2010, undated later edition, from St. Martin's GriffinSusan J. DouglasThe Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture Took Us from Girl Power to Girls Gone WildBought newish for $16.99Slightly worn paperbackB-
This disappointing follow-up to Douglas's Where the Girls Are (1994) is not without its merits, but I do need to talk about its flaws first and foremost. To begin with, the earlier book was written from her perspective as a fortysomething Baby-Boomer, while this time she's a "Vintage Female" and the mother of a then-twenty-year-old daughter. She often writes here as if there was no generation of feminists in between, except for the riot-grrrls who produced music and zines. Well, I was born in 1968, and I can't relate to any of the TV covered here, from Xena and Buffy to Survivor and The Real World, or even ER. (I've seen more of the Elliott Gould sitcom of the same name!) I have seen several of the movies she discusses, and I do appreciate, for instance, her appreciation of Clueless, but I think she missed the boat on Mean Girls and most definitely Down with Love. I have seen a few celebrity magazines with the "baby bump" pictures. And I sort of followed the way Janet Reno, Hillary Clinton, and Sarah Palin were covered.
But this all may be a flaw in me as a reader, rather than her as a writer. So let's take a look at her title, which was changed from the hardcover edition, Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message That Feminism's Work Is Done. Douglas's thesis is that the American media present the following intertwined messages:
- Women have achieved all of feminism's goals, as evidenced by all those women in power in real life and more particularly on TV.
- Therefore, we can now relax and enjoy sexism "ironically," by showing retrograde images, like of scheming, skinny, large-breasted blondes. (Like in Marcotte's It's a Jungle out There. Sorry, I couldn't resist.)
The first part is what she calls "embedded feminism," where female bosses, judges, and even presidents appear as characters. She has a problem with this, because it doesn't reflect most women's lives. Well, no, neither did Bewitched, but she seemed to appreciate that in the previous book. Is the problem that what's shown on TV in recent decades, as opposed to the '50s and '60s, is meant to be real, even when it's contrived "reality TV"?
And, yes, as the more recent subtitle indicates, she does discuss the Spice Girls, and the ambiguity of their message. She doesn't even mention the equally British Hermione Granger, despite my earlier hopes, although there's quite a bit on Bridget Jones. It's as if she doesn't want to include any recent positive images of girl culture. Where the Girls Are was much more balanced.
Still, when she does what she does best, like examining the devolution of Cosmo or mocking Mel Gibson, the book is funny and, well, enlightening. If she does another follow-up, some fifteen or twenty years down the road, I hope that either I'll be more into the pop culture of that time than I am now, or she'll pick a wider range of examples.
2008 edition updating from '06, from Seven Stories PressStuart Ewen & Elizabeth EwenTypecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human InequalityOriginal price unknown, purchase price $14.00Slightly worn paperbackB-
The Ewens take a look at the ways that people (mostly white male Europeans and Americans of the last two or three centuries) have tried to label others, using dubious science (some of which threw out data that contradicted the thesis), as well as various forms of art and entertainment. I found the book to be a bit unfocused, and there were some distracting typos, most oddly enough involving the word "the." However, there is some interesting information, from a 1910ish intelligence test to the Russian attitude towards "Caucasians." Some of it's funny, but some of it's tragic, like the fate of Saartjie Baartmann, the Khosian woman who was exploited during her life and mutilated after her death, all in the cause of "scientific inquiry."
Yes, the Ewens discuss The Birth of a Nation, as well as other early movies. Although there are times that they make connections to the present, such as wondering what "your face is destiny" theorists would've done in the modern world of make-up, contact lenses, and plastic surgery, the book would've been strengthened by more on the post-World-War-II era.
2007, 2008 Seal Press edition
Amanda Marcotte
It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments
Original price $13.95, purchase price $6.98
Slightly worn paperback
C
I'm going to discuss the controversy surrounding this book, because I think it highlights something I noticed about other aspects of the writing. Marcotte uses the symbol of the jungle to represent the sexism that feminists must battle. That in itself is troubling, and related to her preference for urban over rural communities. (Probably the result of her growing up in rural Texas.) But wait. What is the definition of a jungle? "An area of land overgrown with dense forest and tangled vegetation, typically in the tropics." So trees, right? Yet almost none of the illustrations at the beginning of the chapters show trees.
