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“Reading remains one of the purest things I do.”

I finished this one up last weekend before my Libby loan expired. It's only my 2nd audiobook ever, and I learned nonfiction isn't going to work for me without a print copy. Keeping in mind that the mode probably affected my opinion of the book, I found this was good, but not great. The topics for each chapter are so very important, but I struggled to be engaged. It could also be that I'm just weary of intolerance and hate right now ⬇️

Inspiring.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1915 book Herland is a thought-provoking work of utopian fiction and a time capsule of early twentieth-century feminism. On the eve of the First World War, sociology student Vandyck Jennings goes on an expedition with two of his friends to search for a society rumored to consist only of women. On the way to what they will name "Herland," Van and his friends ponder the type of women they hope or expect to see when they...

Be still my heart. A whole essay about competitive Scrabble.

There are evidently many men who feel entitled to regulate pregnant bodies without having the remotest idea about, or interest in learning, how they work. And there are evidently some women who are prepared to paint others as heartless for balking at these attempts to police and enforce their pregnancies. #SheSaid

As with any collection, some of these essays are better than others. A few of them didn‘t age particularly well, but most are spot on. I did the audio version, narrated by Banhi Turpin, and it was mostly well done but with a handful of words she mispronounced so wildly that I lost the whole sentence trying to parse it. I‘m glad I finally read it, and I‘ll probably read more of Gay‘s work at some point, but I‘m not racing to do so.

The easiest way to describe this book is the say this is the specific ways everyday sexism is used against women and their bodies in the name of science. It‘s pathetic just how many doctors are, in fact, this bad. It‘s even worse to consider that many of these doctors are also women themselves.

Herland keeps showing up on feminist book lists I'm trying to read through. Noticed it's book #2 in a trilogy. But book #1 is rarely mentioned. Do I need to read the first to understand what is happening in Herland?

And don‘t insist we advocate for ourselves, then get pissy when we actually do, or we‘ve done our homework and know more about our symptoms and how they may tie together than you do. We are not deferring to “Dr. Google” more than to you. We are trying to get you to take us seriously.
#MayaDusenbery #DoingHarm #selfadvocacy #doctors #hysteria #weknowourbodies