Feminists Don’t Wear Pink and Other Lies – ed. by Scarlett Curtis

This is a nice collection of essays on feminism, edited by Scarlett Curtis. A large number of celebrities, artists, activists, and others are all explaining what feminism means to them (52, I believe). This means you get a very diverse range of responses, and there’s something in here for everyone. It’s been published with the UN’s Girl Up Foundation, and all profits got to them.

The book is divided into sections Epiphany, Anger, Joy, Poetry Break, Action, and Education. No surprises that my favourite essays were in Anger and Action.

I felt strongly that the first section would be a great read for someone just starting to realise they are a feminist, and may help someone who is just starting to understand the issues involved. I found this section to be personally the least interesting, although it is good to hear from younger women about how they discovered they were feminists.

The later sections were where I really connected with a lot of the writing. Particularly I loved Jameela Jamil’s essay on raising boys, and Keira Knightly’s on her daughter. Both very moving, and very powerful. Both obviously issues that are very important and close to my heart as I have a son and a daughter.

I, of course, also loved the essay on Co-Parenting by Sharmadean Reid. She states the case for separated parents to share child rearing responsibilities 50/50. It’s so obvious, yet it’s unusual. I have been in this situation for a few years now, and from the break up we have shared parenting 50/50. It’s great, honestly. I see so much resistance to it from people I know. Often from the mother who doesn’t trust the father with this responsibility. I can see where this may be valid (from both sides too, with useless mothers and fathers existing), but mostly you chose a decent person to procreate with. Let them shoulder half the job. Don’t let them swoop in for a fun weekend every fortnight. Let them have to remember when parents evening is, or when they need a packed lunch sending in, or when a birthday party is and a present must be bought for it. Don’t take the day to day care away from the other parent. Let them parent too.

There are benefits for everyone involved. The kids still get half the time with both parents. The Father (because it’s mostly the father who ends up in this low contact time situation) gets to parent just as much. And you get HALF YOUR TIME TO YOURSELF. Rejoice. You can get shit done. You can date, and have a life, and run a business, whatever you like with this regained time. In Reid’s essay, she says she wouldn’t have been able to set up and run her successful business without this parenting arrangement.

Who wrote the rule that single fathers only see their children every other weekend? This was a plot line that I scrubbed out of my life. I am not going to pretend it was easy. I would budget five years of emotional hardship for you to hold on to consistency and routine, and to discover with your co-parent what works for you both and your child together as a family. It’s not an easy ride, but stand firm! I promise, it’s worth it.

This is just one of the 52 essays in Feminists Don’t Wear Pink, and honestly is covers such a broad range of topics, it’s just the parenting ones that currently say the most to me and my life.

Another stand out essay for me was Dismantling and Destroying Internalized Misogyny: To-Do List by Dolly Alderton. Now I need to read her book immediately.

I also loved the essay Baker-Miller Pink in the Education section (written by Scarlett Curtis). I hadn’t. even. heard. of. this. before. Suddenly I want to paint my house in it.

Baker-Miller Pink: the calming colour

Overall, a huge coverage of issues in Feminists Don’t Wear Pink. An enjoyable, informative, eye opening, celebratory, collection of essays.

Pussy: A Reclamation – Regena Thomashauer

Oh wow. This is like self help on the strongest drugs currently available. To empower myself I need to locate my inner Goddess. She is accessed via my pussy. We are reclaiming that word by the way, and therefore it must be said 100 000 times over the course of the book.

I’m not normally one for such insanity. Really, really, it is not my thing. At one point it is claimed that via accessing the energy of your pussy, the outcome of a national sporting game can be influenced. I mean, urgh, come on. That is clearly BS of the highest order.

Having said that, 95% of this book is just hardcore female empowerment. Fucking the patriarchy, standing up for other women, and having the power to do what you want with your own life. I am totally on board with this.

She is basically trying to give women the power to make decisions that are the best thing for them, regardless of how society, or other people around them, will react. Live your best life sisters.

Combined with this, and how you become so empowered, is by harnessing the power of your pussy, and the goddess within you. Stay with me, I know we are heading into the land of batshit crazy. But we stay on just the right side of this line. Juuuussstt about. Although it’s all dressed up a bit crazily, the message is sound. Part of being a strong, empowered women, is being in touch with your own sexuality, and sexual power. There a chapter where Thomashauer takes you through some exercises you can do to get in touch with this part of yourself. Frankly, I know a lot of women who could do with taking this advice.