Instead they display a busty, scantily clad blonde fighting the dangers of the African plains. Suffice to say, none of these dangers look like Jerry Falwell or Bill O'Reilly. They look like wild animals and menacing black natives. Marcotte and Seal Press apparently didn't see anything wrong with racist imagery in a book promoting feminism, not even after the original cover, of a blonde being abducted by a gorilla, was criticized and withdrawn. (This edition, she battles a crocodile.) It's as if they couldn't see the trees for the jungle.
I could cut Marcotte some slack, since she was young, but it's not as if she was fresh out of college. She turned 30 that year, making her not much younger than Mary Wollstonecraft publishing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman at 33. And if Ellerbee, Ivins, and Hightower have taught me anything, it's that left-wing rural Texans are definitely aware of issues surrounding race. Perhaps the pictures from the '50s comic books about Lorna the Jungle Girl were meant in an ironic, campy way, but that doesn't make them non-racist, no matter how many anti-racist blogs Marcotte mentions.
It's three years since The Midnight Disease, where "blog" had to be defined, but this book is almost equally dated in its excitement over blogging. As I think I've amply proved over the past couple years, any idiot with an Internet connection can have a blog, and blogs have not turned out any more remarkable than print books, except in the case of speed. And you can turn a blog into a print book pretty darn quickly anyway. This book seems to have evolved out of Marcotte's blog, and it shows signs of not being well edited, as in the "pubic" for "public" slip. (It's still miles better than the editing in Forever Summer though.)
The racism and the giddiness contribute to a carelessness that I haven't seen in a feminist since Germaine Greer, almost 40 years earlier. Marcotte shares with Greer a blindness to the full history of feminism. (In Marcotte's case, "riot-grrrl" days are quaint, and the '70s are ancient, while no feminism existed before, say, 1965.) Also like Greer, Marcotte (whatever mentions of lesbians and women of color she makes) is writing for women like her: white, young, straight, and a bit shallow. Yes, anal bleaching, purity balls, and Girls Gone Wild manage to be both ridiculous and disgusting, but are they the biggest issues facing modern women? Marcotte puts them almost on a level with reproductive rights and equal pay.
Still, I laughed at the book a few times. Like Michael Moore, it's hard to tell how serious she is in some of her suggestions, so, as with Moore, I see this more as "funny politics" than humor per se. I can't recommend it, but if you come across it, you might enjoy it if you just focus on the text and set your standards low.
2007, first edition, from Henry Holt and Company
Susan Faludi
The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America
Bought new for $26.00
Good condition hardcover
B+
Albert: That's too bad 'bout some folks not wantin' to be rescued from trouble by the Loan Arranger.
Noah: Some is even more fierce.
Albert: More fierce?
Noah: Some won't get in trouble for him in the first place. Not very obliging.
--Prehysterical Pogo (1967)
I kept asking myself why, as I read this. Why did a tragedy whose victims were mostly male get recast as a need for men to protect women? Why were the same men who failed to protect the 9/11 victims recast as heroic studs? (As if Donald Rumsfeld's "sexiness" or George W. Bush's ability to cut brush, or for that matter John Kerry's huntin', would've stopped the attacks, or even upgraded the firefighters' communications system.) And why was it, as it always seems to be in the mainstream media, feminism's fault?
Faludi points out the lack of logic, but she also shows why the particular myths took hold at that time. She draws parallels not only to, of course, the 1950s but also to the second half of the 1800s, with a look at the very different attitudes of the 1600s and 1700s. (In that earlier time, white Christians saw themselves as weak and vulnerable compared to God, and they were fine with this.)
When Americans of the last two centuries feel vulnerable, they often hope for cowboys and other heroes to ride to the rescue. (And, yes, she quotes Rogin on The Birth of a Nation.) But for some men, perhaps most especially the men who are most scared and least able to admit it, there's a corresponding need to believe that women are, or should be, damsels in distress. If women are strong, including Daniel Boone's "skilled markswoman" wife Rebecca, then it makes the men seem weak, and thus vulnerable to Injuns, Commies, and terrorists. If a woman is actually a victim, like Jessica Lynch, her victimhood is magnified so her rescue can be enlarged.
