Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters Review

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Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters ReviewJessica Valenti is a part of the feminist blogger elite, and for good reason. The blog that she was part of establishing, Feministing.com, gets a lot of traffic and is well-known among internet savvy, young, hip feminists. Full disclosure: I read Feministing on a somewhat regular basis. Having read Valenti's writing on the blog - which tends to be oversimplified and, quite frankly, bratty - I was hoping her analysis in book form would show at least a tad more depth. Unfortunately for Valenti, there's a downside to fame; it opens you up for public criticism.
If Full Frontal Feminism is supposed to be the spark that ignites young women to identify as feminists and hop on the movement train, then women are in deep trouble. Valenti writes like a feminist version of Ann Coulter, and let's face it, Ann Coulter is hardly known for her intelligence. Flamboyant and egotistical, much of Valenti's commentary is trite, at best. She makes sweeping generalizations ("When you're a feminist, day to day life is better. You make better decisions. You have better sex."), repeatedly calls her opponents juvenile names [...], confuses "truth" with "opinion," and has apparently done very little actual research to prove her claims, as there is little to no citation of her assertions. At times, she doesn't feel the need to make an assertion at all, responding to the opposition with a facile yet grandiose "Puke," a deliberately ironic "Yeah" or a pithy and useless "Terrifying", as though she has made her case. And despite hackneyed attempts every now and again to mention other marginalized groups, the truth is that this book overwhelmingly reflects the viewpoint of its white, middle class, (primarily, if not entirely) heterosexual, entitled, American, liberal feminist writer.
Valenti doesn't give her readers credit that they can do the thing she most wants them to do: think, analyze, and be critical. This is apparent in the fallacious style by which she presents her perspectives. My personal favorite - taken straight from the right wing, talk radio instruction manual - is when Valenti uses the "straw man," a common misleading bait-and-switch tactic, to "prove" her point (e.g., contending that anti-abortion advocates simply hate sex). A close second is when she uses the most extreme cases as though they weren't the exception to the rule (e.g., making the case for all women to have access to Emergency Contraception because rape victims should have access to it).
Perhaps Valenti believes that young women won't be moved unless they're completely scared to death. Fear is a powerful motivator, but it belittles the audience in the process. Oh, and did I mention that she uses the book as a forum to talk public trash about petty tiffs she's had with other bloggers? If fear doesn't sell you on feminism, apparently Valenti believes taking her side in some inane, personal dispute will.
Full Frontal Feminism is written in sound bytes, each chapter being comprised of smaller (usually) page-long explanations of a given issue: sex education vs. abstinence only, virginity pledges, expensive weddings, unattainable beauty standards, and other typical feminist fare. Apparently, the television has taken its toll (or so Valenti thinks) on the public because there is no sense of organization or logic to the structure of the book. And solutions? Those must have been left for someone else to tackle because you won't find them here, at least not outside of the standard volunteer, give money, and vote.
Now I know I've pretty much run this book into the ground, but I do want to say that I get what Valenti is trying to do here. And it's a really smart idea. She wants to reach out to young women who don't yet identify as feminists and let them know that it's okay, cool even, to be down with the F-word. She wants to tell them that they already believe in feminist ideals and have benefited from the women's movement. She wants to encourage them to continue in that tradition and kick some misogynist ass. That's a really honorable goal that, unfortunately, was a victim of poor execution.
If you're truly looking to find out why feminism matters, you'd be better served to flip to the booklist in the back of Full Frontal Feminism and read some of the titles listed there - including Colonize This!, Listen Up: Voices from the Next Generation, To Be Real, and The Fire This Time - because cool packaging is really great, but if there's nothing of substance inside then what you are selling is just the packaging.
Written by Mandy Van DevenFull Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters Overview

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Women Who Run with the Wolves Review

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Women Who Run with the Wolves ReviewReading the other customer reviews, I find it very interesting to see how different they are, and how different many of them are from my experience.
I was surprised to read the review on this page by the woman who believes we ought to read Jung first (or instead). My experience is the opposite; when I've picked up Jung's original works I've found them tough to follow, but this book I found very accessible and useful. I don't think the comparison between the Bible and a tv evangelist is at all fair. It's more like the difference between Strunk & White and the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED is wonderful, but Strunk & White is the one that is most likely to help you become a better writer.
Although I think of myself as a creative person, I tend to downplay that part of myself and to lead with my left brain, as it were. Reading this book I felt like I was being given a path to my inner wellspring. I felt that I had at last found water for a thirst I hadn't quite been able to identify until now.
This book is about one's inner life. It is not a how-to book, it's not political (except in the sense that the personal is political), and I didn't feel that it over-emphasized "what's wrong with you," as another reader put it. It does continually nudge one to think about what might be wrong: many many women are cut off from their own preferences, their own inner selves, because they feel pressured to conform with societal norms. Many societal norms are, in my opinion, quite damaging and inappropriate. It is very easy in American society to get the impression that women should be seen and not heard. Women are still encouraged to focus on how we look, to be compliant, to act ladylike and be nice even when we are being denigrated, and to stand by our man no matter what. We are encouraged to help others at the expense of our own happiness, and many many of us fall into this trap without even realizing it. We think it is normal to put ourselves last, and we lose touch with the shames and the fears that keep us from being happy, wiping the subject of happiness off the table with a dismissive hand as something that is too indulgent or not important.
This book helped me realize the ways in which I stand in my own way, and it gave me courage and inspiration.
The author is not only a Jungian analyst, but a storyteller. She is steeped in the traditions of storytelling from both the Latin and the Hungarian sides of her family, and I very much enjoyed the ways in which she uses this legacy of the storyteller as healer to make her points. I never thought of storytelling in this way before, but reading this book I found it to be true. (I feel that her stories have helped heal me.) I am a storyteller myself, of a sort, so for me the book was a kind of homecoming. If you have ever wondered why fairy tales seem so cruel and peculiar, you will find the answers in this book. Fairy tales have been mangled in the translation, but this author shows you where they came from and what they are really about.
While I am a huge believer in free-market capitalism, growth, business, and civilization (as opposed to back-to-nature Green-ery), I have tremendous concerns about the increasingly violent and impersonal nature of our society. This book shows you how to cultivate a healing, loving attitude toward the world without becoming a doormat--quite the contrary, it shows how love can give you more strength and power than you'll ever find in a boardroom.
Another review on this page criticized the book for not putting these issues into a broader context of one's life. It took twenty years for this author to distill her wisdom of storytelling and her knowledge of Jungian archetypes into this lovely, readable book. For me, that's quite an accomplishment. I'm more than willing to take it the rest of the way myself.Women Who Run with the Wolves Overview

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