Thomashauer runs The School of Womanly Arts, in New York, as Mama Gena. Is this Hogwarts for female empowerment?? I’d like to think so. We hear a lot about it in Pussy, and honestly, I would attend a class at it if I could.

In summary, this is a REALLY EXCELLENT book on the power of female empowerment and truly embracing equality. It gives sound advice on putting yourself first and helping smash the PWC (the patriarchal world culture). It talks utter sense on being at one with your own body and embracing your sexuality. It absolutely then encourages you to support other women and help them free themselves from a lot of this PWC bollocks (sister goddesses, yes). And even though there was quite a lot of fluff and bullshit, that I have barely any tolerance for, it was still a great book full of sound advice. Yes, I managed to even cope with talk of the GPS (the great pussy in the sky). please read the book for further details. Haha. Then buy it for your friends who need it.

New Erotica for Feminists – Caitlin Kunkel, Brooke Preston, Fiona Taylor, and Carrie Wittmer

I first saw this book without the tagline: satirical fantasies of love, lust, and equal pay. I just thought it was erotic, feminist stories. I’d quite like to read that book too, but this one is still brilliant. I’m assuming the tagline was added so as not to confuse people like me.

Inside is a collection of feminist fantasies. For example:

He calls me into his office and closes the door . . . to promote me. He promotes me again and again. I am wild with ecstasy.

It’s really funny, although I would have liked to see more longish stories – most are only a few lines long.

You get some slightly extended stories in the historical and literature section. For example, a feminist retelling of Adam and Eve. In this one Eve decides to not bother with eating the apple, because she’d prefer to carry on living her great life, in the Garden of Eden, full of guilt-free sex.

The extra funny thing was when I told a friend about this story he was baffled ‘I’d never associated sex with guilt’. No shit, male friend, no shit.

If you want a book that will make you laugh, and laugh, and then make you hate the world just a little bit more for the fact that these fantasies are just fantasies, this is for you. The last part of the book gets you to take that anger and direct it at changing the world.

This book would be perfect to give as a gift too.  I want to be gifted book like this. 😀

 

The Mother of All Questions: Further Feminisms – Rebecca Solnit

The Mother of All Questions is Solnit’s follow up to the amazing Men Explain Things to Me (my review of this can be found here). Firstly, if you haven’t read Men Explain Things to Me, please rectify this immediately. It is a brilliant book that sets out all the basics of feminism and why it’s so bloody necessary in the modern world. It makes arguments that I wish I could always remember. It is brilliant.

I *really* dislike the cover

The Mother of All Questions, as the follow up, is also excellent. But it doesn’t cover the same ground as Men Explain Things to Me. It’s more of a what has happened since that was published (2014), with some new ground covered. If I was to recommend only one of them to you, I would say read Men Explain, but really read both!

So what is covered in The Mother of All Questions? The format is essays on different subjects, I should probably have mentioned that first. Some of which have appeared in other places previously. The longest essay is about ways in which women are silenced. It opens with the title essay: about families and motherhood. There are also essays on the cultural change that seemed to happen around feminism in 2014, men and feminism, gun violence and misogyny, the recent history of the rape joke, and a few other short essays on various pop culture topics at the end of the book.

My favourite essay was The Mother of All Questions. It is no exaggeration to say that I found this essay to be life changing, or at the least to entirely give me confidence with some hard decisions I made at the end of last year. It was life-affirming for me. Solnit discusses attitudes to motherhood and her own experience of how people treat her as a childless woman.

She begins by telling a story about a talk she gave on Virginia Woolf. A lot of audience questions were about Woolf’s childlessness.

What I should have said to that crowd was that our interrogation of Woolf’s reproductive status was a soporific and pointless detour from the magnificent questions her work poses. (I think at some point I said, “Fuck this shit,” which carried the same general message, and moved everyone on from the discussion.)

 

In the long essay on silence, I underlined a few key points. They are firstly a clarification between silence and quiet:

for the purposes of this essay, regard silence as what is imposed and quiet as what is sought.

I like that and I’ll remember this difference. I don’t really think its something I’ve thought about before.

Being unable to tell your story is a living death and sometimes a literal one.

and

What we call politeness often means training that other people’s comfort matters more.

We could all do with remembering that every now and then.  Finally:

Being a woman is a perpetual state of wrongness, as far as I can determine. Or, rather, it is under patriarchy.

