A witty polemic with significant contemporary value.
A noted Australian feminist writer, activist, and “troll agitator” offers her take on the culture of toxic masculinity.
In her latest, Ford (Fight Like a Girl, 2018) analyzes patriarchy and, in particular, “how the systems we live in allow men to get away with doing deeply shitty things.” She begins by examining the behaviors that “codify male power and dominance…[and] secure protection” from the consequences of those behaviors. She traces the genesis of toxic masculinity to the cultural penchant for forcing young boys to accept the rigid ways of being that disallow them to express emotions or preferences for “girlish” things like dresses and dolls. The more boys see the males and females around them assuming equal roles in both the private and public spheres, the less likely they will feel entitled to tell women their place is at home taking care of men. The fewer stories they see in books, film, and online that “reinforce regressive stereotypes,” the less chance boys will develop the inflated sense of social entitlement Ford sees as being at the heart of toxic masculinity. She argues that rather than glorify male violence, society must teach boys the importance of communicating with and respecting the vulnerability in each other and in women. Ford also considers the online “manosphere” backlash against female empowerment, which includes men’s rights activism that sees feminism as a “social cancer.” The author then delves into the various frightening manifestations of rape culture. Normalized through the sanction of powerful men like Donald Trump, it paints women as provocateurs responsible for all acts of male sexual aggression they might suffer. Ford’s book, which draws on current events in Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. as well as her own life as a wife and mother of a son, launches yet another furious and necessary salvo at the gender status quo while offering a blueprint for a more enlightened world.
A witty polemic with significant contemporary value.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78607-663-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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