As the discussion of America's early days shows, it wasn't always like this, and Faludi sees it as a pattern that can be broken. Her book obviously has a sad, frightening base, but I was surprised how much I laughed. As always, her speaking truth and cutting through the crap delighted me.
The title comes from the novel The Searchers. She discusses that book, its movie, and other media, although as usual not much about music, other than Neil Young's "Let's Roll."
2006, possibly first paperback edition, from Random HouseKatha PollittVirginity or Death!, And Other Social and Political Issues of Our TimesBought new for $13.95Slightly worn paperbackB
Although there's some good, even great, stuff here, I didn't find that it held up as well as her earlier collections. Ironically, although I agreed with her controversial post-9/11 piece "Put Out No Flags," I didn't think she really got going till about halfway through, with one of the best columns last, the tribute to the late Betty Friedan. It's as if she was waiting till the 2004 campaign to really tear into the issues, the politicians, and the media. (Her thoughts on "Dr. Judith Steinberg, aka Judy Dean," and the expectations for potential First Ladies, are still thought-provoking, in the Michelle Obama era.)
It was again fun to see glimpses of daughter Sophie growing up, from punk 13-year-old to a college student, still sharp and opinionated, not always agreeing with her mother. (She later became a columnist herself, for Huffington Post among other places, but now seems to be in marketing.) I laughed out loud at some of Katha's cynical thoughts on marriage, which was once again being promoted as a panacea, along with, yes, premarital virginity for girls, after the relatively liberated '90s. As I get older, I become less aware of the zeitgeist, so I can't say how much of this book is dated, other than that Pollitt, despite an anti-war stance, actually gave Bush II a bit of the benefit of the doubt, another reason why the second half is better than the first.
And I've sort of lost track of Pollitt. According to Wikipedia, she married Steven Lukes (presumably the Last Marxist) a few weeks after the last column here, which, despite my own cynicism, I find rather sweet. She's published a book on learning to drive, and another collection of poems. She still writes for The Nation, so hopefully there will be another collection in print soon. Here's one of her latest columns: http://www.thenation.com/article/177733/year-feminism
2006, first edition, from BloomsburyAndreas Killen1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties AmericaOriginal price $24.95, purchase price $1.00Hardcover in good conditionB-
This is only the second time I've read this book, and I'm still not sure if I like it, or even if it's a book that can be "liked." Killen focuses on the pivotal year 1973, with some looks forward and back, but not only is this far from my favorite year of the 1970s, I don't think of most of the topics that he focuses on, Watergate aside. POWs, skyjackers, and religious cults are not terribly interesting to me. Even when Killen focuses on pop culture besides Warhol, it's things that I've never seen or heard, like the New York Dolls, Fear of Flying, Badlands, and An American Family (the reality-TV pioneer about the Loud family), or ones that aren't very meaningful to me, like American Graffiti. (Even so, I felt like like I knew that movie better than Killen, since he thinks Wolfman Jack is "a person of color.") Also, it seems wrong that Ronald Reagan is repeatedly mentioned, sometimes as being elected "at the end of the decade," while Carter merits only one mention, for pardoning Patty Hearst. True, few outside Georgia knew who Carter was in 1973, while Reagan was a nationally known Governor of California, but couldn't Killen have connected Carter's election with the breakdown of three years earlier?
Still, I found the book well written and sometimes insightful. I'll give Killen kudos for presenting 1973 as it seemed to him and making it more interesting than I expected. And if it was true seven (almost eight) years ago that we were still experiencing the aftershocks of that earthquake of a year, it's still true now.
