1) So. Much. Freud. Lady, you are aware that further work has been done in psychology since the mid-twentieth century? Kipnis’s references to Freud, Oedipal complexes, and psychosexual development are so numerous they would make an excellent drinking game condition, an idea I am sorry I have only come up with now because I would probably have enjoyed this book more if I had been a bit drunk for it.

Sometimes this leads to interesting insights — there’s a reason Freud’s giant shoulders are the ones everyone’s been standing on — but as a theoretical framework, it’s sharply limited, and you run up against the limits fairly quickly. The essay about Dale Peck and how his harsh reviews are his way of enacting the same abuse scenarios to which he was subject as a child is armchair psychology of the most simplistic variety.

2) Perhaps this is my own limitation, but Kipnis doesn’t seem to be in conversation with much of modern feminism. She does have an essay about outrage culture (framed as a cutesy confession of her own tendencies to moral relativism, gag), but it’s mostly about something else, and in a later essay she says this:

Yes, Dworkin reads like a stampeding dinosaur in our era of bouncy pro-sex post-feminism. Feminist anger isn’t exactly in fashion at the moment: these days, women just direct their anger inward, or carp at individual men, typically their hapless husbands and boyfriends.

Er. What now? There is certainly a strand of bouncy post-sex writing, but — like, Amanda Marcotte, Roxane Gay, Jessica Valenti, Anita Sarkeesian, Mychal Denzel Smith, Lindy West, Jamia Wilson? I’m not even trying hard to think of names of fashionable feminist writers who regularly express anger about feminist issues.

And relatedly:

3) Kipnis has an air of being above the fray when it comes to many of the issues that occupy feminist writers and thinkers. Since she’s written this book, it’s clear that she isn’t above the fray; but she gives the impression that she is far too cool for your petty problems. Her reaction to crappy behavior (whether it’s Norman Mailer being a shit or Harold Bloom hitting on students) is frequently along the lines of “How can you be mad at them when all they want is attention? I just find it rather endearing!”

Well. Neat? I guess? That you feel that way? But that sort of reaction elides and perpetuates the troublesome power dynamics at play. It tells the people who are bothered that they are wrong to be. And it tells the people doing the bothering that they are okay to continue behaving that way, as everyone will just chuckle indulgently. And that, my friends, is how we all end up jumping over missing stairs.

To return to the Harold Bloom example, Kipnis has a lengthy essay about the absurdity of sexual harassment policies at universities. Much of her alarm over these policies feels like received wisdom, given that she admits upon reading her own university’s guidelines that they are “far less prohibitive than other places I’d been hearing about” (where are these mythologically prohibitive universities?). She goes on for a while about how when she was in school everyone slept with their professors and they were totally happy about it, because actually the power was quite balanced: The students had the power of being young and beautiful and desirable, and the professors had the power of, you know, actual power over the students’ futures.

Kipnis feels that the tricky part of sexual harassment is that you don’t actually know until you have already groped the student whether that sexual advance is “unwanted” (prohibited in school guidelines). So what is a professor to do? Here’s one idea, just off the top of my head: perhaps professors could try the radical strategy of waiting until the class is over and grades are handed out, and then to hit on their students by saying “Now that class is over and grades are handed out, I wanted to tell you that I think you’re swell, and I would love to take you out for dinner sometime if you’re interested.” And if that is too much of an emotional challenge for the poor wee vulnerable bunnies in the professorial field, I submit that they perchance should find something else to do with their genitals.

Sigh.

The post The three main problems I had with Laura Kipnis’s essays on men appeared first on Reading the End.

Two caveats before I begin my complaining:

1. My opinion about The Mind of Winter arises from a personal preference that I have about the outcome of ghost stories. I have complained about this on the blog before, so it may come as no surprise to you.
2. From here on out, I will be spoiling The Mind of Winter in ragey all-caps. And I will spoil The Machinist, that 2004 Christian Bale psychological thriller, as well, because I don’t like to miss any opportunities to complain about The Machinist, maybe my least favorite movie of all time.

The premise of A Mind of Winter is that Holly wakes up on Christmas Day feeling certain that something followed her family back from Russia, when they came home with their adopted daughter, Tatiana. All through the day, as she’s preparing her family’s Christmas meal, dealing with a medical emergency in her husband’s family, and quarreling with Tatiana, she cannot shake the thought that something malevolent came back with them from Russia, and that she has subconsciously known about it all along.

