Review: Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert

This was a good read, although more therapeutic than enlightening. Sophie Gilbert catalogues the portrayal of women in pop culture in the ‘00s and 2010s, surveying music, reality TV, teen comedies, celebrity journalism, and Girl Boss feminism.

Having spent my most impressionable years in that era, it was helpful to revisit things that had faded in my memory and interrogate how that might have shaped me. The discourse around women and women’s sexuality was horrible: the jokes about waiting for child actresses to turn 18, the expectation of women to act as sexual gatekeepers for men, the level of scrutiny applied to women’s bodies. At the time, I read feminist criticisms of all these things, but when you’re 16 you have no frame of reference for how else the world could be. The distance, education, and worldliness I acquired over the last two decades have enabled me to better assess the wretchedness of that time, and Gilbert’s well-structured and comprehensive book was a means of reviewing the era.

Still, I think Gilbert doesn’t quite manage to transcend beyond cataloguing. In the Introduction, she writes,

My main goal was to reframe recent history in a way that might enhance my own perspective. But what became clear was how neatly culture, feminism, and history run on parallel tracks, informing, disrupting, and even derailing each other.

I was therefore excited to see more interweaving of history and culture; however, I found this aspect lacking. Events like the Great Recession and Obama’s election were mentioned, but these passages often felt more perfunctory than really revelatory of shifting attitudes or mutual disruption or derailment. For example, in the introductory passages to her chapter on confessional auteurs (e.g., Taylor Swift and Lena Dunham), Gilbert writes

Barack Obama’s election in 2008 seemed to signal that the future would be postracial and postfeminist—a progressive America that was bruised by the Great Recession but optimistic about the possibilities of a new intellectual age. Looking inward for inspiration, writers offered up a new wave of prickly, difficult studies of the self.

Obama’s election convinced many people that hope and change were possible. Few lives were left untouched by the Great Recession, and many Americans lost their homes and jobs. However, Gilbert fails to illuminate how these political events ended up producing “prickly, difficult studies of the self.” I think part of the challenge is that Gilbert is a cultural reporter, not an economics or political reporter, and seemed shy about venturing too far from her beat.

In addition to remaining rooted within the cultural realm, Gilbert’s analysis is limited by its narrow focus on the 2000s and 2010s and the years immediately leading up to them. To her credit, she astutely begins her narrative in the 1990s music scene, populated by fully-grown, independent women writing political songs. She identifies the teen-dominated pop of the early 00s as a manufactured reaction to scenes like Riot Grrrl:

I can’t help but read the arc of music in the 1990s as an explicit response to women’s taking control of their art, their image, and their careers…. And as outspoken women proved their power commercially and collectively as touring acts, they were replaced on the radio and in the media by teenagers who didn’t—or couldn’t yet—complain.

Gilbert continues to emphasize how one cultural movement was a response to another — Girls, for example, was Dunham’s reaction to “a cultural climate that ogled and sneered at women, even loathed them.” But Gilbert doesn’t look back further than the 90s. What can we say about early 21st century attitudes towards women in the context of the century of rapid change in women’s liberation that came before? Nor does Gilbert look forward. What can we say about the portrayal of women in the mid-2020s based on her survey of the 00s and 10s? She does muse a little about current trends, but her analysis remains shallow and contradictory:

In moments when I’m galled by archaic trends given a modern twist—tradwives, bimbo chic, stay-at-home girlfriends, twelve-year-old skincare influencers—it’s consoling to remember that most women watching have both newfound language and skepticism that I couldn’t have dreamed of while watching Girls Gone Wild or the video for “Money Maker.”

This optimism proves unfounded when we recall the many feminists writing about objectification, pornography, beauty standards, purity and youth standards, etc. long before the turn of the millennium. Perhaps this misplaced optimism is symptomatic of Gilbert’s neglect of older feminist movements, but even the Riot Grrrl scene, discussed by Gilbert at some length, anticipated some of the patriarchy and sexism of the 00s and 10s in its critique.

