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ferdy_goat's review against another edition
5.0
Funny, informative, and biting critique of capitalist patriarchy which controls and affects all our lives. The section on cyber sexism is outdated but it’d be hard not to be at the pace with which the internet moves. Highly recommended.
hollydunndesign's review against another edition
5.0
Laurie Penny is a left-wing journalist and activist. In this book she examines current social issues derived from gender. She explains how the polar constructs of masculinity and femininity are detrimental to people as a whole, and ultimately alienates us by setting one half of the population in opposition to the other. She argues that mainstream feminism overlooks those on the bottom rungs of society and calls for a revolution against sexism in mainstream media, sexual assault and online misogyny.
A greatly informative read for people of all genders.
A greatly informative read for people of all genders.
janedoelish's review against another edition
5.0
Laurie Penny must be the voice of my generation. I've seldom read a non-fiction book that expressed and expanded my own thoughts on a wide variety of subjects so well.
nyssahhhh's review against another edition
4.0
I don't know that I've ever posted so many sticky flags on the pages of a book. If it hadn't been a library book, I would have highlighted this to pieces. I'm not sure much would be left unhighlighted. This was an incredible book. It so articulately explained so many frustrations I have, things I've never been able to quite explain for myself, especially the pressure I feel to be perfect at everything. Below are some of my favorite sentences, paragraphs, thoughts.
Introduction
p. 23: The world doesn't need another handbook for how to submit with dignity to a world that wants you to hate yourself. Women and girls in particular don't need any more rules for living and working and grooming and loving. There are already too many rules, most of them contradictory.
Ch. 1: Fucked-up Girls
p. 36 You can't win. If you choose to devote less of your time to grooming as a political statement, you're a 'hairy bra-burning feminist' and nobody has any obligation to listen to anything you have to say, but if you embrace conventional beauty standards, or appear to enjoy them for their own sake, you are presumed to be a shallow and manipulative slut.
p 37: Naomi Wolf was right, in The Beauty Myth, to refer to 'Beauty Work' -- the time, money, and effort women have to put into 'maintaining' their appearance and cramming their physical selves into the narrow stereotype of conventional beauty standards -- as a new 'third shift' of labour, alongside women's traditional 'second shift' of domestic and caring work.
p. 38: The fall of patriarchy is unlikely to begin or end with one woman's decision to wear fishnets or grow out her armpit hair, so relax. Make informed choices, play with gender, wear what you want. Feminism is far more than a big-girls' squabble over the dressing-up box, and there are more important things to do.
p. 46: The best way to stop girls achieving anything is to force them to achieve everything.
p. 58: We're the ones who laugh too loud and talk too much and reach too high and work for ourselves and see a new world just out of reach, at the edge of language, struggling to be spoken. And sometimes, in the narrow hours of the night, we call ourselves feminists.
Ch. 2: Lost Boys
p.66: What we don't say is: of course not all men hate women. But culture hates women, and men who grow up in a sexist culture have a tendency to do and say sexist things, often without meaning to. We aren't judging you for who you are, but that doesn't mean we're not asking you to change your behaviour. What you feel about women in your heart is of less immediate importance than how you treat them on a daily basis. You can be the gentlest, sweetest man in the world and still benefit from sexism, still hesitate to speak up when you see women hurt and discriminated against. That's how oppression works.
p. 68: Sexism should be uncomfortable. It is painful and enraging to be on the receiving end of misogynist attacks, and it is also painful to watch them happen and to know that your'e implicated, even though you never chose to be. You're supposed to react when you're told that a group you are a member of is actively fucking over other human beings, in the same way that you're supposed to react when a doctor hammers your knee to test your nerves. If it doesn't hurt, something is horribly wrong.
p. 78: Desire is socially constructed: what the heart and groin and stomach want is brokered by the basic desire to fit in and not make a fuss.