This year I am feeling more than normally affectionate toward creepy Russia stories, due to the excellent The Necromancer’s House, so I approached A Mind of Winter with great enthusiasm. A malevolent Russian magic something? At the holidays? That followed them home from Russia and is in their house? Nothing is bad about that premise!

Except then I read the end. And guess what.

(Here is the part where I spoil the book for you. Thus saving you the trouble of reading it and being disappointed.)

Holly is hallucinating everything that happens the whole day through, because actually Tatiana has died of a heart defect. There’s more to it than this, which would take too long to explain but it does make that ending more interesting and less cliche than how I’ve made it sound, but mainly, the protagonist is imagining every interaction she has with Tatiana, plus the feeling of malevolence around the house. It is all self-protecting hallucinations to shield her from the knowledge that her daughter died that morning.

I. HATE. IT. when the resolution to the spooky story is that someone was hallucinating it. Why did we bother then? If I am going to read a book about mental imbalance, I will just read a book about mental imbalance. Such books exist! I can seek them out! This very day, I started reading Jerry Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom, in which there is mental imbalance and it tells you about it right on the cover. The point of a spooky book is to be spooky. It is not to scare you with atmosphere all along to where you think there is going to be a ghost or something for them to fight against, but then at the end it is like, “No, actually, everything’s very mundane, and regular life is regular. Sorry.”

That is the “And then she woke up” of psychological thrillers. See also: The Machinist, a movie that scared me so badly and then turned out to be so stupid that it engendered in me a lifelong loathing of Christian Bale that has only deepened with the passage of time. I was so furious when I realized that was really, truly, honestly the direction A Mind of Winter was going in that I chucked it across the room (but carefully, to land on a soft chair, because it was a library book).

HMPH.

I reiterate: This book bashed straight into a pet peeve of mine. If you do not have this same pet peeve, maybe you will love A Mind of Winter instead of wanting to hurl it across the room, alarming your puppy and mother.

The post A book I hurled across the room (plus some cheap shots at The Machinist) appeared first on Reading the End.

Veronika lives on an island with three other girls: Caroline, Isabel, and Eleanor. They are all the same exact girl, except that their hair is different colors. Their parents died in a plane crash. They live with their guardians, Robbert and Irene, who educate them and test them and try to understand them. One day, a girl called May washes up on their shore. She looks different to Veronika and the others, and she seems frightened of them. Her coming heralds the end of the life Veronika has always known.

The problem is this: I like books that work more by implication than by description. I do! I loved The Haunting of Hill House, for example, a book that does not spend much time spelling things out for the reader. However, my liking of implication-heavy books depends on trusting that the author knows how to steer the ship. In The Different Girl, there are heavy implications of Unrest back in the real world, but it’s super dull because Dahlquist doesn’t give any good details. One or two really good details, strategically and creepily dropped at intervals, would have counterbalanced a lot of the vagueness about world-building. As it was, the world outside Veronika’s island felt mad generic. Blah blah people are scared of science blah blah destroy the robots blah blah blah.

I am a reasonable woman. I do not demand that every author be Laini Taylor and N. K. Jemisin, with their flawlessly realized worlds. All I ask is some dribs and drabs of information to say what this world is about, and what its dangers are, and what the point of these girls is. Absent that, the book hasn’t got any stakes. I truly couldn’t have cared less about the fate of these characters.

I hereby propose the following guidelines for authors who are not natively gifted at world-building:

1. Introduce a fig leaf to explain why you are not explaining more. This can be that all the characters are steeped in their normal, thus not fussed about describing it; but if a stranger washes up on shore, you really cannot keep up the non-explaining without a plausible reason.
2. The number of details you must drop about the world is inversely proportional to their specificity, by which I mean, their ability to imply a lot while saying a little. For instance, early on in Crux, there is talk of how parents of non-neurotypical children are suspects for use of / sympathy for users of the mind-altering drug Nexus. That says a ton about the drug and the political atmosphere that surrounds it. A small number of details with that kind of specificity can go a long way.

Okay. Grumbly post over.

Do you have any guidelines you’d like authors to adhere to in their world-building?

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Unnatural Selection is a book about how widespread access to abortion in many developing nations has led to a crisis in sex-selective abortion, where the ratio of boys born to girls born — a necessary constant because nobody wins in a sex-skewed society — shifts well out of what would be the biological norm. What ends up happening if parents overwhelmingly select for male fetuses is, eventually, a whole bunch of men with no women to marry. Again, nobody wins when this is the case. The men do not win and the women really, really, really do not win.

