So many books
I spent last weekend plowing through Lisa M. Diamond's Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desires. It was good, really, but I had to finish it by Monday because I'd promised to review it for a newsletter.
She spent a decade interviewing 100 young women about their sexual attractions, intimate involvements, and sexual identity, five times each over the ten year period. Her project focused on lesbian and bisexual women, with about a dozen heterosexual women for comparison. She came to the conclusion that women seem to have a greater capacity for what she named "sexual fluidity" than men.
Many more of her respondents reported being attracted to both men and women (usually not to the same degree) than she'd expected; and a surprising number felt that the category "unlabeled" fit them better than "lesbian" "bisexual" or "straight." Also, for an unexpected number of respondents, sexual attraction only developed when they had learned to appreciate and admire an individual's personality, and never the other way around - i.e. attraction leading to a desire to get to know the other person.
Once my review was in, I read Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Achidie, a Nigerian author. It was beautifully written and compelling, but also terribly sad. I ached for the characters. The narrator is Kambili, a 15-year-old Nigerian girl. Her father is wealthy and influential and widely respected for using most of his money to support charities. But at home he's fanatically religious (the family is Roman Catholic) and incredibly dictatorial about every detail of their lives. Kambili has a lot of secrets to keep about what things are like in her home. Her classmates envy the advantages they think she has and mock her awkwardness.
Kambili's father identifies completely with white colonial power, starting with the white missionaries. He seems to have internalized all their worst, racist attitudes; he scorns everything about Nigerian society and holds whites up as the standard in everything. It's horrifying to imagine the sense of inferiority the European-run schools and churches had engendered in him, although as the novel goes on, it's harder to be sympathetic because it becomes clear that he's not just neurotic about controlling his family, he's violent and abusive as well. Each character's life changes dramatically by the end of the book, but there are no happy endings: the damage is already done.
She spent a decade interviewing 100 young women about their sexual attractions, intimate involvements, and sexual identity, five times each over the ten year period. Her project focused on lesbian and bisexual women, with about a dozen heterosexual women for comparison. She came to the conclusion that women seem to have a greater capacity for what she named "sexual fluidity" than men.
Many more of her respondents reported being attracted to both men and women (usually not to the same degree) than she'd expected; and a surprising number felt that the category "unlabeled" fit them better than "lesbian" "bisexual" or "straight." Also, for an unexpected number of respondents, sexual attraction only developed when they had learned to appreciate and admire an individual's personality, and never the other way around - i.e. attraction leading to a desire to get to know the other person.
Once my review was in, I read Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Achidie, a Nigerian author. It was beautifully written and compelling, but also terribly sad. I ached for the characters. The narrator is Kambili, a 15-year-old Nigerian girl. Her father is wealthy and influential and widely respected for using most of his money to support charities. But at home he's fanatically religious (the family is Roman Catholic) and incredibly dictatorial about every detail of their lives. Kambili has a lot of secrets to keep about what things are like in her home. Her classmates envy the advantages they think she has and mock her awkwardness.
Kambili's father identifies completely with white colonial power, starting with the white missionaries. He seems to have internalized all their worst, racist attitudes; he scorns everything about Nigerian society and holds whites up as the standard in everything. It's horrifying to imagine the sense of inferiority the European-run schools and churches had engendered in him, although as the novel goes on, it's harder to be sympathetic because it becomes clear that he's not just neurotic about controlling his family, he's violent and abusive as well. Each character's life changes dramatically by the end of the book, but there are no happy endings: the damage is already done.