Gilbert identifies in the various trends of the 00s and 10s a unifying ideological current: postfeminism — exemplified by characters like Bridget Jones and Carrie Bradshaw:

Less an explicit ideology than a mechanism to attract media attention and sell things, postfeminism emerged in the 1980s and 1990s as a reaction to women’s activism, bolstered by the sense that second- and third-wave feminists were somehow inhibiting our collective freedom…. Postfeminism was vague; it seemed to define itself mostly in opposition to a boogeyman version of feminism, encouraging women to embrace casual sex, spend with abandon, and be as stereotypically girly or overtly sexy as they desired. All these things were insistently sold as being empowering[.]

I found this term useful, but not fully compelling. Postfeminism is more of a vibe than an ideology, defined by what it is reacting against than what it is pushing for. To better grasp its development, it would have been fruitful to compare it to the other reactionary currents of the era (e.g., anti-science, anti-diversity) and to reactionary currents arising from earlier waves of feminism.

Still, while I found the analysis overall shallow, I thought the book was a rewarding read. I’d recommend it for millennial women or others who were shaped by the sexism of the time, or those with a particular interest in pop culture history. Reading is not a process of passive absorption of information, and Gilbert’s book provides the reader with plenty of fodder for reconsidering the era.

Review: The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin

Le Guin wrote this novella during the US invasion of Vietnam, and the book’s laser focus on the issues raised by that conflict means it has aged less richly than The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, or The Lathe of Heaven.

This story tells the tale of a colonial expedition: a crew of a few hundred men travel to a distant planet and extract its natural resources. To do so, they enslave the indigenous population, who they treat as animals, even while they rape them. The indigenous people — Athsheans — rise up and destroy one of the settlements. In the civilization’s core, instantaneous interplanetary communication is invented and brought to the planet, radically changing the relationship between the colonial outpost and the governing interplanetary League. A settler anthropologist, Lyubov, stands in for the US anti-war movement. He alone recognizes the humanity of the Athsheans, and advocates for their liberation.

In a surprisingly Hegelian turn, the State reigns in the colonizers and negotiates a permanent withdrawal from the planet, promising to return only in five generations’ time and even then only a handful of visitors for scientific expeditions. (Hegel viewed the Sovereign as a limit on the ability of the aristocracy to exploit the masses.) It is interesting to see Le Guin’s optimism in the role of the state to impose justice, since she is usually identified as an anarchist and her fictional works are quite critical of centralized authority (see, for example, The Dispossessed, The Lathe of Heaven). Still, an Athshean character, Selver, questions how capable the League really is of enforcing its ban on interfering with the planet, whose future is left open-ended:

“You decide matters all at once, your people,” [Selver] said, again between statement and question.
“How do you mean?” The Commander looked wary.
“Well, you say that none of you shall cut the trees of Athshe: and all of you stop. And yet you live in many places. Now if a headwoman in Karach gave an order, it would not be obeyed by the people of the next village, and surely not by all the people in the world at once…”
“No, because you haven’t one government over all. But we do—now—and I assure you its orders are obeyed. By all of us at once. But, as a matter of fact, it seems to me from the story we’ve been told by the colonists here, that when you gave an order, Selver, it was obeyed by everybody on every island here at once. How did you manage that?”
“At that time I was a god,” Selver said, expressionless.

Le Guin’s Athsheans are a mishmash of idealized indigenous stereotypes. They live in harmony with nature in peaceful, egalitarian communities. Their women are political leaders and their men are spiritual leaders. Dreams are culturally and spiritually significant, and can be consciously directed to communicate with others. They lack the concept of murder until the settlers arrive in their lush garden — an event that is an allegory for colonialism’s impact on the societies it collided with as well as an allusion to biblical Original Sin. Although the colonizers leave, this knowledge of murder and violence is something the Athsheans are permanently left to grapple with. “You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity,” Selver answers in response to a League representative asking if the Ashtheans have returned to their pre-colonial ways.