p. 82: 'It Gets Better' is neoliberal mythmaking writ large, not just a plea for emotional resilience but a manifesto for economic compliance, the promise that if you only work hard and tough it all out, you'll have a better life than your parents had. It's a promise that a majority of Americans no longer believe will be true for the next generation.
p. 91: Men don't get told that the best years are over just as they're starting to get the hang of being here.
p. 97: What almost all men and boys want — in fact, what almost all human beings want — is to feel useful and needed and loved. One of the quiet tragedies of our age is that we're still telling young men that the only way they can be useful is either by earning a pile of money and bringing it home to a grateful, pliant wife who rewards you with dull, dutiful sex and home-baked brownies in return for a lifetime of financial security, or by fighting — and possibly dying — in a war very far from home.
p. 100: The gains that women have made in the workplace ... are framed uncomplicatedly as a loss to men and boys. It's as if there were a fixed amount of equality in the world and giving more to women automatically meant taking it away from men. Freedom doesn't work like that.
Ch. 3: Anticlimax
p. 105: For over a century, 'slut' has been a word censure. It has been used to hurt people and make them ashamed. The word 'slut' has been used to control women and girls, queer people and poor people by making them feel ashamed of what they are and what they want. It keeps them in their place by telling them that wanting more than what they're allowed is shameful...
p. 108: The ideal woman is fuckable, but never actual fucks. (Note: More on playing hard to get.)
p. 113: Rather than teaching young girls about contraception and sexual health, we teach them shame. Rather than teaching young girls about pleasure, we teach them fear and self-hatred. And rather than teaching young boys about responsibility, we teach them suspicion and slut-shaming, teach them that sex is something they have to cheat and trick girls into giving up.
p. 137: Women are selfish if we have children and selfish if we don't; we are expected to anticipate the stretching of our energies between our gross physical fecundity which will inevitably curtail our own chances and the demands of the workplace. We will be stretched, overtaxed and judged whatever we choose, and that's the way the world works.
p. 140: The religious and conservative right, especially in the United States and in majority Catholic countries, continues to claim that abortion and contraception are sinful, to which the obvious retort is that God also created smallpox, polio and erectile dysfunction, but that hasn't stopped medical science from helping us lead longer and more exciting lives without them.
p. 144: Down the centuries, women and girls have been told not to do all sorts of things 'for our own good'. We have been told not to go to work, not to read too much, not to go to school or to university because it would be damaging for us; we are still told not to go out alone, enjoy our sexuality or speak our minds in public because that might provoke violet retribution from the dwindling number of men who believe that women should be silent sexual commodities and nothing else.
p. 145: Unfortunately, however, rape culture gets you coming and going. It is precisely about fear, about creating a culture where women are afraid to participate in public life as men do.A life lived in fear of sexual violence, a life where you cannot take the risks that men take without anticipating physical attack or, worse still, being attacked and then blamed for it, is not a life lived freely.
p. 146: here's what we must begin to say to today's young women, all over the world. Rape does not have to be a fact of life. It is not your responsibility to be cautious, to restrict yourself, to be quieter and better behaved so that men don't rape you. (Note: Continues to say that there are risks for those who talk too loudly/flirt too much/take too many risks, but also for those who don't.)
p. 147: At some point we began to talk, not just privately, cowedly, but in numbers too big to ignore, about the reality of sexual violence ad child abuse, about how victims are silenced.
