female chauvinist pigs?
has anyone read Female Chauvinist Pigs? I find myself really creeped out by the reviews of it, but I haven't read it and I've also heard it's insightful.
It sounds to me like it might be yet another of the screeds saying that women who are in porn are always bad and blameworthy for doing things that harm other women, blaming them for being silly dupes... but maybe it isn't, as the excerpt I peeked at mentions Girls Gone Wild and not much else. And I agree that that kind of stuff is raunchy. I just... meh. I got the impression that it might lapse into deeming women raunchy, rather than condemning the exploitation of women. And that doesn't sound helpful to me.
And I also notice in the reviews and the contents section that there's a chapter about "bois", and I often find that certain people treat butch-femme (or is it about young transmen?) as if it's new and some sort of frightening, antifeminist youth culture. I know that some butches and transmen can adopt misogynistic masculine behaviors, but I'm bothered by the implication I see: that she means to actually say the butch-femme and/or FTM community automatically should be associated with antifeminism. Or with "raunch" -- how is masculinity in women or in female-assigned people raunchy?
It just sounds creepy to me. Women's misogyny is completely worth examining, yes -- but I wonder if, from the snappy title and some of those Amazon reviews, the author is so disgusted by women who "collude" that she is thinking women are the problem. And... while I certainly think we can be critical of "anything goes" type feminism, I'm bothered by the idea some people have that women are "our own worst enemies." The patriarchy is the problem, and the patriarchy loves to tell us to hate one another, to deem one another sluts, hoes, bimboes, and skanks.
Does this book slip into doing that, or am I totally misunderstanding what it's about?
It sounds to me like it might be yet another of the screeds saying that women who are in porn are always bad and blameworthy for doing things that harm other women, blaming them for being silly dupes... but maybe it isn't, as the excerpt I peeked at mentions Girls Gone Wild and not much else. And I agree that that kind of stuff is raunchy. I just... meh. I got the impression that it might lapse into deeming women raunchy, rather than condemning the exploitation of women. And that doesn't sound helpful to me.
And I also notice in the reviews and the contents section that there's a chapter about "bois", and I often find that certain people treat butch-femme (or is it about young transmen?) as if it's new and some sort of frightening, antifeminist youth culture. I know that some butches and transmen can adopt misogynistic masculine behaviors, but I'm bothered by the implication I see: that she means to actually say the butch-femme and/or FTM community automatically should be associated with antifeminism. Or with "raunch" -- how is masculinity in women or in female-assigned people raunchy?
It just sounds creepy to me. Women's misogyny is completely worth examining, yes -- but I wonder if, from the snappy title and some of those Amazon reviews, the author is so disgusted by women who "collude" that she is thinking women are the problem. And... while I certainly think we can be critical of "anything goes" type feminism, I'm bothered by the idea some people have that women are "our own worst enemies." The patriarchy is the problem, and the patriarchy loves to tell us to hate one another, to deem one another sluts, hoes, bimboes, and skanks.
Does this book slip into doing that, or am I totally misunderstanding what it's about?