A significant, spirited analysis sure to be embraced by feminists and deserving of wide attention.
An enthusiastic update on the state of female sexual liberation in contemporary society.
Fifteen years after her well-received book on sexual stereotyping, Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation (1999), grass-roots feminist Tanenbaum (Taking Back God: American Women Rising Up for Religious Equality, 2008, etc.) still bristles at the “contradictory landscape in which females are applauded for sexual audacity when they’re not being humiliated and disgraced.” As the Internet’s omnipresence continues to realign attitudes regarding what constitutes appropriate behavioral standards, the author revisits former arguments on issues of female empowerment and verbal sexual harassment, refreshing her research with new interviews with girls on the frontlines of name-calling and bullying. She updates readers on what has changed on the name-calling landscape, noting that the term “slut” has “metastasized” outward throughout our culture, with girls often reclaiming the term to defuse it in mutual conversation. Tanenbaum makes potent use of the anecdotal material she’s collected from a wide variety of young women, mostly students, which makes the text useful for concerned educators. Their experiences illustrate the viciousness of social mudslinging, which takes the form of online and direct-contact verbal bullying (“slut-bashing”) and diffused, casual judgmentalism (“slut-shaming”). The “razor-thin” contradictory line between “sexy” and “slutty” shows up in the most provocative chapter, which depicts girls who ineffectively attempt to be sartorially sultry while avoiding male sexualization or worse, rape. In the final chapters, Tanenbaum arms parents and budding professional women with helpful, if somewhat canned, advice addressing modern society’s “sexual double standard” and how to avoid becoming a victim of harassment. In a reliably approachable tone, the author seeks to empower and not chastise, optimistically promoting the incremental elimination of societal slut-shaming with education and the self-actualization of young women.
A significant, spirited analysis sure to be embraced by feminists and deserving of wide attention.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0062282590
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
One may quibble with the title: this is a study of Islamic Orientalism solely, of Western representations of the Near East, with little or no direct reference to Persia, India, China, Japan.
Professor Said (Comparative Literature, Columbia) explains the limited focus as both methodological (coherence over exhaustiveness) and personal: he is an Arab Palestinian. But among Eastern civilizations, as he recognizes, Islam is a special case, particularly in relation to Christian Europe: a "fraudulent," competing religion (doggedly miscalled Mohammedanism), a longstanding military threat, and all the more, therefore, as affront. Singularity, however, is no handicap to what is essentially a case study of Western ethno-centrism and its consequences, while the very persistence of the generalizing and dehumanizing attitudes that Said condemns, unparalleled in regard to either Africa or the Far East, argues the urgency of the enterprise. Drawing, most prominently, upon Foucault's history of pernicious ideas, Said traces the development of Orientalism from Silvestre de Sacy's fragmentation of Oriental culture into "a canon of textual objects" and Ernest Renan's incorporation of the fragments into the new comparative philology: "the Orient's contemporary relevance [was] to be simply as material for European investigation." Ascribed traits—passivity, eroticism, etc.—became fixed; travelers, ostensibly sympathetic, added exotic tales; and the presumed inferiority of Islam served as the pretext for its political domination, its supposed backwardness the excuse for economic intervention (with even Karl Marx writing of England's "regenerating" mission in India). Not until after World War II does Islam enter the American consciousness, and then—with Arab specialists in attendance—as "the disrupter of Israel's and the West's existence." Said's recent citations are devastating, and add force to his final challenge: how to avoid all categorization of one people by another?
The book is redundant and not always reasonable, but bound to cut a wide swath and leave its mark.
Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1978
ISBN: 039474067X
Page Count: 417
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1978
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A clear, useful guide through the current chaotic political landscape.
A sharp explanation of how American politics has become so discordant.
Journalist Klein, co-founder of Vox, formerly of the Washington Post, MSNBC, and Bloomberg, reminds readers that political commentators in the 1950s and ’60s denounced Republicans and Democrats as “tweedledum and tweedledee.” With liberals and conservatives in both parties, they complained, voters lacked a true choice. The author suspects that race played a role, and he capably shows us why and how. For a century after the Civil War, former Confederate states, obsessed with keeping blacks powerless, elected a congressional bloc that “kept the Democratic party less liberal than it otherwise would’ve been, the Republican Party congressionally weaker than it otherwise would’ve been, and stopped the parties from sorting themselves around the deepest political cleavage of the age.” Following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, many white Southern Democrats became Republicans, and the parties turned consistently liberal and conservative. Given a “true choice,” Klein maintains, voters discarded ideology in favor of “identity politics.” Americans, like all humans, cherish their “tribe” and distrust outsiders. Identity was once a preoccupation of minorities, but it has recently attracted white activists and poisoned the national discourse. The author deplores the decline of mass media (network TV, daily newspapers), which could not offend a large audience, and the rise of niche media and internet sites, which tell a small audience only what they want to hear. American observers often joke about European nations that have many parties who vote in lock step. In fact, such parties cooperate to pass legislation. America is the sole system with only two parties, both of which are convinced that the other is not only incompetent (a traditional accusation), but a danger to the nation. So far, calls for drastic action to prevent the apocalypse are confined to social media, fringe activists, and the rhetoric of Trump supporters. Fortunately—according to Klein—Trump is lazy, but future presidents may be more savvy. The author does not conclude this deeply insightful, if dispiriting, analysis by proposing a solution.
A clear, useful guide through the current chaotic political landscape.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4767-0032-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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