Ch. 4: Cybersexism
p. 161: From the moment we can speak, young women are ordered not to do so. Little girls who talk too much, who demand the respect they have earned, are 'attention seeking', and that's very bad. Little boys who do the same are 'confident' or 'engaging'.
p. 169: Online misogyny, like any other misogyny, is about power, resentment and frustration, and not about sexual overstimulation, although it can be sexually expressed.
p. 176: The Internet is public space, real space; it's increasingly where we interact socially, do our work, organise our lives and engage with politics, and violence online is real violence. The hatred of women in public spaces online is reaching epidemic levels and it's time to end the pretence that it's acceptable and inevitable.
p. 181: According to the current logic of online misogyny a woman's right to self-expression is less important by far than a man's right to punish her for that self-expression. What appears to upset many of these people more than anything else is the idea that any woman or girl, anywhere, might have a voice, might be successful, might be more socially powerful than they themselves are...
p. 183: Freedom of speech does not include the freedom to abuse and silence others with impunity. It doesn't even include the right to be paid attention to. It doesn't even include the right to be paid attention to. ... The whole point of the Internet is that it allows many voices to speak at once. that's what the network is. the sudden presence of women in great and vocal numbers online doesn't prevent men from using the Internet, because this isn't primary school, and nobody is actually allergic to girls.
p. 190: It's about being curious, and clever. Being a geek is about making things, and fixing things, and taking things apart to see how they work. ... It's about understanding, on a fundamental level, that being smart is more important than being strong, and who you are and where you come from doesn't matter as long as you've got curiosity and guts.
p. 192: Guys, listen up: we're not conspiring with your boners against you. Women are people, not walking bags of pheromones and interestingly arranged body fat, and we like to be treated as such.
Ch. 5: Love and Lies
p. 205: LoveTM is the other side of the pornographic narrative; the other side of SexTM. It is the story told in the light where the machinistic, vengeful clusterfuck of most straight porn is the story told in the dark, and the thing about stories is that somebody made them up. The competing narratives of hypercompetitive patriarchal porn and fairy-tale for-ever romance are meant to be polar opposites. They are certainly almost never part of the same plot, outside the widely and unjustly ridiculed universe of cheap ladies' paperbacks. but there are some important similarities. Both stories, LoveTM and SexTM, hold us up to impossible standards. Both demand that we see another person as less than human, merely a body filling a prewritten role in our script for romantic or erotic ecstasy. Both are wildly unrealistic, and both set us up to fail.
p. 206: In many social situations, it is now more acceptable to say you don't believe in God than it is to say you don't believe in love. LoveTM has become devotional, especially for women. We search for it, profess belief in it, make sacrifices for it.
p. 207: We don't just fall for all of this romantic faff because we're stupid, or gullible, or weak. We fall because we want to, because we need to believe that something will make the rest of our lives safe and meaningful.
p. 209: Women across the classes are taught to seek teh love of men first, to assess our worth on the basis of how good we are at keeping and holding male attention.
p. 212: But deep down, I know if I choose not to play the good girl game, I might not get as many kisses as I want. And that's so much more terrifying.
To threaten someone with loss of love, however is a violence far mroe profound and painful: there are few people who would choose a long healthy life without love over a short, painful life full of it.
p. 218: (Re: Manic Pixie Dream Girl) ... there were certain kinds of girl you could be, and if you weren't a busty bombshell, if you were maybe a bit weird and clever and brunette, there was another option.
p. 220: It's all about a frustrated young author who writes himself a perfect girlfriend, only to have her come to life. When she inevitably proves more difficult to handle in reality than she did in his fantasy, the writer's brother comments: 'You've written a girl, not a person.'
p. 223: But I refuse to burn my energy adding extra magic and sparkle to other people's lives to get them to love me. I'm busy casting spells for myself. Everyone who was ever told a fairy tale knows what happens to women who do their own magic.
So here's what I've learned, in twenty-seven years of reading books and kissing boys. Firstly, averagely pretty white women in their late teens and twenties are not the biggest, most profoundly unsolvable mystery in the universe. Trust me. I should know. Those of us with an ounce of lust for life are almost universally less interesting than we will be in our thirties and forties. the one abiding secret about us is that we're not fantasies, and we weren't made to save you: we're real people, with flaws and cracked personalities and big dreams and digestive tracts. ... Secondly, you can spend your whole life being a story that happens to somebody else. You can twist and cram and shave down every aspect of your personality that doesn't quite fit into the story boys have grown up expecting, but eventually, one day, you'll wake up and want something else and you'll have to choose.