There are parts of the history of this phenomenon that are straightforwardly morally wrong. When the West decided to make foreign aid to developing nations dependent on reducing the birth rate, it should not have pushed abortion above contraception education and supply on its list of priorities. Because duh. But other things are less straightforward. If you believe women should have access to abortion, it’s tricky to say “You can do it for X reason but not for Y reason.” It is a slippery slope to do that. Also that people can lie. On the other hand, even if you believe that any individual woman has the right to an abortion she wants to have, you nevertheless do not want the global crisis of missing girls that results from many, many women making the decision to abort female fetuses.

See how it is tricky? It is so tricky! I do not have a good solution for policy-makers, but I am glad that people are writing books about this thorny human issue. And Mara Hvistendahl is careful not to make grand pronouncements on the morality of the players in this crisis; she delineates the cultural influences behind what is happening (America really, really wanted to reduce the birth rate in Communist countries during the Cold War; parents in many of the countries with this problem are depending on a son to grow up and take care of them in their old age). So that was really good. She doesn’t point fingers, she doesn’t overgeneralize, and she does a good job breaking down complicated issues in a way that’s readable and understandable.

Okay.

BUT.

Whenever I start reading a nonfiction book, I check the references pretty exhaustively at the outset. If the endnotes tend to contain interesting further information, I keep checking the references all the way through. If the endnotes provide citations to sources that seem suspect, I keep checking the references until I finish the book or get fed up with all the shady citations (usually the latter). If the endnotes cite non-shady sources and are boring, I stop after the first chapter or two. Unnatural Selection was a non-extreme example of the second case. There weren’t many citations that I outright distrusted, but a number of citations (the largeness of this number varied wildly from section to section, and in some chapters it was nonexistent) where I thought, “Surely you could have gotten a better source than that.” At one point she cites Malcolm Gladwell to back up a point she wants to make about an international trend. (That being an example of a source I outright distrusted.)

So here are two examples of what I mean:

Sentence: The matchmakers lining the streets of Ruili, along Yunnan’s border with Myanmar, tout Burmese girls as a bargain: half price!
Citation: Keith B. Richburg, “Chinese Border Town Emerges as New Front Line in Fight Against Human Trafficking,” Washington Post, December 26, 2009

Sentence: Donning magenta saris, the women band together into gulabi, or pink, gangs and brandish clubs against offending men.
Citation: Soutik Biswas, “India’s ‘Pink’ Vigilante Women,” BBC News, November 26, 2007

It’s not that I wouldn’t trust these articles if I read them in the wild. I would. I do! I am sure the Washington Post and the BBC did their homework, and that their reports of these occurrences are reliable. It just felt like there must be some better source for Hvistendahl to give. I felt like, if you are going to pick out a horrifying detail (women on sale for half price), it should be your own original horrifying detail, not somebody else’s; and if you are going to talk about an emerging trend (gangs of women going about bashing harassers with clubs), you should cite something that can speak to the long-term existence of this trend.

There was also this thing in the chapter about History where she cited a book about sex selection in history to back up a claim she made about the way the Roman Empire treated women. Again, I don’t not trust her source. I just think that if you are going to cite a book as support of your claims about history, the book should have been written by someone whose entire job it is to know Facts from History. Not someone who has a dog in the fight you’re fighting.

I get that Hvistendahl isn’t a researcher; she’s a journalist. She cites like a journalist and not like a researcher. But still I was left with a lingering, pervasive feeling of unease. There was no specific claim Hvistendahl made that I felt sure was factually wrong (leaving out one remark about the demographics of American women who get abortions, but that information is spottily collected so she gets a pass on that, I guess), but altogether I felt that I should take everything with a very large grain of salt. Or several grains of salt.

Wildly skewed gender ratios is an important international issue, and I picked up this book with the final goal — the same final goal I nearly always have when I pick up a nonfiction book! — of being able to speak sensibly about sex-selective abortion and the problems it presents the global community. Which I now can probably do, but maybe not? Even though I think it’s perfectly likely that (most of) Hvistendahl’s claims are reasonable and accurate, because now, I don’t feel confident that I can trust her sources. So if I am ever in a conversation about sex-selective abortions and I’m repeating a claim I learned from this book, I’ll have to make some qualifying remark about reliability.