This essay takes up 50 pages of the book, and the whole thing is less than 200 pages altogether. It a wide ranging essay and is well worth a read. Some of it is reminiscent of Mary Beard’s Women and Power (my review here) and Beard’s lectures that Women and Power are based on, are discussed in Solnit’s essay.

I love Solnit’s writing, so I was always going to love this book. It doesn’t disappoint.

The Silence of the Girls – Pat Barker

This last few months my reading has been very Iliad themed. First I read The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, about Achilles relationship with Patroclus. Then I read (two thirds) of The actual Iliad (reviews of half of it here in part 1 and part 2). Now I find myself reading The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker. It’s The Iliad from the point of view of Achilles’ war prize Briseis. She who is the cause of the entire plot of The Iliad.

Chocolate Guiness Cake. Happy Birthday to me. 

Briefly, Achilles tells the big boss Agamemnon to give back a girl he has taken as a war prize, because her Father has come with a ransom to beg for her to be returned. The Father happens to be a priest of Apollo, and with Agamemnon’s refusal, Apollo is reigning down death and destruction. Agamemnon concedes, but says he will now take Achilles war prize Briseis as compensation. Achilles says if he takes her, he won’t fight anymore. Achilles is their best fighter, so this is a serious threat. Briseis is returned to Achilles when he returns to the fighting after his good buddy, Patroclus is killed.

The little we know about Briseis from The Iliad includes that her Father, Mother, Husband, and three brothers died at the hands of Achilles. But that also her relationship with him is considered by both of them to be maybe more marriage-like, and Briseis grieves for Patroclus when he dies.

I read a lot of this on my birthday, as the pictures show. 

In The Silence of the Girls we get Briseis point of view from her life in the city of Lyrnessus, her witnessing the arrival of Achilles and the subsequent murder of all her family, her experience in Achilles’ house, the change to being Agamemnon’s slave, and her return to Achilles and situation after his death. (Think I’m ok with these plot reveals, as The Iliad is quite well known… ).

I really enjoyed reading about what the women were doing, while the men were hacking each other to death. It has a lot to say about the erasure of female voices in literature, though it doesn’t come across as preachy at all. And it puts the story of women at the heart of this retelling of The Iliad, and I really, really enjoyed that.

As later Priam comes secretly to the enemy camp to plead with Achilles for the return of his son Hector’s body, he says: “‘I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son.”
Those words echoed round me, as I stood in the storage hut, surrounded on all sides by the wealth Achilles had plundered from burning cities. I thought: “And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers.

I prioritised reading The Silence of the Girls because I’m going to a Manchester Literature Festival event with Pat Barker tonight! She is going to be in conversation with Kamila Shamsie, who wrote Home Fire that I also loved. I can’t wait!

A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf

A short classic of feminist literature. A Room of One’s Own is an extended essay, based on lectures Woolf gave on Women and Fiction to two ladies colleges, at Cambridge University, in October 1928.

Woolf uses a fictional narrator to explore her ideas about women and fiction. The main idea being that historically women haven’t been given the physical or mental space to be able to write. Access to education has been severely limited

She gets us to think about Shakespeare’s hypothetical, equally talented sister, Judith.

This may be true or it may be false—who can say?—but what is true in it, so it seemed to me, reviewing the story of Shakespeare’s sister as I had made it, is that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.

It’s also funny in places. There are some snarky comments that I very much appreciated:

I had been drawing a face, a figure. It was the face and the figure of Professor von X engaged in writing his monumental work entitled The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex. He was not in my picture a man attractive to women.

Woolf talks about how women who appear in literature, written by men, are so completely different to women in real life, and how they were allowed to live:

A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced
a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.

She ends by reminding young women that education and more professions are now available to them and they must make the most of it. She encourages them to have a few children, rather than 10 or more, and to go and write!

I would say it’s really worthwhile to go and read A Room of One’s Own, if you haven’t already 🙂

Everyday Sexism – Laura Bates

It has taken me a long time to get around to reading this. Published in 2014, I remember the rise of the #everydaysexism on twitter and the reaction to it. Mostly I seem to remember it was men I knew who were shocked at the pervasive sexism and harassment most women have accepted as just normal life, because it happens all the god damn time. Women I knew just sighed or shrugged at the knowledge – so commonplace are a lot of the examples, but they also felt empowered by the size of the movement, the solidarity, and the knowledge that you weren’t alone.