The story is fine, but a little overly simple. Le Guin’s other works challenge us to confront dearly-held or deeply-rooted beliefs. The Lathe of Heaven asks us if gender is really real and fixed, or socially constructed and fluid. The Dispossessed questions if liberalism and anarchism are really as free and fair as their proponents argue. The Lathe of Heaven examines the ramifications of trying to impose one’s vision of a better world on others. These are still pertinent, fiercely-debated political questions. In contrast, The Word for World is Forest questions colonial exploitation, a matter that seems well settled now, if it was not already settled for most people by the 1970s, following decades of national liberation movements. If her narrative had been more subtle — its colonial representative are near caricatures of racism and misogyny — it may have been better able to challenge any lingering settler ideology in the typical Le Guin reader. On the other hand, that may have made it a less pointed critique at its time of publication.

Review: Survival by Margaret Atwood

Writing in the 1970s, Atwood surveys Canadian literature and identifies a few of its central themes and tendencies. In doing so, she helped bring self-consciousness to the literature of this frigid, confused, often-violent child of Britain, nudging it toward a distinct national identity.

Atwood identifies “survival” as the idea coursing through Canadian literature (in contrast to the US’s “frontier” and England’s “island”): survival against Mother-Nature-the-Monster (having discovered that Canada’s natural bounty was nothing like the idyll pictured from the shores of England), survival against the dominance of its southern neighbour, survival of the francophones in a sea of anglophones.

Survival is precarious in these works. Most of its characters succumb to some travesty or other. Atwood attributes this pessimism to a victimization complex, which she breaks down into four stages: denial of victimhood, resignation to the inescapability of victimhood, belief in the possibility of overcoming victimhood, and some fourth stage of transcendence (more of a theoretical possibility than something typically achieved, in reality or in literature). Most Canadian literature lingers in the second phase.

The book is well-structured; each chapter investigates a particular facet (nature, animals, settlers and immigrants, family, women, francophones, artists, death, failure), critiquing poems and novels that touch on these topics or motifs. Each chapter comes with a shortlist of 3-4 key works and a longlist of perhaps a dozen referenced works. Atwood’s writing is colourful, wry, and incisive, and her tour through CanLit is well-paced and enjoyable.

Having surveyed the previous century or so of writing, the work is now over half a century old. It was highly influential in shaping Canadian literary criticism, and thus the Canadian publishing industry broadly. It is therefore undoubtedly dated. I thought this was particularly true of the chapter on artists: with the advent of CanCon laws and funding for the arts (not to mention self-consciousness as a nation or the ease of distributing media across the globe), the lack of audience is no longer so existential for Canadian artists. Canada has also changed. Now several generations later, our identities as and associations with settlers and immigrants have shifted. Indigenous literature was absent from Atwood's investigation due to its near-total exclusion from the publishing industry. A modern revision would presumably investigate ideas of indigeneity and settler-colonialism founded on Indigenous literature that has since made it to print.

Still, I found it very easy to see themes of survival and the ways it ripples through other topics in many of the Canadian works I have read lately. Ducks is all about survival in the bleak capitalism and soul-crushing misogyny of the oil sands, first as a bare survival but then transitioning to an insistence on thriving and overcoming victimhood. Station Eleven is a post-apocalyptic narrative; survival means navigating a sparse and hostile world to find meaning in life. Study for Obedience picks up on many of the family themes Atwood discusses, with the brother taking the position of domineering patriarch. To this protagonist, survival means finding a way to coexist as a Jewish woman and an immigrant with the backwards villagers.

This is, obviously, a book about Canadian Literature from front-to-back. But I think it holds interest outside that narrow scope too. By honing in on this niche, Atwood demonstrates the value — or even the necessity — of literary critique and literature for developing a cohesive community identity. This work therefore may be of interest for someone hoping to develop other national or political identities. Second, although dated, Atwood hits upon some very persistent aspects of the Canadian identity. Those interested in learning who Canada really is, or taking a good look at themselves in the mirror, may also wish to pick it up.

Review: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

“Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be.” 

