about TOXIC because while the subject matter was interesting, the way the author talked about some of these women left a bad taste in my mouth. Take the Britney chapter, which dates itself because it came out pre-Britney memoir: the tone of the essay, while sympathetic, feels patronizing; and in retrospect, some of her remarks about Britney feel quite callous and at times even cruel, such as her analysis of the music video "Everytime." Ditum seems to take it as a mournful song about a breakup, but now we know that it's a heart rending ballad about the abortion Justin made her get that she wasn't allowed to talk about.
The section about Paris reads more positively, but suffers the same limitations because it also came out pre-memoir (her most recent one, I mean; she has two). I liked this chapter a lot because I really like Paris Hilton and I think the author, to her credit, really manages to capture how clever and self-effacing Paris is. However, the essay about Aaliyah was painful to read. Mostly because the focus of the essay is not so much about Aaliyah herself but how she was a victim of grooming. R. Kelly is more prominently discussed in this essay than she is, and the way Ditum talks about her, like a helpless martyred waif who was frozen in time like a bug trapped in amber, made me so upset.
I don't feel like the Amy Winehouse and Kim Kardashian chapters were very well done at all. Neither of those essays really capture how dynamic and conflicting those women are. Kim Kardashian seems to be a celebrity that people really struggle to write about because I've noticed this is a theme in other celebrity-focused books I've read. I think it's really difficult to juggle the fact that while she portrays herself as a selfish and vapid celebutante, she is an expert deflector, and she and her mom have turned their name into both a brand and empire. She also is the recipient of a metric ton of shit talk. The way people talk about her and her body (particularly during pregnancy) can be so traumatic that I am honestly in awe that she can leave her house without crying (because that is what I would be doing if it were me). Amy Winehouse was a similar recipient of that level of hate, especially in the late aughts and early 2010s. And, like, I really don't think this essay captures how she was basically destroyed by her fame; addiction almost felt like her way of self-medicating from the stress she received from being in the public eye and that is devastating. It feels very Valley of the Dolls, which basically had the message that the standards are women are such that to make do, you have to be drugged up... or perish trying.
I didn't really care about the two essays on Jennifer Anniston and Chyna, so I skimmed those.
TOXIC said some interesting things and reminded me of some very disturbing aughts trends that I'd half-forgotten (like Tila Tequila), but I'm not sure I'd recommend it unless you are just really interested in 2000s celebrity culture and want to read about it in a book that almost seems to emulate the same gossipy tabloid formula that it sets out to criticize.
I think this is the fourth book of Gay's I've read and as always, she doesn't disappoint. Her books always feel so raw and emotional, but they're written as if you're looking at her words through the other side of a clear glass wall: removed, but with a full view of whatever terrible or beautiful thing she decides she wants to show you.
This book removes that barrier.
HUNGER is probably her hardest book to read, although it's a close call with UNTAMED STATE. This is a memoir about the body: what it means to take up space (especially as a tall, "super plus-size" Black woman), what it means to hunger-- for food as well as acceptance, and how in our desire to fill up the emptiness inside us we sometimes turn to darkness. In this book she also discloses her rape, and the lasting effect it had on both her mind and her body, and how it shaped her sexual relationships in an irreversible way.
She says at several points that she doesn't want to be defined by what happened to her and I fully understand that. When I think of Gay, I think of an honest book reviewer and a phenomenal writer. But sometimes, with celebrity figures, we forget that there's a man (or person) behind the curtain with very real flaws and insecurities. I admire Gay for her bravery in sharing what it means to be a human who has gone through terrible things, and hearing her thoughts on how society contributes to structures that continue to facilitate these inequalities and injustices.
I hope this memoir brings other people comfort and makes them feel less alone.
