Amanda Marcotte's first book "It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments" was just released and it's a corker. If you read her blog Pandagon then you are already familiar with her engaging and witty prose. In the introduction, she refers to herself as "a member of the compulsive category of bullshit-callers" and she's dead on with that observation. Marcotte's book is designed to guide the reader through three essential stages involved in calling bullshit on the patriarchy: how to recognize sexism, how to steel yourself against popular woman-hating arguments and then how to have fun sticking it to them or challenging your opponents in return. I laughed out loud several times. She may have a stiff spine from standing up to bullies, yet her writing style is anything but stiff or staid.
The book is organized into eight parts:
"Part One: The Emerging Feminist: High School and College" features sections on issues such as "purity balls," advice to use when dealing with religious whacko parents, sororities, and resisting the whole "Girls Gone Wild" industry.
"Part 2: Family Matters" includes a section on debunking patriarchal myths from the NYT, specifically with the use of anecdote as evidence with the emerging "Opt Out Revolution" which was claiming that hordes of preofessional women were dropping careers for mommyhood in 2003. (Susan Faludi also discusses this at length in "The Terror Dream" as a way to bully women back into traditional gender roles in the wake of 9/11. Read my review of that here). Marcotte continues the chapter with advice on being a vegetarian at family gatherings, how to resist pressure to join the wedding frenzy that some family members and friends care to inflame, same with the pressure to have children.
"Part 3: Surviving the Sexual Minefield" has some really comic responses to the excruciatingly painful gender stereotyping that colonized the dating world. The list of false and insulting presumptions for women's desirability is legion. There's no end to bad advice for women on how to get a man. (It put me in mind Of Lynn Peril's "Think Pink." Read my review). In "Men Who Think You're a Challenge," Marcotte explains that a standard narrative in romcoms tells men that if they clamp their designs upon a feminist, he will ultimately be able to subdue her with his manly essence, taming her into a devoted and submissive wife and mother of his kids. To some men, feminists are a challenge. Perhaps the best entry in this section is on "Nice Guys," a taxonomy of the dudes that think that all women should want to fuck them just because they're nice guys. They have problems with entitlement and a difficulty understanding that they have to develop conversational skills in order to be interesting to women. The Nice Guy resents that women only like jerks and not dudes like him. Moreover, he laments modern women as spoiled materialistic cunts who should really be more submissive and nurturing such as women in third world countries. She nails this type of guy.
"Part 4: The Ugliest Side of the Backlash: Fundamentalists and AntiChoicers" delves into the murky rhetorical sludge spewed forth by conservatives in the U.S. Abstinence-only education, abortion protestors who fetishize the fetus, the Quiverfull movement which advocates having as many kids as you can, the flinch from modernity and science and the modesy movement which polices women's apparel just short of having us where burkas, are all topics covered in detail.
"Part 5: You Don't need god to tell you to be Sexist" begins with the prevailing myths about feminists. You know the drill. We hate men, children, have no sense of humor, we're ugly, we hate sex and we're all hairy lesbians. She breaks down antifeminist quips in "Feminism Versus Chivalry, or I Opened a Door for You so Now I Can be a Douchebag." Honestly, if I had a dollar for everytime I heard bullying remarks such as that since I want to live in an egalitarian society as a full human being, it means that I can look forward to men slamming doors in my face and losing the "privilege" of being knocked off my pedestal, I'd be a rich woman. Why doors and pedestals are the taunts thrown at me whenever I mention civic rights for women is beyond me. Who gives a fuck about having doors opened or being objectified in some twisted notion of adoration? I'll take equality, thanks.
Anyhoo.
"Part Six: Postfeminist My Ass" categorizes the intellectual failings of the faux "Feminists for Life" and Men's Rights Activists. Both are antifeminist and dedicated to reversing women's rights while keeping a bitch under a man's boot.
"Part 7: It's Not a Postfeminist World When we still have a long way to go" compares PETA with Operation Rescue, organizations that are twinned in their desire to use women's bodies for their own agendas, examines efforts to explain away or disguise sexism, what to do when men badger women out of the kitchen, how to survive bachelorette parties and then the bouqet toss.
"Part 8: Resources While Having Fun Surviving" includes inspirational films, television programmes, music and blogs to nurture your feminist sensibilities.
