sábado, 15 de septiembre de 2018

Review: 'Feminist Fight Club' by Jessica Bennett


Writer: Jessica Bennett
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2017
Pages: 295
IBSN-13: 9780241244845
Price: 11.75€ (paperback Amazon)
Mark: 7/10

SYNOPSIS

This is a call to arms.
Are you aged zero to infinity? Finished with the sexist status quo? Ready to kick ass and take names?
Welcome to the Feminist Fight Club. You have lifetime membership.
Feminist Fight Club provides an arsenal of weapons for surviving in an unequal world. You will learn how to fight micro-aggressions, correct unconscious bias, deal with male colleagues who can't stop 'manterrupting' or 'bro-propriating' your ideas - and how to lean in without falling the f*ck over.
Every woman needs this book - and they needed it yesterday.
This is not a drill.


PERSONAL ASSESSMENT

JUSTIFICATION
I have never heard about this book before, but I am in a time in my life when I am attracted and interested in reading anything about feminism. Well, last month I went to a bookstore to buy a book in Italian and I saw this book on the self. Immediately my attention was drawn by those big pink capital letters, “FEMINIST FIGHT CLUB”. I took it and started to leaf through the pages and saw that there were a lot of visual resources, letters, drawings… I started to feel the urge to read it. So I decided to buy it.

PLOT
This book is a funny approach to the sexism in the workplace and how fight it. It is divided into six different topics talking about the men, the women, and that, and each section is divided into two parts: the kind of person (e.g. the mansplainer, the menstruhater…) following by the “fight moves”, where the author gives us some guidelines or solutions to deal with every kind of person.

WRITING STYLE
It is a light writing, not hard to read at all, funny and amusing. It keeps you hooked in from the very beginning. It is very entertaining to see that each two or three pages you see a visual resource like one letter, the ten commandments of vagffirmative action, some drawings like high power poses, etc. Sometimes it gets a bit condescending, but it has more funny parts.

GENERAL COMMENT

I have conflicting emotions with this book. On one hand, I think it is great to have a warning about how to detect the micro-aggressions, advises on how to treat them, advises on how to be successful as a woman and stop giving credits to others (as we women have been taught), stop sabotaging ourselves, stop fight against other women (sorority) and that. She is doing a great job thus, and I give her the credit, also she writes in a funny and contemporary language to reach as much people as she can, she wants that everybody understands her message, so everybody can detect those micro-aggressions and fight them.
On the other hand, it is a bit “paternalistic” (maternalistic? does that word even exist?). It treats you like if you were stupid, like if you cannot see some obvious things or you don’t know how to react. It treats us like if we were one of those alienated women but really, if I cannot identify some of those micro-aggressions because I’m not deconstructed enough, probably I won’t be reading this book. It is something that I feel when I read some feminist books, they treat you like if you don’t know anything about it.
But anyway, I think that we all should read this, it will help us more than be damaged to us.

-Saru.

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