Because the thing about stories is that they end. The book closes, and you're left with yourself, a grown fucking woman with no pieces of cultural detritus from which to construct a personality.
p. 231: Is there any more pitiable creature than the single woman? ... We are all encouraged to feel sorry for ourselves if we are single, to consider ourselves incomplete, but women in particular are urged to consider themselves inferior if their time is not spent comforting and cosseting a man, and ideally children too.
p. 234: But the relatively recent cultural narrative of The One — the idea that everyone has a soulmate whom they are destined to love for ever, and that your life will always be incomplete if you fail to meet, mate and move in with that person — that's not just implausible, it's cruel. It implies that those who do not find their One will somehow never be complete, that those who divorce, who live and raise children alone, or who find alternative arrangements for happiness, have somehow failed as human beings. To my mind, that's a decidedly unromantic idea.
p. 238: Loneliness is a fearful thing. but a life lived grasping for another person to make you whole is just as fearful. If you see yourself as incomplete without a partner to be your 'other half', you will always be lonely, even in a partnership. It took me twenty-seven years to truly understand that just because you would give up every dream you ever had to see one special person smile doesn't mean you should.
p. 239: Love is not a scarce resource. Love is not a prize to be won and jealously hoarded. Love is not a productive field, a sphere of work. Human love may have been colonised and appropriated by the demands of labour and capital, but it can be retaken.
Afterword
p. 242: If we want to escape the straitjacket of gender under neoliberalism, we must stop trying so hard to hold ourselves and others up to impossible standards, standards we didn't set ourselves. We have to resist the schooled inner voice telling us to be good girls, tough boys, perfect women, strong men. If we are to realise a greater collective humanity, we must learn to see one another as human beings first.
p. 243: We've got to stop letting stale old men define our dreams. We must refuse to be ashamed of our desires, of our ambition, of our energy. We must refuse to judge others by any standard other than that of kindness and decency. We must not start out by apologising for all that we are.
...
Because when we are done hating ourselves and hurting each other, we can get on with asking for what should be ours by right.
Introduction
p. 23: The world doesn't need another handbook for how to submit with dignity to a world that wants you to hate yourself. Women and girls in particular don't need any more rules for living and working and grooming and loving. There are already too many rules, most of them contradictory.
Ch. 1: Fucked-up Girls
p. 36 You can't win. If you choose to devote less of your time to grooming as a political statement, you're a 'hairy bra-burning feminist' and nobody has any obligation to listen to anything you have to say, but if you embrace conventional beauty standards, or appear to enjoy them for their own sake, you are presumed to be a shallow and manipulative slut.
p 37: Naomi Wolf was right, in The Beauty Myth, to refer to 'Beauty Work' -- the time, money, and effort women have to put into 'maintaining' their appearance and cramming their physical selves into the narrow stereotype of conventional beauty standards -- as a new 'third shift' of labour, alongside women's traditional 'second shift' of domestic and caring work.
p. 38: The fall of patriarchy is unlikely to begin or end with one woman's decision to wear fishnets or grow out her armpit hair, so relax. Make informed choices, play with gender, wear what you want. Feminism is far more than a big-girls' squabble over the dressing-up box, and there are more important things to do.
p. 46: The best way to stop girls achieving anything is to force them to achieve everything.
p. 58: We're the ones who laugh too loud and talk too much and reach too high and work for ourselves and see a new world just out of reach, at the edge of language, struggling to be spoken. And sometimes, in the narrow hours of the night, we call ourselves feminists.