2005, first edition, from Harcourt, Inc.Haynes JohnsonThe Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to TerrorismOriginal price $26.00, purchase price $6.40Hardcover in good conditionB
Johnson, who was an adolescent at the beginning of the McCarthy period, does offer a bit of his personal history, including his recollections of his father writing the articles that inspired On the Waterfront, but this is mostly a general look at McCarthy and his impact on American society. At that, we mostly stay in Washington, D.C., or perhaps follow McCarthy on his speaking engagements, including the 1950 Wheeling speech that kicked things off. There's little here about, for instance, Hollywood. But Johnson did help me better understand McCarthy, why he had such influence and what a lying, scheming bully he was. He literally kicked columnist Drew Pearson in the balls, and then boasted about it. Richard Nixon was the one to break up the fight, as a Quaker!
The book has lots of stranger-than-fiction details like that, so I found it very entertaining. I did think Johnson didn't get what leftist criticism of liberals' handling of McCarthyism is/was about, that the liberals not only didn't stand up to McCarthyism enough (if at all), but also sometimes fed into it, as Truman did, although he disliked McCarthy personally. Johnson thinks Eisenhower was heroic to disagree with McCarthy, but that was in private meetings, his diary, and rough drafts of speeches. Johnson attributes this to classiness, not cowardice.
As for the "terrorism," in the last two chapters Johnson draws parallels to the Bush II administration, and it is interesting to get a blended contemporary and long-term perspective. The thing is, Johnson believes that what Bush, Cheney, and Ashcroft did is worse than McCarthyism, even if McCarthy paved the way for them. And that's not really something you can just throw in at the end, it needs to be explored more deeply. On the other hand, I found it just as interesting as what went before.
This is one of my most recent purchases, and I was reading it while rereading 2003. It's a pretty long book (600+ pages, counting notes and all) to read twice within a few weeks, but it was worth it, and I look forward to revisiting it again when more time has passed.
2004 update from 2003, published by Warner BooksMichael MooreDude, Where's My Country?Bought newish for $14.95Worn paperbackB-
It's been awhile since I've seen Dude, Where's My Car?, so correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the car actually physically missing? And in this book, Moore says you can't have a war with a noun, like "terror." I think he means an abstract noun, but maybe he doesn't actually know what "country" means. I'm not questioning his patriotism. He's probably more patriotic than I am, since he actually gives a shit, while I've spent the dozen years since 9/11/01 doing my best to not follow the news, although feeling guilty about it and sometimes compensating with purchases such as this. (Ironically, I first saw the attacks in Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, since I've never hooked up my TV to anything but my VCR and DVD player, and I bought them all earlier in 2001.) I just think he's again chosen a bad title.
This time he of course addresses that War on Terror, as well as the war against civil liberties at home. He's still very confrontational, but arguably less so. (2003 was, however, the year he made his "fictitious" speech at the Oscars.) He thinks that there's a great deal of consensus in America, and you can make common cause with your conservative brother-in-law, provided you admit that liberals are wrong about some things, like MTV. (What happened to MTV being hated by feminists? Now we find out that the liberals are to blame?) Oh, and "your children do not have a right to privacy and you better pay attention to what they're up to." Yes, parents should be involved, but guess what? Kids (especially teens) have legal rights, including to privacy. (Or does pro-choice Moore want to argue for parental consent laws for abortion?)
In Googling Moore before writing this review and the previous one, I saw that he's been criticized for portraying himself as a working-class hero, when he's actually "rich." Well, I guess it depends on how you define "rich." He's no Trump, but he's financially comfortable, as he tells us in this and Stupid White Men, like in the chapter here called "Woo Hoo! I Got Me a Tax Cut!"
Moore seems to be one of those love-'em-or-hate-'em divisive sorts that I can't get too worked up about either way. (Madonna is my ur-example for music.) I find him somewhat entertaining and informative, if taken with a grain of salt, but after following his career from roughly '02 to '05 I lost track of him and didn't really care. Revisiting that time through these books has taken me back a bit, and I will rewatch Fahrenheit next year for its tenth anniversary.
