The book is described by its author as a polemic. It isn’t only about women it is about bigotry and prejudice and about how those affect everyone in their daily lives. It is about rigid gender roles and how they affect the choices of everyone. Rigid roles affect those men who want to be nurses and carers just as much as they affect women who want to be engineers and airline pilots or computer programmers. Rigid gender definitions of qualities and aptitudes stop people taking on the roles they as individuals are best suited for.
The book talks about issues which many people hesitate to voice and it talks about people being individuals first and foremost before they are either gender – or somewhere in between. It talks about cyberbullying, trolling and stalking and how it seeks to shut women up on the internet. Women should not speak out about anything and need to be silenced because good women and girls – rather like children – should be seen and not heard. To say you disagree with someone is to invite a tirade of abuse. Freedom of speech is fine for everyone except women because if they exercise their right to free speech they are ‘mouthy c . . s or whining women always moaning about something’. Or there’s nothing wrong with them which plenty of sex wouldn’t cure. This sort of treatment on the internet – you rarely meet it in real life – makes my blood boil and it clearly does the same to the author. Freedom of speech is a right but with it goes the responsibility not to abuse, insult or denigrate others.
The book covers subjects such as the beauty industry and the celebrity culture and how it tries to impose certain rigid parameters on the appearance women and girls present to the world. I must admit that having grown up in the 1950s and 1960s I realise I would hate to be growing up now. There seems to be so much pressure on young women to look and behave in certain ways. I wasn’t conscious of this at all when I was growing up and differences were welcomed or at least tolerated far more than they are today.
As well as focussing on women- she also looks at how men and boys are treated these days and finds they are not served well by stereotypes imposed on them. Not all men want to be into violence and what tend to be thought of as traditional masculine stereotypes – real men don’t cry and real men definitely don’t do the housework. Some men enjoy the housework and want to give vent to their feelings by crying. We need to be less rigid in our expected gender roles – in fact why have gender roles? What is wrong with looking at people as individuals?
I think for me one of the most frightening chapters was about sex and the internet and the way violent pornography is so much a part of it. There are plenty of men in real life who are not interested in being violent towards women and yet so much of pornography contains violence towards women.
This is an angry book as you might expect but it also contains plenty of references to other sources – comprehensive notes on each chapter and a bibliography. It contains rather more uses of the F word than I am quite comfortable with but that is a personal preference.
I think the sentence which made most impression on me is this one from close to the end of the book:
‘Feminism and radical politics are about demanding more than a choice between one type of servitude and another’
That pretty well sums it up for me.
jillysheep 