Ch. 2: Lost Boys
p.66: What we don't say is: of course not all men hate women. But culture hates women, and men who grow up in a sexist culture have a tendency to do and say sexist things, often without meaning to. We aren't judging you for who you are, but that doesn't mean we're not asking you to change your behaviour. What you feel about women in your heart is of less immediate importance than how you treat them on a daily basis. You can be the gentlest, sweetest man in the world and still benefit from sexism, still hesitate to speak up when you see women hurt and discriminated against. That's how oppression works.
p. 68: Sexism should be uncomfortable. It is painful and enraging to be on the receiving end of misogynist attacks, and it is also painful to watch them happen and to know that your'e implicated, even though you never chose to be. You're supposed to react when you're told that a group you are a member of is actively fucking over other human beings, in the same way that you're supposed to react when a doctor hammers your knee to test your nerves. If it doesn't hurt, something is horribly wrong.
p. 78: Desire is socially constructed: what the heart and groin and stomach want is brokered by the basic desire to fit in and not make a fuss.
p. 82: 'It Gets Better' is neoliberal mythmaking writ large, not just a plea for emotional resilience but a manifesto for economic compliance, the promise that if you only work hard and tough it all out, you'll have a better life than your parents had. It's a promise that a majority of Americans no longer believe will be true for the next generation.
p. 91: Men don't get told that the best years are over just as they're starting to get the hang of being here.
p. 97: What almost all men and boys want — in fact, what almost all human beings want — is to feel useful and needed and loved. One of the quiet tragedies of our age is that we're still telling young men that the only way they can be useful is either by earning a pile of money and bringing it home to a grateful, pliant wife who rewards you with dull, dutiful sex and home-baked brownies in return for a lifetime of financial security, or by fighting — and possibly dying — in a war very far from home.
p. 100: The gains that women have made in the workplace ... are framed uncomplicatedly as a loss to men and boys. It's as if there were a fixed amount of equality in the world and giving more to women automatically meant taking it away from men. Freedom doesn't work like that.
Ch. 3: Anticlimax
p. 105: For over a century, 'slut' has been a word censure. It has been used to hurt people and make them ashamed. The word 'slut' has been used to control women and girls, queer people and poor people by making them feel ashamed of what they are and what they want. It keeps them in their place by telling them that wanting more than what they're allowed is shameful...
p. 108: The ideal woman is fuckable, but never actual fucks. (Note: More on playing hard to get.)
p. 113: Rather than teaching young girls about contraception and sexual health, we teach them shame. Rather than teaching young girls about pleasure, we teach them fear and self-hatred. And rather than teaching young boys about responsibility, we teach them suspicion and slut-shaming, teach them that sex is something they have to cheat and trick girls into giving up.
p. 137: Women are selfish if we have children and selfish if we don't; we are expected to anticipate the stretching of our energies between our gross physical fecundity which will inevitably curtail our own chances and the demands of the workplace. We will be stretched, overtaxed and judged whatever we choose, and that's the way the world works.
p. 140: The religious and conservative right, especially in the United States and in majority Catholic countries, continues to claim that abortion and contraception are sinful, to which the obvious retort is that God also created smallpox, polio and erectile dysfunction, but that hasn't stopped medical science from helping us lead longer and more exciting lives without them.
p. 144: Down the centuries, women and girls have been told not to do all sorts of things 'for our own good'. We have been told not to go to work, not to read too much, not to go to school or to university because it would be damaging for us; we are still told not to go out alone, enjoy our sexuality or speak our minds in public because that might provoke violet retribution from the dwindling number of men who believe that women should be silent sexual commodities and nothing else.
p. 145: Unfortunately, however, rape culture gets you coming and going. It is precisely about fear, about creating a culture where women are afraid to participate in public life as men do.A life lived in fear of sexual violence, a life where you cannot take the risks that men take without anticipating physical attack or, worse still, being attacked and then blamed for it, is not a life lived freely.
p. 146: here's what we must begin to say to today's young women, all over the world. Rape does not have to be a fact of life. It is not your responsibility to be cautious, to restrict yourself, to be quieter and better behaved so that men don't rape you. (Note: Continues to say that there are risks for those who talk too loudly/flirt too much/take too many risks, but also for those who don't.)
p. 147: At some point we began to talk, not just privately, cowedly, but in numbers too big to ignore, about the reality of sexual violence ad child abuse, about how victims are silenced.