2004 update from 2001, published by HarperCollinsMichael MooreStupid White Men...And Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation!Bought newish for $13.95Worn paperbackB-
Moore generally is not good at titling his works. For instance, his Oscar-winning documentary sounds like the old show Bowling for Dollars, with purple flowers substituted for money. In this case, he was inevitably setting himself up, so it's not surprising that it inspired the "answer book" (sort of like an answer song) Michael Moore Is a Big Fat Stupid White Man. The thing is, Moore at various points in this book says he's not proud of being (somewhat) stupid, white, or male. Some of those he attacks aren't white and/or male, but he considers, for instance, Condi Rice and Colin Powell "honorary white men." And the problem isn't really that these are stupid people. (Even George W. is simply inarticulate, like his father.) The problem is that they're cruel and/or greedy. But that might've made for too wishy-washy a title. And Moore is all about being in your face, in a humorous way.
Yeah, I think the book is funny, although I wouldn't put it in humor (as I might with Ivins), because the line between Moore being satirical and being outspoken is always blurry. When he tells women to buy a stepladder so they won't have to rely on men, I suppose it's pointless to mention that some women can reach cupboards just fine. (I'm 5'3" and when I had lunch with an ex-girlfriend recently, I recalled that she's seven inches taller than I am!) It's the same for some of his more "serious" suggestions.
This book was originally published right before September 11, 2001, but held back by the publisher for a few months. It still went on to be a best-seller. Moore has added footnoted updates for this edition, including on Enron, which was just about to break in '01. He goes into quite a bit of detail on the 2000 Presidential election, and even if you've seen Fahrenheit 9/11 (a good title choice that time), it's worth rereading, especially with hindsight.
2004, possibly first edition, from VikingJim HightowerLet's Stop Beating Around the Bush: More Political SubversionOriginal and purchase price unknownHardcover in pretty good condition except for torn dustjacketB-
Unlike Michael Moore (coming up twice later in '04, for reasons I'll explain then), Hightower seems to be more interested in domestic policy than foreign, although they overlapped when it came to Attorney General Ashcroft, who did indeed say, "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: your tactics only aid terrorists." So there's a lot more here about the environment and the economy than on wars and elections, but that was true of Hightower's Dead Armadillos book in the days of Clinton.
To mix things up a bit, this time there are illustrations and puzzles, the latter solvable if you've read the chapter, sort of like in a junior/senior-high Civics class. You could probably guess the five-letter word for "Former President who looks like the Jolly Green Giant [environmentally] compared to George W," even if you hadn't read the chapter, since there were then only five possibilities. (No, I don't count Van Buren.)
2004, undated later edition, from Houghton MifflinAlice W. FlahertyThe Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative BrainBought newish for $15.00Slightly worn paperbackB
Flaherty is a neurologist and a mother of twins, as well as a writer, and she brings all these perspectives to this book. She also quotes a variety of writers, from Flaubert to Mel Brooks. Although there's a lot in here about how the brain works, it never gets too dry or technical, but instead is funny, lively, and thought-provoking. You won't necessarily learn how to unblock your writer's block, but you'll learn some coping techniques, including how to see the block as part of the process.
At the time I reviewed The Golden Notebook, I said that I'd never seriously had a writer's block. Well, after that I did find myself stalled on one story, but I eventually realized that I didn't really want to be writing it. I came to accept that if writing isn't easy for me, it won't be good, and vice versa. And then a few months ago I was able to write from three to six short chapters a day of a different story, until I reached the home-stretch and had to tie up loose ends, which slowed me down to a chapter every day or so.
I don't think I have hypergraphia, which she discusses here as a compulsion to write quickly and at great length, but it is something I relate to more than a block, and why I bought this book in the first place, because no one ever talks about it in comparison to block. (Obviously, it's much less of a problem, unless it's interfering with other tasks.) I also liked things like her observation that the "inner child" has little to do with actual children's behavior. (The stuff with her twins, then three, is great.) And about 35 years after Kate Millett, Flaherty can let a simple "Yikes" suffice for Freud's view of the pen as penis.
I was also amused that in '04, roughly three years after I got a LiveJournal account, she defines "blog (from Web-log)" as an "on-line memoir." Obviously, blogs (not just this one) are often used for less diaristic purposes as well.