This has made me think some thoughts about trusting nonfiction authors. When I was in high school, I read two of Malcolm Gladwell’s books and thought they were pretty good; but what I’ve noticed more recently is that his arguments don’t reeeeeally hang together. What he’s good at — and I’ll be the first to say he’s very good at it — is constructing a compelling narrative, and when someone’s good at that it’s easy to cut them a lot of slack in other areas. I’d like to say that I started noticing this about Malcolm Gladwell because I am a clever critical thinker, but the truth is that I started noticing it because I loathed the narrative presented in one of his essays (this one here), and I started picking the argument apart and finding it sorely wanting. And it turns out that once you have done this to any single Malcolm Gladwell piece, you can’t stop doing it to all the Malcolm Gladwell pieces. Because he is not that good at arguments. Just stories.

And here is the thing: Now that I don’t trust Malcolm Gladwell, I will never trust Malcolm Gladwell. Whenever I read any Malcolm Gladwell article ever, even if he’s making a point I agree with, I feel that I’m being sold a bill of goods. And the same will be a little bit true of Mara Hvistendahl. I may still read articles by both of them — though probably not books, because life is short — but if I get interested in what they’re saying, I will seek independent verification of their claims. This is, I think, completely fair in the case of Malcolm Gladwell, and probably not completely fair in the case of Mara Hvistendahl; but my good opinion, once lost, is lost for ever. (Not really. That is a joke. Little Jane Austen humor for ya there.)

Has this happened to you before? What red flags make you think a nonfiction author may not be trustable? Do the red flags differ if you’re reading a book by a journalist versus a researcher? Or a slightly different question: Have you ever discovered external, biographical things about a nonfiction author that made you reconsider how you felt about their trustworthiness in books you had previously enjoyed?

And a question of duration: Once you feel mistrustful of an author, what would it take for you to stop feeling mistrustful of that person? If they got more degrees, would that do it? If all the experts in their field praised them, would that do it? Or is it never ever ever? I think it’s never ever ever for me! and I’m worried that makes me a close-minded jerk.

The post Review: Unnatural Selection, Mara Hvistendahl; or, Trusting nonfiction authors appeared first on Reading the End.

Is what I was saying throughout most of Habibi. I wanted to be saying what I was saying throughout most of Thompson’s previous book, Blankets, which was nothing actually because I was so breathless from the beauty of the story and the illustrations. I wanted that to be the case with Habibi, and occasionally it was, like when the characters were telling each other stories from Muslim traditions. Craig Thompson never didn’t succeed at making his stories beautiful. If he had stuck to this, we’d be having a very different review right now.

Let me back up. Described by Thompson as a fairy tale, Habibi is set in the fictional country of Wanatolia, an Arabian Nightsy place complete with harems and sultans and deserts. Dodola is raising a small boy named Zam, whom she rescued from slavers, on an abandoned ship in the middle of the desert. This is all very nice for Zam, up to a point (that point being the point at which he discovers how Dodola procures rations for them both), but then Dodola is taken away to be part of the sultan’s harem, and then a bunch of depressing stuff happens to both of them, and eventually (spoilers) they are reunited.

Basically, the book starts out lovely, but then gets super rapey. I do not like super rapey books. And here’s what it is: If your book is about real life, and you are careful, you can have a super rapey book. I might not want to read it, but I am far less likely to say “Come on dude” to you. If your book is a fairy tale and it’s super rapey, then that tends to fall into the realm of the unnecessary (as a rule! not always!). If you’re going to show sexual abuse, be prepared to deal with the emotional consequences for your characters. Don’t toss it in there because you need your characters to undergo many trials. When you do it that way, it makes me feel icky. It’s not that I’m trying to hide from the fact that rape is a real thing, it’s that I need books to treat it like a real thing, and give it the weight it deserves.

Leaving out the questionable way Thompson deals with rape in this book, the misery the characters go through was just too much misery. It was too much misery in too episodic and haphazard a way. They bounced from one miserable life to another miserable life, steady being miserable, that shorthand thing of making characters sympathetic by inflicting misery on them. There’s something to be said for putting your characters through hell, and I’m all for it, I really am, I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer as much as the next geeky girl, but you still have to make them recognizable people whose experiences change them. I didn’t feel anything for Dodola and Zam, I just sort of wanted the book to be over.

Boo. I was so excited for this book and I ended up not liking it at all and sort of wanting to give Craig Thompson the look of squinty-eyed wrath at which my family excels. I wish it had been one huge long book of stories from Muslim tradition. That would have been gorgeous and exciting and wonderful. Instead it was occasionally gorgeous and exciting and wonderful, but overwhelmingly unawesome. I’m going to go reread Blankets and make myself love Craig Thompson again.

But don’t take my word for it!

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