Ch. 4: Cybersexism
p. 161: From the moment we can speak, young women are ordered not to do so. Little girls who talk too much, who demand the respect they have earned, are 'attention seeking', and that's very bad. Little boys who do the same are 'confident' or 'engaging'.
p. 169: Online misogyny, like any other misogyny, is about power, resentment and frustration, and not about sexual overstimulation, although it can be sexually expressed.
p. 176: The Internet is public space, real space; it's increasingly where we interact socially, do our work, organise our lives and engage with politics, and violence online is real violence. The hatred of women in public spaces online is reaching epidemic levels and it's time to end the pretence that it's acceptable and inevitable.
p. 181: According to the current logic of online misogyny a woman's right to self-expression is less important by far than a man's right to punish her for that self-expression. What appears to upset many of these people more than anything else is the idea that any woman or girl, anywhere, might have a voice, might be successful, might be more socially powerful than they themselves are...
p. 183: Freedom of speech does not include the freedom to abuse and silence others with impunity. It doesn't even include the right to be paid attention to. It doesn't even include the right to be paid attention to. ... The whole point of the Internet is that it allows many voices to speak at once. that's what the network is. the sudden presence of women in great and vocal numbers online doesn't prevent men from using the Internet, because this isn't primary school, and nobody is actually allergic to girls.
p. 190: It's about being curious, and clever. Being a geek is about making things, and fixing things, and taking things apart to see how they work. ... It's about understanding, on a fundamental level, that being smart is more important than being strong, and who you are and where you come from doesn't matter as long as you've got curiosity and guts.
p. 192: Guys, listen up: we're not conspiring with your boners against you. Women are people, not walking bags of pheromones and interestingly arranged body fat, and we like to be treated as such.
Ch. 5: Love and Lies
p. 205: LoveTM is the other side of the pornographic narrative; the other side of SexTM. It is the story told in the light where the machinistic, vengeful clusterfuck of most straight porn is the story told in the dark, and the thing about stories is that somebody made them up. The competing narratives of hypercompetitive patriarchal porn and fairy-tale for-ever romance are meant to be polar opposites. They are certainly almost never part of the same plot, outside the widely and unjustly ridiculed universe of cheap ladies' paperbacks. but there are some important similarities. Both stories, LoveTM and SexTM, hold us up to impossible standards. Both demand that we see another person as less than human, merely a body filling a prewritten role in our script for romantic or erotic ecstasy. Both are wildly unrealistic, and both set us up to fail.
p. 206: In many social situations, it is now more acceptable to say you don't believe in God than it is to say you don't believe in love. LoveTM has become devotional, especially for women. We search for it, profess belief in it, make sacrifices for it.
p. 207: We don't just fall for all of this romantic faff because we're stupid, or gullible, or weak. We fall because we want to, because we need to believe that something will make the rest of our lives safe and meaningful.
p. 209: Women across the classes are taught to seek teh love of men first, to assess our worth on the basis of how good we are at keeping and holding male attention.
p. 212: But deep down, I know if I choose not to play the good girl game, I might not get as many kisses as I want. And that's so much more terrifying.
To threaten someone with loss of love, however is a violence far mroe profound and painful: there are few people who would choose a long healthy life without love over a short, painful life full of it.
p. 218: (Re: Manic Pixie Dream Girl) ... there were certain kinds of girl you could be, and if you weren't a busty bombshell, if you were maybe a bit weird and clever and brunette, there was another option.
p. 220: It's all about a frustrated young author who writes himself a perfect girlfriend, only to have her come to life. When she inevitably proves more difficult to handle in reality than she did in his fantasy, the writer's brother comments: 'You've written a girl, not a person.'
p. 223: But I refuse to burn my energy adding extra magic and sparkle to other people's lives to get them to love me. I'm busy casting spells for myself. Everyone who was ever told a fairy tale knows what happens to women who do their own magic.