2002, 2003 Perennial editionBetsy IsraelBachelor Girl: 100 Years of Breaking the Rules-- A Social History of Living SingleOriginal price unknown, purchase price $7.50Slightly worn paperbackB-
I found this about equal to Blumberg's The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (1997), with which it somewhat overlaps. Despite the subtitle, we're actually looking at more like 150 years of single "girls." And some of these singles are young, under 21, although she does discuss older "spinsters," of 30 or 40 or even 50. She goes roughly chronologically, but sometimes with a few decades in one chapter. The book didn't quite jell for me, although there was some interesting material. And, yes, both Sheila Levine and Bridget Jones make appearances, as do some TV characters like Mary Richards and Ally McBeal. Israel was single and 27 when the "marry a terrorist" study came out, although she wed soon after. I wish she'd gone into more about the binary assumption of married and single-- as a divorced childless woman I identify as neither-- but I do appreciate that she includes lesbians to some degree.
2001, possibly first edition, from PrometheusBill Sloan"I Watched a Wild Hog Eat My Baby!": A Colorful History of Tabloids and Their Cultural ImpactOriginal price unknown, purchase price $12.50Hardcover in good conditionB
Sometimes I ask myself, "Will I regret it more if I buy this or I don't buy it?" (This applies to other things than purchases of course.) In the case of this book, I was on the fence and didn't buy it when it was relatively new, and regretted it. Luckily, I found it used years later. It's a fun, although sometimes serious, read about "the tabs" by a journalist who got to know many of the key players in the golden years of the late '60s through late '80s. Generoso Pope (real name) and the other publishers were almost as strange as the people and creatures who appeared in their magazines/newspapers. My favorite chapter was about the likes of Weekly World News, where nearly everything was made up and bizarre. I was never a big tabloid reader, except during my early teens, and even then it was mostly so my best friend and I could make fun of them.
Sloan argues convincingly that everything changed in the 1990s, due to factors that included corporate consolidation, the Internet, the Lewinsky scandal (when daily newspapers could wallow more easily and more deeply than the tabs), and the aging of the prime audience, the housewife readers of the glory days. Of course, the story begins back in the 1890s, with Hearst and Pulitzer, but Sloan moves quickly to the '50s when The Enquirer and its less successful competitors began with violence and sometimes smut, later cleaning up their acts as newspaper/magazine purchasing shifted from news-stands (think of the Bellini family in The Cricket in Times Square in 1960) to supermarkets. I went to two different supermarkets this past weekend and noticed that one didn't seem to have any tabloids, while the other had a few at the less used checkstands. I can still remember laughing at headlines while waiting in grocery lines in the '90s, but Sloan is right that the tabs were in a long, slow decline throughout that decade. On the other hand, I just looked, and nationalenquirer.com has news of Peter O'Toole's death, so tabs are still out there in some form.
The book could be criticized as too short to cover all it sets out to cover, but I found it an enjoyable read for what it was. And, yes, it's got one of the more eye-catching titles in my book collection.
2001, possibly first paperback edition, from Modern Library
Katha Pollitt
Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture
Bought new for $13.95
Worn paperback
B+
Instead of the longer essays of Reasonable Creatures, this is more of a "best of" from Pollitt's column in The Nation called, yes, "Subject to Debate." As such, I didn't feel it sustained the heights of its predecessor, although she's still probably my all-time favorite columnist. I had a Nation subscription into at least '95, and I remember seeing some of these pieces for the first time almost twenty years ago. And yet, I found myself laughing hard early on, when she zaps Clinton, and Nixon. There's a definite New-York-centricity to her writing, and so we get a slightly different take on Giuliani vs. Ofili's "elephant-dung Virgin Mary" artwork than in Lechner's book.
Pollitt's daughter Sophie was growing up, seemingly untraumatized by her mother's divorce and subsequent live-in with "The Last Marxist," and it's the then ten-year-old who makes the best comments on Titanic. But understandably the elder Pollitt has great insights into The First Wives Club, which I recently saw for the second time. Ironically, she comments on her future publisher Modern Library's choice for the 100 best books of the 20th century.* Pollitt mostly writes of politics of course, local, national, and international. I agreed with her for the most part, especially in why "we were wrong" to vote for Clinton in '92, and again when she reacts to how Clinton tried to cover up the fuss over the Lewinsky scandal by "carpet-bombing Iraq without so much as a phone-call to Congress, much less the U.N."