MEN WHO HATE WOMEN is a very good book, but as other reviewers have pointed out, the incendiary title is a little misleading. The focus of this book isn't really about women-hating men so much as it is about alt-right groups that aim to target men who feel uncertain or terrified by shifting paradigms of masculinity and gender rights, and essentially scapegoat and dehumanize women-- often in the abstract-- to gain what they see as a toehold in the fraying fabric of society. But that title isn't as catchy. :P
Laura Bates, through exhausting research and even some undercover stints, discusses some of the primary groups that are responsible for these regressive stances on sexuality and gender roles, including pick me girls and impressionable teenage boys. She also discusses some work that feminist men are doing to further quality, and how some men who were once caught in the crosshairs of these movements ended up having changes of heart (and she shares their stories, too).
This is one of the most disturbing and upsetting books I've read in a while and I would urge people to be cautious reading if they are sensitive to violent language aimed towards women. I can't imagine what sort of headspace the research for this book might have put the author in at times, and I hope she indulged in some major self-care after finishing. I think this book is informative but probably not transformative. Looking at the reviews for this book, it seems like MEN WHO HATE WOMEN will appeal most to people who already believe in feminism and just want better talking points for understanding and repudiating the other side.
I would have given this a higher rating but it ended up being a bit of a slog. Parts of the book felt very repetitive. The "Men Who Fear Women" chapter, for example, was very similar to the MGTOW chapter, and there were a lot of arguments that felt very circular, even though I agreed with them. However, I still appreciated this book a lot, and I'm grateful for the work that Bates is doing to both highlight the inequalities and abuses many women face as part of their day-to-day lives while also trying to be inclusive towards men and boys, showing how sexism hurts men as much as it does women, often in sadly ironic and unexpected (for the men) ways.
I recently watched Tara Mooknee's YouTube essay, "The anatomy of a 'girl's girl' (& when it turns toxic)," which is an analysis of the trending TikTok topic of girl's girls, what they are, and what they represent within the broader cultural sphere. While reading FRIENDS TO KEEP IN ART AND LIFE, I kept thinking of that video, because I feel like the humor in this book is basically targeted towards the types of girls who think they're girl's girls, unironically.
This was fun but not as good as MEN TO AVOID IN ART AND LIFE. It did get a good chuckle out of me though so it gets at least a three star rating.
LIVING DOLLS is a book that tackles raunch culture and the hypersexualization of women. Both of which are valid subjects, but I'm not sure this book went about it the right way. It actually seemed to share a lot of issues with this other book I didn't like, FEMALE CHAUVANIST PIGS, where a lot of the blame is heaped on the woman. The author complains in the book that because feminism is about choice, people who criticize this sort of party/sex culture are often criticized themselves, when really they're just educating women. And it's like, yeah, okay then, educate-- but also, when women are shaping themselves to fit and benefit from the culture that oppresses them, is it really their fault? Especially when it's either: play the game or lose.
It is possible to criticize society at large without putting women to shame. I've seen it done. TRAINWRECK did an amazing job about this, I thought. It's about how people delight in the humiliation of female celebrities and public figures, but it didn't dress down the women being written about, whereas LIVING DOLLS sort of frames the women being written about as pathetic and sad. The language was also vaguely objectifying, imo. And a little degrading.
While reading this book, I was thinking about this trash BBC show I used to watch called Snog, Marry, Avoid. If you haven't heard of it, you're lucky. It's an early aughts show and I honestly thought I'd hallucinated it in a fever dream until I found old episodes of it on YouTube. Basically, young adults who wear too much makeup or bronzer are taken into this studio for what they call "makeunders," or a makeover that showcases their "natural beauty." It seems to specifically target people who like 2000s party girls (like Jodie Marsh or Paris Hilton), goths and cyberpunks, gender nonconforming individuals, and street performers. And it is SO MEAN. There's sort of this attitude, like, well if you're dressing like this, you're setting yourself up to be looked at and talked about like a freak, and I feel like that's an attitude that some people take with sex workers and even just women who like wearing tight clothes. Which is, in and of itself, kind of participating in misogynist culture because it's saying, if you look a certain way, you're asking for negative attention. Or... maybe just don't be a dick?
