An attack on “female chauvinist pigs,” women who make sex objects of themselves and of other women.
Levy, a contributing editor for New York Magazine, has expanded two of her articles in that magazine and a piece for slate.com into this biting critique of the phenomenon of raunch culture (think Paris Hilton) in which women choose to present themselves as bimbos. Noting that “raunchy” and “liberated” are not synonymous, she questions the assertion by some women that dressing and acting overtly sexual is empowering. She argues that they are deluded, that raunch culture is not essentially progressive but rather focuses on one particular commercial view of sexiness. For the roots of this, Levy turns to the schism between the women’s liberation movement and the sexual revolution, with anti-porn feminists on one side and women who argued that freedom for women meant being free to look at or appear in pornography on the other. If grown women have adopted raunch as rebellion against the constraints of feminism, she asserts, teenage girls, growing up in a postfeminist era, are unaware of feminism’s history and thus have nothing to rebel against. To learn why raunch culture is so pervasive among the young, she interviewed teenage girls. Her finding, in a chapter titled “Pigs in Training,” easily the most disturbing part of her book, is that they are being blitzed with cultural pressure to seem sexy, to dress provocatively, to look as lewd as possible if they want to win social acclaim. Ironically, she notes that most teenage girls are being taught to just say no to sex before marriage rather than being educated about sexuality as a fundamental part of being human. It is, she asserts, a lack of understanding about the complexity and power of sexuality, an anxiety about real sexual freedom, that has produced the current unfortunate obsession with raunchy exhibitionism.
An assertive blast, filled with punchy language and vivid images.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-4989-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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Not an easy read but an essential one.
10
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Title notwithstanding, this latest from the National Book Award–winning author is no guidebook to getting woke.
In fact, the word “woke” appears nowhere within its pages. Rather, it is a combination memoir and extension of Atlantic columnist Kendi’s towering Stamped From the Beginning (2016) that leads readers through a taxonomy of racist thought to anti-racist action. Never wavering from the thesis introduced in his previous book, that “racism is a powerful collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity and are substantiated by racist ideas,” the author posits a seemingly simple binary: “Antiracism is a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas.” The author, founding director of American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center, chronicles how he grew from a childhood steeped in black liberation Christianity to his doctoral studies, identifying and dispelling the layers of racist thought under which he had operated. “Internalized racism,” he writes, “is the real Black on Black Crime.” Kendi methodically examines racism through numerous lenses: power, biology, ethnicity, body, culture, and so forth, all the way to the intersectional constructs of gender racism and queer racism (the only section of the book that feels rushed). Each chapter examines one facet of racism, the authorial camera alternately zooming in on an episode from Kendi’s life that exemplifies it—e.g., as a teen, he wore light-colored contact lenses, wanting “to be Black but…not…to look Black”—and then panning to the history that informs it (the antebellum hierarchy that valued light skin over dark). The author then reframes those received ideas with inexorable logic: “Either racist policy or Black inferiority explains why White people are wealthier, healthier, and more powerful than Black people today.” If Kendi is justifiably hard on America, he’s just as hard on himself. When he began college, “anti-Black racist ideas covered my freshman eyes like my orange contacts.” This unsparing honesty helps readers, both white and people of color, navigate this difficult intellectual territory.
Not an easy read but an essential one.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-50928-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
Categories: FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE
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