Every single woman I spoke to had a story. But not from five years ago, or ten. From last week, or yesterday, or ‘on my way here today’. And they weren’t just random one-off events, but reams and reams of tiny pinpricks – just like my own experiences – so niggling and normalized that to protest each one felt facetious. Yet put them together and the picture created by this mosaic of miniatures was strikingly clear. This inequality, this pattern of casual intrusion whereby women could be leered at, touched, harassed and abused without a second thought, was sexism: implicit, explicit, common-or-garden and deep-rooted sexism, pretty much everywhere you’d care to look. And if sexism means treating people differently or discriminating against them purely because of their sex, then women were experiencing it on a near-daily basis.

Everyday Sexism is the book summarising the #everydaysexism tweets and the submissions to the accompanying website.

It’s an overview of all the sexist things that happen generally in life. And yes, it covers sexism that happens against men too – though is careful to point out that this is a minuscule problem compared to the pervasive problems that affect women. This isn’t to say it isn’t serious, it just isn’t a problem with the same scale, and the same life affecting consequences.

Everyday Sexism covers the whole wedge of sexism, from seemingly (dismissed by many) innocuous everyday events, to rape and the killing of women. It’s a wedge, and while one end of it is much more serious, criminal, and life shattering, the other end of it is part of the same problem (this reminded me of Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me). One feeds into the other and supports a patriarchal society where sexism is not just tolerated, but expected, and none of us should be putting up with it.

To include stories of assault and rape within a project documenting everyday experiences of gender imbalance is simply to extend its boundaries to the most extreme manifestations of that prejudice. To see how great the damage can be when the minor, ‘unimportant’ issues are allowed to pass without comment. To prove how the steady drip-drip-drip of sexism and sexualization and objectification is connected to the assumption of ownership and control over women’s bodies, and how the background noise of harassment and disrespect connects to the assertion of power that is violence and rape.

Each chapter starts out with some statistics outlining the subject of the chapter. There are other statistics mentioned throughout the text too, where they are relevant. From the section on crime:

Then I looked at the crime statistics and found that on average more than 2 women are killed every week by a current or former partner, that there is a call to the police every minute about domestic violence, and that a woman is raped every 6 minutes – adding up to more than 85,000 rapes and 400,000 sexual assaults per year. That 1 in 5 women is the victim of a sexual offence and 1 in 4 will experience domestic violence.

If that doesn’t shock you, then what is wrong with you?

And each chapter is littered with examples from tweets or entries submitted to the everyday sexism website. There are a few interviews with other people for a few topics. For example, Reni Eddo-Lodge (writer of Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race) is interviewed to talks about  intersection of sexist abuse and racism.

The book ends on a positive chapter about people fighting back against sexism. It highlights global examples and ends in an uplifting way.

Women everywhere have had enough. We’ve reached our tipping point and we’re not afraid to say it. We’re not afraid to be dismissed, or belittled, or laughed at any more, because there are too many of us. There’s no silencing someone who has tens of thousands of others standing right behind them. We can’t be silenced when we’re all saying the same thing.

Laura Bates is a goddess and I recommend reading this book to everybody. But if you could get every one who says sexism doesn’t exist anymore, then that would be marvellous.

 

The Descent of Man – Grayson Perry

This slim book is Perry’s take on modern masculinity, where it’s harming everyone, and ideas for moving it forward in a way that would be better for both men and women. It’s brilliant. This is a book where I couldn’t stop myself from highlighting roughly every other sentence. Go and read this book!

Because I highlighted almost all of these 151 pages, I’m finding it really difficult to review. It was all really interesting and worth reading. What a helpful review! This is actually going to be my worst review ever. If you don’t want to bother reading the rest of it, it basically says: Amazing amazing amazing read it read it read it.

From the introduction:

I hope that in picking up this book you have already acknowledged that masculinity needs to be questioned, that gender inequality is a huge issue for all of us and that the world would be a better place without it.

I was already a Grayson Perry fan before reading The Descent of Man.

One of the central issues here, and the reason this book is called The Descent of Man, is that as women rise to their just level of power, then so shall some men fall.

Some themes covered include: Default Man and all that is bad with him, identity, prejudice, being a transvestite, clothes declaring tribal status, the male body, gender fluidity, anger, mental health, male suicide, attitudes to women, checking privilege, positive discrimination as way to force change towards a gender-equal society,

Also, it’s really funny. Ties are ‘colourful textile phalluses hanging round their necks.’