Fun fact: Ryan Gosling is a Canadian actor and one of his breakout roles was in the Goosebumps TV series, which was mostly filmed in Canada, specifically the "Say Cheese and Die" episode. His career sure has blown up since then. I know he's been involved with a lot of really famous movies and his bedroom eyes and approachable face have made him quite popular with the ladies. Even-- dare I say, especially-- the feminist ladies.
And because of that, he has become a meme.
I actually knew about the feminist Ryan Gosling memes. They became so popular, they even spawned merch. At one point, Target was selling "Hey Girl" notebooks with his face on them (I actually own some of them). But I didn't know that they were being created by a specific lady on her website, inspired by her work in Gender Studies. What surprised me even more is that I actually already owned two other books by this author, THE UGLY CRY and SELFISH, SHALLOW, AND SELF-ABSORBED (to which she was a contributing essayist).
Some of these blog-to-book novelty publications don't always pan out. The way that this was formatted was a little iffy but it wasn't too bad in ebook and I thought that the jokes paired with the photos were fun. The author said in the foreword that her website has actually gotten people interested in feminism and feminist theory who were hooked in by the jokes, and I love that. In terms of what it offers on an intellectual level, I'd say it's a lot like MEN TO AVOID IN ART AND LIFE. It's a novelty book with intellectual aspirations but it's also not meant to be taken too seriously, either.
CAREFREE BLACK GIRLS is a collection of essays written about the interaction of Blackness and pop-culture. The focus is more on the former than the latter, which seems to have disappointed some reviewers, but if you enjoy think-piece type takes on pop-culture, in the style of authors like Rebecca Solnit or Lauren Michele Jackson, you'll probably really enjoy this. I recently got into an argument with someone over the validity of soft journalism like this, where the point isn't necessarily to share factual, testable data, but cultural opinion. With social phenomena, there often isn't measurable data, so if you want to describe what you see in the world, your samples come from observation and consensus opinion. But how else are you supposed to write about and study culture?
While reading, I waffled between four and five stars. Most of the essays in this book were incredibly strong. I liked the one about how people talk about plus-sized bodies (using Lizzo as an example). I liked the essay about the meme-ification of Breonna Taylor, which tied into performative activism and the commodification of Black bodies for clout. I liked the essay about colorism and how Hollywood still favors lighter skinned actresses. And I LOVED the essay about Mel B and her role in the Spice Girls, which then segued into how Black representation in film and media has changed from tokenism to more authentic roles.
CAREFREE BLACK GIRLS is one of those books that everyone should read but I do have a few criticisms. I didn't really care for the essay about Cardi B and Nicki Minaj's feud. I guess from a "tea" standpoint, it's sort of interesting to hear about a tiff between two famous women, but I'm not really invested in either of them as performers, and apart from some valid criticisms of people who infantilize and marginalize Cardi, denying her Blackness and her potential for growth because of her upbringing, it felt more disorganized and less cohesive than Blay's other essays.
I also thought it was a little strange how the author seemed to suggest that Aunt Viv's character was replaced on Fresh Prince because of colorism because, from what I understand, Janet Louise Hubert was replaced because of an ongoing feud she had with Will Smith behind the scenes. If she was going to use this as an example, it felt like it might have been better placed in her essay about Denise Huxtable, played by Lisa Bonet, who had a similar tension with Bill Cosby, because both Cosby and Smith seemed to resent sharing the spotlight with their incredibly charismatic female co-stars.
Lastly, the author said at the beginning that she wasn't going to define things for readers because she felt like they should do the legwork, and I think that is mostly fair, but then she uses a couple terms that have some nuance when it comes to definition (like hotep, for example), where even after looking it up, I wasn't 100% sure what she meant, or what her particular definition for the term was. I also was unclear if the photos she used at the beginning of each essay were supposed to tie into the essays because sometimes the relationship was unclear (why was Mae Jemison shown before the Cardi B/Nicki Minaj Chapter????).