This book goes up to October 2000, the outer edge of the Clinton years. We'll see what she says about the first half of George Bush II's administration in Virginity or Death!: And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time in 2006....
*No "television criticism" tag though because, as Pollitt admits in an endnote, she lacked "television savvy." I've never watched NYPD Blue either, so I identified with her there, too.
1999, first edition, from Cleis
Gore Vidal
Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings
Probably bought new for $14.95
Slightly worn paperback
B
This overlaps 1968's Sex, Death, and Money, and not just topically. The first three essays here are mid-'60s ones that appeared in SDaM, and although it's been a long while since I read that collection, I decided to skip those three works. (Near as I could tell, Vidal hadn't made any changes or comments on them.) I jumped ahead to a snarky and insightful look at David Reuben's Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex, which even at age 14 I found dubious. The book overall is smart and funny. Even when I don't agree with Vidal, he's entertaining. It was nice to get his take on Eleanor Roosevelt compared to B. W. Cook's. (In 1971 he offers his memories of her, and then in 1999 he briefly talks about reading her correspondence with Lorena Hickok.) There are also some interviews of Vidal by gay journalists, in 1974 and again in 1992.
One thing that Vidal said repeatedly that no one (of any orientation) seemed to get was that "homosexual" is an adjective, not a noun, and it applies to acts rather than people. He was (I'm guessing) a Kinsey 4 or 5, defining himself as bisexual when pressed for a label, but seeing nearly everyone as potentially bi. He does discuss homophobia, and the impact of AIDS, but I found his opinions changed little over time, except to become both more cynical and more hopeful. In his lifetime, he saw gradually more acceptance of homosexuality, but he was always aware of the prejudices of society, particularly the Religious Right.
I doubt that I'll get his novel The Golden Age (2000) in time for this project, but this is not a bad place to end with him. As you probably know, he passed away after I started blogging about him, but even at the time I saw him in Celluloid Closet (1995), he was an iconoclastic icon. He may not be remembered fondly overall, but he will be remembered.
1999, possibly first edition, from Chronicle BooksJoshua Piven and David BorgenichtThe Worst-Case Scenario Survival HandbookOriginal/purchase price unknownSlightly worn paperbackC+
I think I got this as a "humorous" gift, and probably haven't read it more than once before. This time, it made me not want to leave the house, or at least never go to Florida again. The authors consulted experts and provide advice on how to, as the cover says, "Escape from Quicksand, Wrestle an Alligator, Break Down a Door, Land a Plane...." I was hoping the book would be funnier, since most of the information is stuff I will probably never have occasion to use. It was somewhat interesting though.
1999, first edition, from William Morrow and Company
Susan Faludi
Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man
Original price $27.50, purchase price unknown
Hardcover with broken spine
B-
The "betrayal" that Faludi writes of is twofold, by specific fathers of Baby-Boom and younger men, and by the culture at large, which shifted after World War II from an emphasis on men doing to an emphasis on men (and of course women) being and appearing. She began with an examination of why some men are angry and sometimes violent, then went on a literal and figurative six-year journey that led her to a surprising destination. (She uses "literal" and "figurative" quite a bit in the book, not always accurately.)
That I was much less into this book than her classic Backlash (1991) is also twofold, although not a betrayal by any means. First of all, the earlier book had a clear message from the beginning, while the thesis here is one she stumbled into. And secondly, many of the men she profiles are not ones that I want to read about, like the Spur Posse. There are some genuinely heroic men, like Michael Bernhardt, who tried to stop My Lai and spoke out against it later, but that's not who the book spends the majority of its time with. I understand, if she's going to explain the Angry (mostly) White Male, then she has to dwell on that sort of man. But that doesn't mean I want to be on this journey with her. There was a point where she wrote about leftist women's late-1960s drift towards feminism because of the sexism of leftist men, and I wanted her to pursue that story instead.
Maybe this makes me sexist, but I didn't want to read about the defense industry, sports fans, the Promise Keepers, or any of the other all (or nearly) male groups and individuals she profiles. But I wouldn't have wanted to read about women doing any of these things either. Only Faludi's writing skills kept me reading to the end.
