Essential cultural criticism. But brace yourself—it ain’t pretty.
How the last three decades of movies, music, and media have written the story for women.
In a carefully buttressed and sharply written analysis that takes into account a dizzying number of cultural products and characters, Gilbert tries to understand how we got where we are today, a moment when the undeniable increase in women’s power meets the repeal of Roe v. Wade and the reelection of Donald Trump. If we can see what went wrong, the Atlantic staff writer says, perhaps “we can conceive of a more powerful way forward.” As she considers topics ranging from the Spice Girls to Nora Ephron to Paris and Perez Hilton, from American Pie to Awkward Black Girl, from Sheryl Sandberg to Sheila Heti to Kim Kardashian, she sees that “so much of what I was trying to figure out kept coming back to porn.” Insights of that sort come fast and bright, big and small: “I’ve always wondered why people diminish girlhood as somehow cosseted or twee, when the reality of coming-of-age as a young woman is so raw, filled with emotional violence and literal blood.” “Movies in the aughts [the decade of Shallow Hal and Knocked Up] hated women.” “Why is male honesty in art seen as brave while female honesty is so repellent?” The heroes of her account are sometimes unexpected, Taylor Swift and Instagram among them. Her exploration of torture porn and its connection to Abu Ghraib is not for the fainthearted. (If you’ve never heard of a movie called Hostel, consider yourself lucky.) Truly, Gilbert deserves a medal—not only for her observations and conclusions, but for navigating the sludge she had to wade through to get there.
Essential cultural criticism. But brace yourself—it ain’t pretty.Pub Date: April 29, 2025
ISBN: 9780593656297
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: today
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
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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