But overall, this is a really great collection. I liked what Blay had to say and how she wove some of her own personal experiences into these observations. When you look up her Goodreads bio, she has a truly impressive resume, and it's easy to see while reading these essays why she was published in such a wide variety of prestigious media outlets. Anyone who is interested in the development of pop-culture and how it intersects with gender and ethnicity, needs to read this book.
I remember seeing this book everywhere when it first came out, and since I love reading books about feminism, I was really eager to read it. Now that I've finally gotten my grubby mitts on it, I can say that it mostly lived up to my expectations. In this book, Mikki Kendall illustrates (with examples) how feminism has historically failed women of color, and how white women can broaden their intellectual scope to be more inclusive to the intersectional branches of feminism, including BIPOC women, LGBT+ women, and women living below the party line (and these groups are not mutually exclusive). I think the biggest takeaway from this book is that "white feminism" often looks to increase and broaden existing privilege, which doesn't always work for people who already have little to none. While some women are pushing for advancement to a CEO position, others can't get work. Period. In addition to being a rallying call to action and a blistering recounting of harsh but necessary truths, it's also a cautionary tale against being short-sighted and selfish when it comes to pushing for change.
That said, as other reviews have noted, I do feel that this is more of a primer for said privileged women (including myself) than it is for BIPOC women who already know this stuff and probably don't need to be told twice. I do think it's worth reading though because Kendall has a beautiful way with words, and I love the way that she chooses them so as to express her points in language that is spare, concise, and cutting. For me, the best feminist essays are emotionally charged, and include self-referential or autobiographical elements, so in addition to getting the author's viewpoint, you also see how they got to that viewpoint from within the framework of their own lives. You really get that here, and I think it added to the essays in a really positive and beneficial way.
Some of the topics discussed in here are gentrification, fetishization and hyper-sexualization of women of color, gun control and gun violence, discrimination in all forms, microaggresions, tone policing and respectability politics, poverty, food stamps, and violence against women. I thought the chapters about hyper-sexualization and about food stamps were the strongest, and I felt like the author did a good job showing how both society and the government fail women (working or no) who require basic things to take care of themselves and/or their children. I also liked the chapter about how society forces women-- especially BIPOC women-- to grow up too fast, usually against their will, and how these preconceived notions of a woman's coming-of-age can lead to violence or a dispassionate reaction to seeing violence being committed against BIPOC women. The line about respectability politics made me especially thoughtful because it reminded me of a Tweet I saw condemning people (so-called feminists) for the way they talked about Caitlin Jenner and basically misgendering her or making fun of her, and how it's not feminist or progressive to misgender people when critiquing them because it suggests that people are only worthy of their identities when we're in agreement with them, when this should be a basic tenet of decency, if not a human right. I feel like Kendall was making a similar point with this book: that Black women are more than just examples to be held up to make a throwaway argument for cheap points, and that they are rightfully owed a voice and a position at the table, whether or not they are making white feminists at that same table uncomfortable with their thoughts and views.
There were a couple essays in this book that didn't resonate with me as much (the parenting one, mostly because I am child-free and can't really imagine motherhood and the sacrifices that comes with, even though I appreciated her points about child rearing as a BIPOC woman and how that can differ for some BIPOC women below the poverty line who don't have access to the resources that might make parenting a relative breeze for someone with access to more resources, etc.), but there were none that I disliked. I will say that, at times, it sometimes felt like the author was imagining the face of white feminism as a yoga-pants wearing, Whole Foods-shopping, Taylor Swift-listening caricature of privilege, and while that is certainly one face of white feminism-- and perhaps the one that this book is geared primarily towards since they have the most social power and cachet when it comes to privilege-- I do think it's a tactical error to resort to this sort of bland stereotyping when making these sorts of arguments, as it chips away at the otherwise solid rhetoric that anyone could stand to open their mind and check their privilege and makes it far too easy for people to say, "Well, I'm not like that. This doesn't apply to ME." Maybe we're just brushing people like that off as a lost cause for being too thick to realize that this book was written about them, but it's still worth noting, imo.