In this work, Joan Didion recounts her grieving process in the year following her husband’s sudden death from a heart attack. Reflecting on those first few months, she realizes that many of her decisions and ways of thinking were not based on reality, like sleeping alone in her apartment that first night “so that he could come back”, or arguing against a tracheostomy for her critically ill daughter, so that “she could be fine in the morning, ready to eat, talk, go home.” These moments give the book its title: A Year of Magical Thinking.

Grief does not always take the same path. Magical thinking is not a part of every journey. Many of the particulars of Didion’s experiences — the casualness with which she considers buying a house in Hawaii or flying to Paris or eating out every night — will not reflect most people’s realities. But most paths cross some of the same trail markers. Didion shares the cycles her mind looped through in that first year of her grief: rumination over the last few months with her husband, fixation over the last moments of his life and trying to piece together what happened and what he experienced, the haze of the first few weeks or months spliced with a few laser sharp memories. 

Didion weaves her own recollections with quotes and passages from others struggling with grief, emphasizing how common an experience it is, for all it is devastating. Like me, she is the type of person to relentlessly research a topic, and so she also bolsters her narrative with things she gleaned from medical and psychological journals. While virtually everyone will experience loss at some point in their lives, it is nevertheless an intense and often lonely emotion to go through. These writing choices help place her very personal account in the broader context of human experience.

Grief confronts Didion with aspects of herself she had not previously considered, such as her need to always be right (“For once in your life just let it go.”), or her positive thinking (“I realized that my impression of myself had been of someone who could look for, and find, the upside in any situation.”). In mourning her husband, she also mourns her own former self: “When we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer.” The version of herself her husband saw is forever gone.

Didion’s account is also a tribute to her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, and to their relationship. As it should be—what is so painful about grief is the end of a specific relationship, the loss of that shared experience. Exploring that emotion requires exploring what he meant to her. Both worked from home, and Didion speculates that it was because they were “unusually dependent on one another” that her grief was “pathological.” Prolonged grief disorder, as it is now known, was added to the DSM two decades after this book was written.

Didion struggles to let go of her husband: to acknowledge “that our life together will decreasingly be the center of my every day”, feels like “so distinct a betrayal.” Avoiding that acknowledgement becomes a way of keeping him alive. Her grief comes and goes in waves, once catching her by surprise in the middle of a story. She calls on his voice inside her head to make the deadline (“You’re a professional. Finish the piece.”). Eventually, she does make it through to the other side.

For those looking for advice on how to move on from loss, Didion offers no clear answers. Such ready-made solutions may help little anyways: knowing that one needs to let go “does not make it any easier to let go.” She describes grief as “passive”; in contrast, “mourning, the act of dealing with grief, [requires] attention.” The writing of this book was undoubtedly part of this mourning process: the active examination of her emotions and thought patterns and her search for their meaning must have helped her process them and recognize herself in her new identity as a widow. Writing is so much a part of how Didion relates with the world that this approach must have seemed natural. Other writers have sought this method too — I was reminded of Ti Amo, a similarly intensely personal reflection on grieving a husband based on the author’s own experience. Non-writers will have to find their own path. But if this book fails as an instruction manual, it does perhaps provide solace that this particular pain is shared, an opportunity to see the self in another person.

And for non-grievers? Didion warns us that conceptually being aware of grief and its inevitability does little to prepare you for it. This book is therefore no vaccine. Still, it remains compelling as a study of how a person examines their own emotions and finds rational explanations for seemingly irrational thoughts — magical thinking.

Review: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

In this memoir, novelist and marathon runner Haruki Murakami reflects on his relationship with running. As a runner myself, I enjoyed recognizing common ground in our experiences: an approachable form of exercise initially picked up to support a long, healthy life became a source of enjoyable routine and self-improvement. We have both also found in running a way to practice coming to terms with disappointment, failure, and personal limits. 