One thing of note, she briefly discusses here the problem of men raised to "rescue" women (yes, literally or figuratively), but finding that women don't want and/or need to be rescued. She would expand on this in The Terror Dream, which we'll look at in 2007....
1998, possibly first edition, from Girl PressEdited by Pam Nelson
Written by Dawn Chipman, Mari Florence, Naomi Wax
Designed by Amy Inouye
Cool Women: The Thinking Girl's Guide to the Hippest Women in HistoryOriginal/purchase price unknownWorn paperbackC+
This goes in alphabetical order, from Amazons to Wu Zhao. And, yes, some profiles are of groups, others of individuals, from many times and places, as well as different claims to fame. So it gets points for multi-culturalism, but I found the format annoying. There are two-page spreads for each person/group, even when there's not much to say, or when there's too much to say. (Funny to see Cleopatra reduced to that after Margaret George's novel.) Also, the colors are often garish, and the text is hard to read against some backgrounds.
The audience seems to be junior-high girls, since the obvious is pointed out at times, as in "That's right-- not so long ago women weren't considered human enough to qualify as full citizens. Pretty incredible, huh?" On the other hand, it can't be aimed at an elementary-school crowd because of figures like Margaret Sanger. You won't necessarily agree with their definition of "hip" or "cool"-- Evita? Queen Isabella?-- and the links are probably hopelessly dated by now, but I guess it might work as an introduction to what was then being called "girl power."
1998, first edition, from Random House
Molly Ivins
You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You: Politics in the Clinton Years
Possibly bought new for $23.00
Hardcover in good condition
C+
As the title suggests, this covers 1993 to '97, with the introduction addressing the Lewinsky scandal. As always, the focus is on both Texan and national politics, although those overlap at times, as when she writes about Ann Richards losing the governorship to George W. Bush. Ivins is critical of Clinton, although much less than Hightower was, partly because she feels the man faced enough criticism, from all sides. She's got a nifty piece on Nixon, happily speaking ill of the dead, because he deserved it. My favorite obituaries though were of her mother ("a combination of Sigmund Freud and Gracie Allen") and Jessica Mitford. I found the collection funnier than the last one, especially the thing about the boss who talked to a thermostat.
I've read but don't own 2000's Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush. (Yeah, talk about wishful thinking.) This is it for her among my books, and she died of cancer in 2007.
1997, 1999 Harvard University Press editionDeborah L. RhodeSpeaking of Sex: The Denial of Gender InequalityPossibly bought new for $17.95Worn paperbackB-
Almost 30 years after Caroline Bird wrote Born Female: The High Cost of Keeping Women Down, and of course later in the decade of Backlash, comes this update on women's status in America. As the title and subtitle suggest, people would rather talk about sex in the sense of intercourse than sex in the sense of gender, and women's progress is used to deny that they haven't yet reached equal rights. Like Faludi, Rhode discusses the ways that feminism is blamed for inequality (when inequality is admitted), but unlike Faludi, she's also able to comment on the beginnings of the MRA, Men's Rights Activism, as well as the early Internet.
Although the book is fairly intelligent, I didn't find it either focused or specific enough. Interestingly, she criticizes Naomi Wolf more than she agrees with her. I could've sworn that Wolf in Fire with Fire used the Baby-Sitters Club series as an example of girls taking pride in making money, but I can't find the reference now. (I'm sure Wolf would've agreed with that idea though.) It's telling that Rhode just sees the "down" side, the "boy-chasing" titles like Stacey's Big Crush. Even more than Faludi, she's stacking the cards by accentuating the negative.
On the other hand, I do appreciate that, more than most of the feminists I've examined so far (Patricia J. Williams of course excepted), she actually talks at length about race and class, and not just when it comes to the '80s and '90s attacks on "welfare mothers." And she does have some useful statistics, and some recommendations for everyone to take more responsibility in achieving equality for all. That women have progressed from 77 cents on the dollar from 1997's 70 cents is still not enough progress. (I know I said in my review of Born Female that it was 81 cents, but it depends how it's measured. Not that 81 cents would be anything to cheer about.)