But over all, this was great. Definitely lived up to the hype. I hope she posts another collection.
I bought CONSENT on a whim and it's a really tough read. It's the story of a young woman who ended up being a writer's "muse" and lover. She was fourteen and he was in his fifties. I believe this was set in the 80s, in a post "free love" France, and even though under-age relationships were against the law, people looked the other way because the man that she was with was an incredibly famous and well-respected writer. For about a year, he used her as a storyboard for his work, while also taking advantage of her emotionally and sexually, but when he became emotionally abusive and she began to realize the truth of their relationship, she broke things off with effort.
This memoir is Vanessa's revenge. The written word was his pride, and she felt like it would be appropriate to get back at him through words. She writes about how his behavior was a pattern, how people-- authorities, even her own mother-- looked the other way. She writes about her shock when she picked up some of his books and saw casual recollections of his time spent with other children, boys and girls. She writes about the difference between rape and sexual abuse, and talks about how abuse can be much more insidious because the lines are much less clear-cut, and abusers know that and operate in those gray areas like experts. How does one consent to something they know nothing about? Spingora emphasizes the need to protect children from people who knowingly take advantage of a "yes" that is groundless.
It's a powerful memoir, and really well written. There's a sense of melodrama to it that reminds me a little of classic V.C. Andrews books. I can see some people didn't like the writing style but most people seem to think it's because she's trying to recapture the enthusiasm and naivete of youth. If that's what she was doing, I think it works, although the style wasn't to my preference. I admire this #MeToo memoir a lot, though, and I think it's so good that she shared her story. It goes into pretty concrete details about her relationship with G., so if sexual abuse is a trigger for you, I'd suggest avoiding the book because she spares no details about the physical elements of her relationship, or her anxiety/depression and almost PTSD-like symptoms after the breakup, when she began to second-guess herself after all of his stalking and gaslighting.
This is like if someone took the concept of Everyday Sexism and wrote an entire memoir about it. I knew it was going to be good from the foreword, where Ms. Woods talks about writing on a train and having a man get in her space on the Subway and mansplain what he thought the book she was reading was really about. Just to give the interaction a taste of delicious irony, the book was Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me.
There are humorous moments in this memoir, but mostly what it made me feel was frustration, sadness, and rage. Starting from when she was a young girl and working to the present day, Woods chronicles one hundred acts of sexism that stand out in her recollection, starting from a boy stabbing her in the hand with a knife for wanting to borrow his digging toys (because girls can't dig) and ending with a Lyft driver with no social graces or sense of personal spaces.
The most upsetting story to me was the one about the doctors who dismissed women's opinions about their own bodies. One dismissed her grandmother's symptoms (which ended up being a heart-attack). Another gave her an unnecessary cervical biopsy, claiming her pap-smear was "irregular." The story about her roommate who refused to put on pants was both amusing and upsetting. The story about the predatory theater technician who kept getting hired and put into proximity with children filled me with incredulity and anger.
Chavisa Woods is an engaging writer. She knows how to tell a good story. She is brave, even though she shouldn't have to be, and strong in a way that she shouldn't need to be. Her story made me wonder how many woman have been forced to don similar suits of armor just to go out and engage in the world. They made me remember similar threatening incidents when I worked in the city, when I was alone and a man confronted me and all my thoughts began to turn to how I could safely get away. They made me think about how it's a surprise and a relief when these interactions are benign, and how I have been trained by society to immediately be on guard and suspicious by default.
This is one of those books that everyone should read. I couldn't put this down and read through it in a day. It's honestly shocking that it doesn't have more reviews than it does. I can't wait to read more of her work, because she is truly gifted with a compelling voice.