There are also substantial differences: Murakami is much more focused on competitive running (marathons, triathlons, and one ultramarathon), while I enjoy running more as a way of exploring and relating to my urban environment, and I have never run an official race nor much farther than a half-marathon. Of our differences, the reflections I found most compelling were those on how aging shapes his relationship with running. I am a decade or so younger than he was when he wrote this book, and so these passages present a peek into my future. For now, I will continue with my 35 kilometers per week while I can.

Overall, however, I was disappointed in the book. A good memoir either offers the reader a rare glimpse into an unknown world, or finds a way to make the author’s particular experience general. Jesse Thistle’s memoir is an example of the first, showing the reader how Canada’s social system traps homeless people in a cycle of poverty, crime and addiction, and how hard it is to emerge from it. Examples of the second approach include The Message, Born to Run, and to a lesser extent, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. These works interleave personal reflection with science, history, and sociology to connect their own experiences with the broader human experience. 

In contrast, Murakami’s narrative is very internal — many passages read like stream-of-consciousness — and I found the result a bit overly self-indulgent. Although I haven’t read Murakami’s novels, this memoir made me less interested in doing so. I find he essentializes “talent” too much (“what’s the most important quality a novelist has to have[?]. It’s pretty obvious: talent.”), views education too hierarchically (“the pupil has no idea what the real point of this sort of practice is.”), and writes strangely about women he sees (the "aggressive challenge” “emanating” from the “small, slim” girls with “blond hair in a ponytail” that “run like the wind.”). I found the prose to be unremarkable, although it is possible the fault lies with the translator. However, I am suspicious of a writer that claims “the fear I feel when I weave in and out of traffic on my sports bike with its skinny tires and my bike shoes strapped tight in the straps is something you can’t understand unless you’ve gone through it.” Isn’t the task of a novelist to make us deeply emotionally understand an experience we have not gone through? 

Altogether, this is a memoir better suited to the Murakami fan than to the casual runner.

Review: Biology as Ideology by Richard Lewontin

Lewontin has a few ideas he wants everyone — scientists and those outside the profession alike — to incorporate into their worldview. First, that genes do not dictate our social behaviour (i.e., against sociobiology); instead, the gene-organism-environment relationship is dialectical, with each influencing and defining the others. Second, science is a political activity: our worldview influences our experimental designs and our interpretation of the world around us.

This is the third work I have read by Lewontin, and all of them make this same case, relying on similar examples and arguments. The Dialectical Biologist is the oldest, and is a collection of several essays and chapters. The rhetoric is a little rougher around the edges, and it is at times more focused on the particular target at hand than on a general framework for understanding science. And yet, because this iteration is also written with passion and urgency, it is the one I would recommend for the scientist eager for a polemic. The Triple Helix is the most detailed and carefully constructed from a scientific perspective; the author tours us through the scientific literature to understand the relationship between the three strands of the helix: gene, organism, environment. This is the one I would recommend for scientists in general, though the political threads are more muted. 

Biology as Ideology is a Massey Lecture, intentionally written for a broad audience, and it fulfills that purpose wonderfully; I would recommend it for a general audience. The ideas are polished and woven together elegantly yet conversationally. The examples are well-chosen to be illustrative and approachable. If I have a critique, it is that the author leaves unsaid what should be done now that the reader (or listener) has this newfound appreciation for dialectical biology and the political ideology of science. The worldview Lewontin introduces us to is not (only) about more accurately describing the world, but about changing it, yet that is left as an exercise for the reader.

Review: Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein

“You should listen to me,” is the implicit argument being made by a narrator to the reader, especially a narrator who speaks as intimately and as conscious of the reader as the one in Study for Obedience. “Why?” is the natural question for the reader to ask back, and this question drew me through the first couple chapters. The narrator’s story-telling — a mix of far too much detail mixed with vague handwaving or elided rationale — quickly clued me in to her unreliability, but what story was she trying to tell me, and what really happened?