I found it hard to chose a favourite other funny bit, because there are so many:

Several times I have asked audiences to put up their hand if they have sexual fantasies where the central theme is gender equality. No one ever raises their hand. (Who would? Nick Clegg maybe?) … No one gets aroused by thinking about holding hands in matching fleeces while shopping for sofas or sharing childcare, do they?

There are amazing, funny cartoons littered throughout the book too. It’s worth reading it just to see these. If you are reading on a black and grey only kindle, make sure you open it up in kindle cloud reader on a computer to see the cartoons in full colour.

I love this quote:

A lot of men are sold the narrative of male domination, but lead lives of frustration and servitude. No wonder they get angry.

and this one:

The ‘ideal’ future might just be increasing tolerance and celebration of a spectrum of masculinities born out of increasing awareness of what feels good for the individual and for society.

Well that would be just great wouldn’t it?

Women and Power: A Manifesto – Mary Beard

A short book about women, the history of misogyny, and how women now are prevented from speaking in public forums by the very structure and roots of our society. It’s a lovely, short, easy, powerful read.

Based on two talks Beard gave in 2014 and 2017, this classicist links modern phenomena with their roots in the ancient world. We see how ancient imagery is used to try and silence women (Hillary Clinton as Medusa anyone?). She explores how our entire construct of power eliminated women’s voices right from the beginning. She explores how we can trace misogyny back to these ancient times and therefore once we understand where it originates, we can see how we can change things and deal with it.

You can’t easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure.

Links between Telemachus and Penelope, Miss Triggs, Lavinia, and of course Medusa with online abuse and other grim modern examples of misogyny, especially in the sphere of silencing women speaking publicly, are littered through Women and Power. 

Every time I even think about the title of this book I get Harpy by Petrol Girls in my head. Click the link to be able to listen to it in its full feminist hardcore glory, or if your ears are too sensitive for that, here’s the main part I get stuck on loop in my head! but actually, do listen to it – it’s marvellous.

Petrol Girls – Harpy

Women with power must be shouted down
Women with power burned or drowned
Women should take it and not make a sound

Keep being loud and taking up space women! And read this book. It packs a punch in its 115 pages.

The Book of Joan – Lidia Yuknavitch

A post-apocalyptic, feminist sci-fi adventure. Sounds awesome! and it is 🙂

Earth is dead after a series of environmental disasters, and seemingly endless wars. The Earth population is barely clinging to life and humanity is just about surviving on a system of space stations, populated by Earths elite, goverened by the Trumplike Jean de Man. The station robs Earth of its very last resources.

The space station population have developed porcelain skin, they get elaborate skin grafts that make them look like eighteenth century French nobility, with billowing skin that trails upwards and behind them from all limbs, oh and everyone’s reproductive systems have shrivelled up and become useless. Also, everyone has to die when they reach fifty years old, so as not to be a drain on resources.

That’s what happens when geocatastrophe is amplified by radiation. Put simply, we devolved. Our sexualities mutated and devolved faster than you can say fuck.

On the stations is Christine. She is unsatisfied with how life on the station has turned out, and is strongly drawn to the story of Joan, the girl warrior who lead the opposition to Jean de Man, who seemed to have a link with the Earth itself. She was executed by burning as one last destroying of the opposition before the space stations were populated, martyring her. But is she really dead? and can she offer any hope for the future of humanity?

I want her story back. The one that was taken from her and replaced with heretic. Eco-terrorist, Murderous maiden who made the Earth scream.

The Book of Joan is a really enjoyable sci-fi adventure. It is delightfully sweary and gets into quite a lot of gender politics – especially considering gender has become irrelevant in the current society.

Men are among the loneliest creatures. They lose their mothers and cannot carry children, and have nothing to comfort themselves with but their vestigial cockular appendages. This is perhaps the reason they move ever warward when they are not moving fuckward. Now that the penis is defunct, a curling-up little insect, well, who can blame them for their behaviour?

Joan is a great character. She’s savage and animalisitic, yet she’s a teenager (for part of the story anyway!). Her connection to the Earth is mysterious and clearly (if it isn’t obvious enough already!) she is a Joan of Arc character.

I think feminist sci-fi might be my favourite sub-genre. I must read some more of it!

 

P.s I was provided with a free copy of The Book of Joan in exchange for an honest review. Thanks NetGalley!