Rebecca Solnit is one of my favorite essayists, and she has such a knack for simple but powerful language that often reading her works makes me want to curl up in envy and despair of ever being so poignantly articulate. WHOSE STORY IS THIS? is one of her strongest collections to date. It's a work about feminism in the #MeToo era, and how the biggest obstacle to equality exists in the silent architecture of our society, in all the implicit biases and coded norms that remain uncontested and unchecked.
Some of the topics in this essay: how men are allowed to selfishly devote themselves to their art and expect someone to take care of them for the greater good while women are still expected to be caretakers; the problem with glorifying the confederacy and other problematic figures of the past; the expectation that women and people of color are supposed to make things comfortable for white cisgendered men and not inconvenience society with the inconvenient truth of their inequalities; and the tie to sexism and capitalism, when women are coded as commodities that incels believe themselves entitled to possess.
It's a fascinating, well-done, and eye-opening collection, powerfully written and timely as always. As with other essays of this type, I suspect they're written more for the people who will already agree than the people who should read them but won't (because, I mean), but even if you already agree, she provides such a useful toolbox of ideas and phrases to pour your beliefs into the setting concrete of plain language, giving them a substance they might not have in your own head.
The Guerrilla Girls are a group of anonymous activists who wear gorilla masks when they appear in public, and campaign against social inequality, inequality w/r/t the wage gap, and inequality in the art industry (especially when it comes to representation by women and people of color). I'd heard about them before in some of my other readings but I didn't know of any of their specific work, so it was cool to read a collection of their "Greatest Hits" and see how they put up flyers and did demonstrations to further equality and diversity.
It's worth noting that in the ebook, only about half of the "book" is actual content. The other half is a bibliography and index. This didn't factor into my rating but I know other people might be bothered by that. I liked the book but after a while, some of the campaigns started to feel redundant, especially with the most famous one (the one about how women have to be posing for a nude to appear in an art museum) being shown multiple times. I get it, it was a bomb campaign, but it started to lose its punch after the tenth time or whatever.
I think this is a better resource than it is a book of pleasure reading. If you're writing a paper on art or the history of feminism, I would highly recommend getting your hands on a copy of this because they're cool. And it's important to illustrate (literally and figuratively) that the work of feminism is still NOT done, that women and people of color are still grossly underrepresented across multiple fields, including art, and that there are powerful people in politics who still campaign daily to not only prevent their rights from advancing but also to strip away the extant ones.
I've been so busy lately that I've just been like, "What even is reading? Books? I don't know her." So when I noticed a whole bunch of Chronicle Books were on sale in the Kindle store I was like YAAAASS. Because everyone knows that the best thing to get you back into reading are easy books with lots of pictures.
MEN TO AVOID IN ART AND LIFE is a comical art/coffee table book consisting of classical works of art that have been captioned to make fun of mansplainers. The concept is pretty played out by the time you get to the end of the book but I felt like for 95% of it, the humor was totally on point, and I found myself giggling out loud more than once. I also liked how a list of the paintings used and where they were sourced is included at the end, in case you find one that tickles your fancy and want to see more.
I think people who love feminism and art will enjoy this. As far as feminism goes, this is strictly playing in the shallow waters, but it still got a smile or two and it was exactly what I needed at the time.
IN THE COMPANY OF WOMEN was gifted to me by a friend (who also gave me a beautiful Kate Spade coffee table book). It's basically a series of profiles about female (and nonbinary-- more on that) creatives, ranging from writers to woodworkers. Each woman gets a picture and sometimes you get to see pictures of their studios or homes. Each woman answers the same questions asking them about their work and aspirations.
The questions got a bit repetitive after a while, although I loved the two artists who answered with drawings. I loved the rep, though. This book has older women, queer women, trans women, women of all ethnicities (Black, Native, East Asian, South Asian), plus-size women, and even one woman-- a dancer!-- who is in a wheelchair. I also liked how one of the women answered the question "what do you do in the morning to kick the day off right" with "take my antidepressants." YES.
