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3.5 Her comedy stylings are not for me. There's also a noticeable void of anti-pseudoscience condemnation in the Goop chapter. But, even when she introduces her searing dissections of global political misdirection via the prism of sappingly irrelevant subcelebrities, Lindy West is still a cultural force.
He's got his finger on the wrong pulse, the putrid blob of bro culture and anti-pc dinosaurs. This is a fremdscham-inducing collection of clunky essays that are a long decade old, none of them written specifically for this book. The slivers of interrogation related to the title generally end up stained with an uncle to incels view.
I want this revolution, but this is not written for the 99%. Even for the already converted, at a would-be punchy fifty pages, it's repetitive and low on solid indictment and action to grab onto. The conclusions to each thesis come across as wispy as self-help fluff and the argumentation is too generalised to be rallying.
For essays about rejecting motherhood and Christianity and about living abroad, this collection was surprisingly unresonating. There's an unnecessary and specific march of ‘this is what tools of the patriarchy would say'. Keturah confronts cultural confines except for those that work for her, with a blind spot for capitalist values. The worth of other humans in her life are weighed up transactionally. You're out of the running if you hold the wrong passport. And she takes a general jab at ‘overweight and homely' women as more obviously having nothing to offer beyond a green card.
‘What the Wound Reveals' was the most personally evocative in addressing the acceptance of mediocre friendships when you're young, inexperienced and/or out of your element.
She refers to Black atheist and secular humanist groups and shares conversations with friends, scholars, and community leaders that some readers may find a support.
Jesse's writing is magnetic and his story's intense. Facing racism and bullying and dropping out of school in grief is the faint overlap I've lived. I thought about when a friend from Turkey told me that he was never bullied growing up—because the school system was so oppressive it was always students against teachers. Whether those in power are nakedly so or cloaked in misdirection, and while humans new and old haven't stopped scrabbling to be at the top of corrupt hills, there is healing power in sharing stories of rising up and breaking free of narratives of dominance. I am especially hopeful about new models of masculinity.
Incidentally I wasn't expecting a chilling link to Jagmeet Singh's family story.
The parts I appreciated touch on the experiences of children and grandchildren of immigrants in Europe. The socialisation of dehumanisation—with a quick sampling in racist children's songs, the German version of rock-paper-scissors (if you point it out to them they say, ‘What? That's what Chinese sounds like'), television fare in France—remains a current.
3.5 I resented having to read through the chapters that presumably were to humanise the superintendent. We learn that he's never had the capacity to socialise with other men, has lived in cellars too long, but at the same time he has absorbed the misogyny of our culture just fine. Although there is less of a perceptive voice about male entitlement and gendered violence, The Street is importantly incisive and angry about the economic genocide of anti-Blackness.
3.5 While I'm into Manglish, it's a dragging chore to wade through stilted, pompous fantasy-speak. On top of that, referring to the female of the species so insistently is eminently irritating. It's hard to stomach fantasy when one creates a world of dragons and fairies and magic, but then replicates the same oppressions. It's unfair when Prunella is to be lumped with the servants or thought a strumpet, not because she questions class structures, patriarchal control, religious hypocrisy, imperialism, etc., but because she's not one of them. Having two protagonists of colour alone (although it's mentioned multiple times how light-skinned Prunella is and how she can pass by candlelight) isn't enough to overturn this genre. Is it mandatory for fantasy characters to be Mary Sues? Why does the omniscient narrator have to be racist and sexist too? I'll still read book two though.
3.5 Directors as gatekeepers including Celine Sciamma think claiming colourblindness is progressive. France is a country where the national sense of humour is one of punching down, and the official line is that naming race is racist, which conveniently denies the reality of inequitable experience and keeps the dynamics of racist public policy unexamined and unchallenged. The voices in Noire n'est pas mon métier are a start, vital in a country that shuts down public discourse on racism.
