nonethefewer | Oh man, I love the library. (Reply)

Yesterday, I hit the library and picked up, among other books, Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children, and Our Jobs by Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers. I'm interested in learning more about feminism, and I've got the current events angle covered (via blogs), so I wanted something more… bookish.

Look, I just woke up, okay?

Anyways. I like that they don't go from "This is how the patriarchy hurts women" to "Come, let us demonise men". They walk the line between demonising and apologising-for fairly well, so far. (I'm only a few chapters in.) While I am all about dismantling the huge power difference, I happen to think that men are human as well, and don't care for the extremist "All men are scum" view.

They also discuss the "Women aren't inferior, they're superior" idea, and explore just how much damage that's caused. For example, if the assumption that women are less competitive and more caring is taken as truth, why promote them up the corporate ladder? Carol Gilligan, the originator of that idea, didn't intend for such repercussions to repercuss as they did. It's possible to trace that men:Mars::women:Venus claptrap back to that idea, for heaven's sake. This is the unfortunateness of letting ideas run free in the wild, I suppose.

I hope the rest of the book is as good as what I've read so far. If not, I have three other gender studies books, so that's okay.