“Women matter. Women are half of us. When you raise every woman to believe that we are insignificant, that we are broken, that we are sick, that the only cure is starvation and restraint and smallness; when you pit women against one another, keep us shackled by shame and hunger, obsessing over our flaws rather than our power and potential; when you leverage all of that to sap our money and our time—that moves the rudder of the world. It steers humanity toward conservatism and walls and the narrow interests of men, and it keeps us adrift in waters where women’s safety and humanity are secondary to men’s pleasure and convenience.”
More important feminist non-fiction for today.
'Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman' is more an autobiography than anything else. Lindy West - whom this Brit had never heard of before picking up this book - is an awesome lady who's had a tremendous life full of hardships. She wants to make herself worthwhile - she already is, of course - and help make other people's lives better, because they can be, and everybody deserves an existence free of shame, scorn, hate, prejudice and oppression.
Lindy talks about growing up a fat girl in a world where thinness is not only desirable in women, but essential. It is the only life goal for women, otherwise they are considered disgusting failures who will never be loved. Disney films and other media from childhood gave her only two options of what she could be: mother or monster (though she doesn't mention Merryweather from 'Sleeping Beauty', whom I always thought was a positive example of fat representation). She talks about her comfort in comedy, her abortion (she acknowledges her own white, upper-middle class privilege making abortion more accessible to her), her up-and-down relationships, the hurtful encounters she's had with people because of her weight, travelling when a lot of planes don't bother to properly accommodate for her, the online abuse and rape threats she has received, the death of her father (internet trolls have actually posed as his ghost to harass her), and how these have shaped her into the confident adult she is today. Learning to love herself when the patriarchy and impossible beauty standards are constantly up against her.
Lindy West is a loud and proud feminist. She knows misogyny is the problem, not herself. Misogyny is systematic, socially-acceptable, and encouraged, especially in male-dominated fields, such as comedy, where the lie, "women are not funny", still hasn't quite died yet. It is because of unchecked misogyny that it is dangerous to be a woman, who are time and again turned into easy targets; they are punished for existing.
Lindy touches on more recent examples of the products of rape culture (the Steubenville rape case is one of the highest things on my 'This is Why Humanity is the Fucking Worst' list), and how it defends the perpetrators and criminalizes the victims, plus the products of white male privilege, and shaming as a silencing tactic in the patriarchal world, where every single woman fears rape every day of her life. Women are made sure never to win, no matter what they do.
'Shrill' does have a confusing structure, where the chapters switch from autobiographical to feminist essays in seemingly random places. The autobiographical chapters themselves are not told in linear order. And there were areas where I thought Lindy could have added a bit more to her points when discussing the importance of feminism, like exploring pop culture in general, not just in comedy stand-ups and shows.
But 'Shrill' and its importance cannot be overlooked. It contains so many wonderful quotes that I wish I could reveal them all, for they are each vital in understanding why feminism (equality between all genders and identities) is so essential to the world's survival. But I shall end this review by quoting some quotes, gathered here:
"I say no to misogynists who want to weaponize my body against me. I say no to men who feel entitled to my attention and reverence, who treat everything the light touches as a resource for them to burn. I say no to religious zealots who insist that I am less important than an embryo. I say no to my own instinct to stay quiet. It's a way of kicking down the boundaries that society has set up for women - be compliant, be a caregiver, be quiet - and erecting my own. I will do this; I will not do that. You believe in my subjugation; I don't have to be nice to you. I am busy. My time is not a public commodity.”
“Denying people access to value is an incredibly insidious form of emotional violence, one that our culture wields aggressively and liberally to keep marginalized groups small and quiet.”
“As a woman, my body is scrutinized, policed, and treated as a public commodity. As a fat woman, my body is also lampooned, openly reviled, and associated with moral and intellectual failure. My body limits my job prospects, access to medical care and fair trials, and – the one thing Hollywood movies and Internet trolls most agree on – my ability to be loved. So the subtext, when a thin person asks a fat person, ‘Where do you get your confidence?’ is, ‘You must be some sort of alien because if I looked like you, I would definitely throw myself into the sea.”
“Why, when men hate themselves, it’s women who take the beatings.” (One of my favourite lines)
“Feminism is really just the long slow realization that the things you love hate you.” (Another favourite, because it's so funny and sad and true)
“There is nothing novel or comedic or righteous about men using the threat of sexual violence to control non-compliant women. This is how society has always functioned. Stay indoors, women. Stay safe. Stay quiet. Stay in the kitchen. Stay pregnant. Stay our of the world. IF you want to talk about silencing, censorship, placing limits and consequences on speech, this is what it looks like.” (YES!!!)
“Don’t trust anyone who promises you a new life. Pick-up artists, lifestyle gurus, pyramid-scheme face cream evangelists, Weight Watchers coaches: These people make their living off of your failures.”
"It's easy for Jim and his fans and all the young comedy dudes to pretend like rape culture doesn't exist, because they have the luxury of actively ignoring it. Confronted with a case like Steubenville, he only bothers to look at the parts that reinforce his world view. He brushed it off with a shrug, because he can, and barreled on."
"In my experience, if you call a troll a misogynist, he'll almost invariably say, 'Oh, I don't hate women. I just hate what you're saying and what that other woman is saying and that woman and one for totally unrelated reasons'. So it was satisfying at least to hear him admit that, yeah, he hated women."
“Feminists don’t single out rape jokes because rape is “worse” than other crimes—we single them out because we live in a culture that actively strives to shrink the definition of sexual assault; that casts stalking behaviors as romance; blames victims for wearing the wrong clothes, walking through the wrong neighborhood, or flirting with the wrong person; bends over backwards to excuse boys-will-be-boys misogyny; makes the emotional and social costs of reporting a rape prohibitively high; pretends that false accusations are a more dire problem than actual assaults; elects officials who tell rape victims that their sexual violation was “god’s plan”; and convicts in less than 5 percent of rape cases that go to trial.” (Absolutely, depressingly true)
“A suffocating deluge of violent misogyny was how American comedy fans reacted to a woman suggesting that comedy might have a misogyny problem. They’d attempted to demonstrate that comedy, in general, doesn’t have issues with women by threatening to rape and kill me, telling me I’m just bitter because I’m too fat to get raped, and suggesting that the debate would have been better if it were just Jim raping me. Holy shit, I realized. I won.”
I love being a woman, no matter how much the rest of the world doesn't want me to.
Thank you, Lindy West.
Final Score: 4/5
No comments:
Post a Comment