"It's a Jungle Out There" is loaded with feminist salvoes which you can fire off the next time you have to endure a woman hater. As she says, most of us just bite our tongue and move along, but there are going to be moments when you've had your fill of sucking it up and you'll want to issue verbal challenges to sexism. Whether you're a newbie or seasoned feminist, this book will enrich your understanding of gender politics while helping you cope.
9 comments:
Ah yes, but winging it is half the fun, and ignorance is most definately bliss.
I am so happy to be on both sides of the male/female divide. The sooner everyone realises that males and females can never be equal, the better... I mean, you can't argue with brain-wiring and hormone alignment, they just can't be changed.
The path to harmony is paved with the ability to read-between-lines.
Having said that, I've never actually dabbled in feminism much, so this book could teach me a few things... I could use a few good comebacks.
Awesome! Thanks for the thorough review. I'm going to the States next week and hoping to pick up a copy of this.
The Nice Guy section looks particularly interesting. I have heard more startling and blanket derogatory assertions about women from men who somehow think they're owed a girlfriend because they're tidy, like kittens and watched PBS that one time in the mid-90s, than the playahs.
She makes it clear just how much women are still up against in terms of gaining equality with men. It really annoys me how many men maintain feminism is all over, women have got what they wanted now so what's the problem? Are they deaf, blind and stupid or what?
K8, I'm not following you I think. You're not serious when you say men and women can never be equal, right? Biological essentialism inflates the differences between men and women as part of patriarchy's desire to have us exist as polar opposites based on male domination and sole access to personhood over women's subordination and subhuman status. Research which investigates how similar we are is overwhelming, but that's not what sells or gets promoted. Instead we get pseudo science like the mars and venus bullshit telling us that we can't even understand each other and well, that's just natural, righ, and unchangeable. Feminists have been fighting the good fight to denounce all this shit and establish an egalitarian society where we are equals.
Sam, it's a funny section. She talks about those guys as seeing women as pussy vending machines. They put so much in and tabulate: listened to her, bought her dinner and drinks, so I should at least get a blowjob.
Nick, did you just see that UK study that reported that what was it? 40% of men polled felt like they lived under women's rule and that they lived as second class citizens? They want a "menaissance." Bleurgh.
But it's just biology, plain and simple! Testosterone is linked to strentgh, aggressiveness and spatial ability amongst others. Most women don't have the hormones necessary to assist them with such related tasks.
Men, on the other hand have limited communication ability, and their vision differs to ours, being that they needed tunnel vision back in the auld hunting days. They also, as we all know, can't multitask, purely because nature never asked him to.
All that sounds like absorbed bullshit from conditioning efforts, but it sincerely isn't... male and female brains are different, and I'm sincerely fucking thankful for that.
I couldn't live in a world where men and women had the same views about everything, don't you think it would be colourless?
I might not entirely get what you mean by 'equality' though... are we talking jobs and pay rates?
K8 our hormonal differences are exaggerated in the branch of science known as evolutionary biology. The idea that we have so much in common with our cave man ancestors ignores an enormous history of evolutionary change and growth over time.
I don't think that the egalitarian world that I strive for would be bland. It seems utopian. The idea that we are extreme opposites is not my experience or one that I care to have. The virtues that I shoot for are what I expect from my husband as well.
That whole mars and venus shit is made up to serve as proof of men's dominance and women's subordination.
Oh God no, not extreme opposites. I would hate to have been born into an era like that, I count myself lucky that I'm in a more tolerant age, thanks to the suffragettes, strong opposition, and improved communication I guess. I dodged the Magdalene laundries by a mere 40 years which scares the hell out of me.
I've never read Mars and Venus, nor do I care to, because I know this crap is commissioned nonsense. Honestly, I'm not speaking through naievety, my opinion is more like a balanced educated guess.
Things that worry me, are statistics that show our hormone levels are being mucked up by the food we eat. I'm worried that we're evolving in the wrong direction. The man/woman balance will be severely different in the near future, I just hope we don't all just turn into the wankers that Rentboy predicted.
K8, it's cool.
But I cling to the hope in the idea that biology is not destiny and we're in no way determined in life by hormones.
The mars and venus mythology is my shorthand for all the popular sterotypes and ideas about gender and extends far beyond that one book. It's what patriarchy tells us men and women are by nature.
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