So here's what I've learned, in twenty-seven years of reading books and kissing boys. Firstly, averagely pretty white women in their late teens and twenties are not the biggest, most profoundly unsolvable mystery in the universe. Trust me. I should know. Those of us with an ounce of lust for life are almost universally less interesting than we will be in our thirties and forties. the one abiding secret about us is that we're not fantasies, and we weren't made to save you: we're real people, with flaws and cracked personalities and big dreams and digestive tracts. ... Secondly, you can spend your whole life being a story that happens to somebody else. You can twist and cram and shave down every aspect of your personality that doesn't quite fit into the story boys have grown up expecting, but eventually, one day, you'll wake up and want something else and you'll have to choose.
Because the thing about stories is that they end. The book closes, and you're left with yourself, a grown fucking woman with no pieces of cultural detritus from which to construct a personality.
p. 231: Is there any more pitiable creature than the single woman? ... We are all encouraged to feel sorry for ourselves if we are single, to consider ourselves incomplete, but women in particular are urged to consider themselves inferior if their time is not spent comforting and cosseting a man, and ideally children too.
p. 234: But the relatively recent cultural narrative of The One — the idea that everyone has a soulmate whom they are destined to love for ever, and that your life will always be incomplete if you fail to meet, mate and move in with that person — that's not just implausible, it's cruel. It implies that those who do not find their One will somehow never be complete, that those who divorce, who live and raise children alone, or who find alternative arrangements for happiness, have somehow failed as human beings. To my mind, that's a decidedly unromantic idea.
p. 238: Loneliness is a fearful thing. but a life lived grasping for another person to make you whole is just as fearful. If you see yourself as incomplete without a partner to be your 'other half', you will always be lonely, even in a partnership. It took me twenty-seven years to truly understand that just because you would give up every dream you ever had to see one special person smile doesn't mean you should.
p. 239: Love is not a scarce resource. Love is not a prize to be won and jealously hoarded. Love is not a productive field, a sphere of work. Human love may have been colonised and appropriated by the demands of labour and capital, but it can be retaken.
Afterword
p. 242: If we want to escape the straitjacket of gender under neoliberalism, we must stop trying so hard to hold ourselves and others up to impossible standards, standards we didn't set ourselves. We have to resist the schooled inner voice telling us to be good girls, tough boys, perfect women, strong men. If we are to realise a greater collective humanity, we must learn to see one another as human beings first.
p. 243: We've got to stop letting stale old men define our dreams. We must refuse to be ashamed of our desires, of our ambition, of our energy. We must refuse to judge others by any standard other than that of kindness and decency. We must not start out by apologising for all that we are.
...
Because when we are done hating ourselves and hurting each other, we can get on with asking for what should be ours by right.
mothmans_mum's review against another edition
5.0
Absolutely fantastic. Penny's critique of capitalism and the patriarchy is eminently accessible and fast paced, and also thoroughly researched. Drawing on her own experiences and those of others she has met though her travels, Penny opens the readers eyes to the stark realities of enforced gender roles, cyber-misogyny, and the oppression of men, women, and all other genders.
A fantastic read that will hopefully stoke the revolutionary fires inside many readers.
A fantastic read that will hopefully stoke the revolutionary fires inside many readers.
njm1993's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
shuofthewind's review against another edition
5.0
A book about body image, feminism, men's rights activists, gender straitjackets, kisses, protests, polyamory, pink hair dye, cybersexism and cybersex, women, men, politics, and wit sharp as shark's teeth. Truly something unspeakable. A must read for all, regardless of age, sex, gender, identity, or class.