Some of the women were new to me but there were a few I recognized and loved. Janet Mock, Mary Lambert, Amina Mucciolo (it kills me that I didn't get to see their studio), Neko Case, Carmen Esposito, and Roxane Gay were just a couple of the names in here that got me really excited.
Some of the qualms I have: the studio pics were few and far between. As I said, Mucciolo's studio would have been SO COOL to see since they deal with rainbows. It also would have been cooler if these had been alphabetized or indexed by profession. The order seems pretty random and it's hard to find a page again once you flip past it. Also, I think Mucciolo identifies as nonbinary, but perhaps their identity hadn't been fully realized when this book was published? If so, this might be something to address in a reprint of the work. I also think it would have been neater if the interviews had been slightly tailored to the women and their various professions, just to mix things up.
Overall, this is a pretty neat coffee table book although not without some flaws. I still really liked it.
FEMINASTY was an incredible book that I bought purely on impulse. While I adore books on feminism, it was the comparison to Lindy West that sold me. Those are some mighty big shoes to fill, since West is an essayist goddess, but Erin Gibson understood the assignment. In this collection of essays, she tackles subjects such as Mike Pence, high heels, Planned Parenthood, teaching abstinence in lieu of sex ed, period politics, and so much more.
I loved this book. It made me laugh out loud multiple times even though the subjects inside were so grim. She's just so darn funny and I agreed with (almost) everything she had to say (CHUNKY NECKLACES ARE AWESOME, GIBSON, I'M SORRY). I would definitely recommend this book to fans of Lindy West, though, as tonally and politically, the two of them are very similar. The unapologetic feminism and ribald commentary were complete wins for me and now I'm thinking I probably have to check out Throwing Shade.
Exhausting. Infuriating. Demoralizing. These are just a few of the words that came to mind while reading EVERYDAY SEXISM. And despite being published in 2014, in many ways things have gotten worse and not better. The overturning of Roe v. Wade, the anti-LGBT+ laws being passed in southern U.S. states, the gleeful and shaming articles posted about any woman who steps out of line by not conforming to society, whether it was Hilary Clinton's campaign against Trump or Amber Heard's testimony in Johnny Depp's defamation trial, it seems like we live in a world that just really hates women. And that, to put it lightly, sucks.
I like the Everyday Sexism project a lot because I think it did an amazing job showing how so many women have these stories to share, either randomly or regularly, either interpersonally or institutionally. With this book, I was kind of expecting essays written by these women about these experiences. Instead, we're given quotes from the Everday Sexism submissions followed by very dry essays tying to these quotes, sorted by subject, and backed by statistics and real life examples.
Overall, I think this is an important book but it seems more geared towards clueless people who don't know how harmful sexism is and less towards people who have a very good idea of what sexism is. For these latter, each chapter of this book is like being beaten over the head with a mallet. The content starts to feel very samey after a while, and some of it is even repeated. Which, again, works well for people who are still learning but isn't so great for people trying to learn more. It was also a little sad to see the chapter on intersectionality kind of lumping together all forms of intersectionality into what felt like one rushed and harried chapter. I feel like the exotification and othering of women of color could have been an entire chapter on its own, for example. The same goes for women with disabilities. Also, I think I would have liked to have seen a chapter about internalized misogyny and TERFs. There's a chapter about men and how men can be victims of sexual harassment and unfair gender standards (which is important, because the same sexism that puts women in victim boxes also makes it so that society believes women are incapable of being the perpetrators of violent crimes or assault), so I think it also would have been good to point out how women can help perpetuate these self-harming standards as well, and how trans-women can be marginalized by bad actor "feminists."
This is a good resource but I fear it's probably already dated... and it's honestly pretty awful to read, so I recommend reading it when you're in a good and healthy emotional space. Triggers for virtually everything apply and the author doesn't hold back.
Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨
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