For a little while, I thought the narrator was like Amy, from Gone Girl, making herself out to be the perfect victim, while secretly carrying out a nefarious plot. The narrator is so meek, so self-deprecating, so unworthy of interest that I thought for sure it was a cover. But this aspect of her nature seems indeed to be true. The narrator is a victim of abuse, raised to serve her older siblings. She may also have been sexually assaulted (in a characteristic linguistic loophole, she tells us that there had been “no assault that had been reported, investigated, and brought to trial”). Now middle-aged, she leaves her life in the city to be a house-keeper for her brother in a tiny, traditional, rural village. She finds ways to make her devotion to her brother a matter of exercising her own agency. It’s a character and setting alien to me: very conservative, hierarchical, punishing, sexist, and so internalized that the character sees virtue in the ways she subsumes herself to these values.

The narrator is Jewish, although that word and its cognates never appear. Her identity can be pieced together from the stereotypes others apply to her and from the shape of the vague history she tells of her ancestors (“an obscure though reviled people who had been dogged across borders and put into pits.”), who fled the land in which she now lives during the Holocaust. She shares the grinding loneliness and fear of moving through the world as a Jewish woman. The villagers treat her as an outsider, no matter how much she tries to integrate. They accuse her of witchcraft, responsible for the many strange events that occurred after her arrival.

But the reader has to wonder about the actual cause of all these events. The narrator emphasizes to us the improbability of so many rare events coinciding:

Accepting that my arrival had coincided with the madness and necessary extermination of the cows, the demise of the ewe and her nearly born lamb, the dog’s phantom pregnancy, the containment of domestic fowl, a potato blight which I have so far neglected to mention – acknowledging that all these events had occurred in quick succession more or less upon my arrival in the place, and admitting that not one of these things had happened singly in recent memory, that the town and surrounding areas had actually lived through a blessed and prosperous fifty years, and that these unfortunate events had still less ever, in recorded history, happened simultaneously – granting all this, yes, still, it was difficult for me to accept the bad feeling of the townspeople.

There is also the unignorable fact that the narrator — for motives she does not reveal to us — wove together “herbs and grasses I knew so well by sight though not by name” into “shapes of some significance to me”, and then dropped them off in the middle of the night to select locations in the village, murmuring “quiet words of devotion” and then nervously waited for the effects to take place. The narrator’s value system is far from sympathetic. She works without scruples for a corporate law firm set on ruining the environment and the lives of those who try to protect it. She sides with her brother against the employees who accuse him of sexual harassment. Are her beliefs just the result of her childhood conditioning, unquestioning service to those higher up the hierarchy? Or is she a bad person?

 At this point, we should consider the epigraph the author chose for the novel: “I can turn the tables and do as I want. I can make women stronger. I can make them obedient and murderous at the same time.” Now the reader is placed in a predicament: is the narrator innocent of all the strange occurrences, merely a worn-down victim of abuse, obedient to a fault, mistreated by her antisemitic neighbours? If so, how do we explain these strange events and the narrator’s woven dolls? Or, is the narrator murderous? Did she cause (some portion of) these events? If so, the reader must accept the existence of magic, and is placed in uncomfortable company with the narrator’s antisemitic neighbours. (And if we choose this answer, the meek, unworthy neighbour recalls Gone Girl’s murderous heroine after all.)

The book ends with a surreal confrontation — for some reason, the townsfolk are all wearing matching white tracksuits when they summon her about the woven dolls — and although it is unclear what exactly transpired, the narrator demands her right to live, as a survivor of horrific violence against her people as well as someone now personally implicated. She receives it. The novel ends with her caring for her sorrysack brother in their home: “I am living, I claim my right to live.”

This novel wasn’t for me. I want to grasp events in all their spatiotemporal particularity; the narrator sands down all the details of history and geography until the village could be anywhere in Eastern Europe, and until its history of Jewish oppression becomes myth-like. I turn to novels to understand the human experience, but despite hearing this narrator’s entire story, I still have no idea who she is; there is no cathartic moment where truths and lies are revealed. The author invites us to contemplate these ambiguities, but rather than finding the result to be profound, I thought it made the treatment of these serious topics superficial, empty.