Mary Daly

[MitchiestInge]

Gyn/Ecology

I can't actually read it. I keep trying different chapters but it makes me feel sick, angry or tearful. Is there a shortcut or am I doomed to spinelessness forever?

Oddly I've just read the final six paragraphs, not so much rape murder and dismemberment there. What you say makes sense and at some point I want to have read this book and better still, to have understood and mulled some of it over. Increasingly aware of how I push anything unpleasant away and out of sight and that this might not always be the great coping skill I'd like to think it is.

I appreciate the acknowledgement that it's an affecting read. Cultivating anger is an interesting twist on my battery theory, at the moment I am storing it and just discharging little bits here and there.

Heh, for spineless person my spine has had lots to say for itself over the years. Usually it is complaining about my posture though.

See this is why I'm not one for the book club :( I find the rage really difficult. I don't think there's a solution to that.

you need Sakura really (has anyone seen her in the last few days?) - she said she didn't read it in the right order as well.

still here Steth (still about, cluching my Volvic from France...)

Mitchiest, I felt exactly like you. I read the first passage and God I was depressed, really, truly. So I went straight to the third passage but the opening page described how the first two passages were a type of initiation. I took it she meant that you would reach catharsis if you did manage to get through it in the right order.
So I turned back to the second passage and read it in dribs and drabs, but couldn't manage it and read the third passage (which was fucking brilliant BTW)
It's best to read it in order to get the full affect of the book, but now I pick up the second passage when the mood takes me. I haven't read Nazi Medicine and American Gynecology because the title turns my stomach, but I think 'God, these women had to DO the research on these atrocities, the least I can do is honour them by READING it!!!"
It's very hard though.

seth, obviously

Glad it is not just a case of me being too pathetic to live etc., nice to know others found it unstomachable. Is it actually worth the trauma, would you say?

It's a life-changing book, there's no doubt about that

am completely abandoning it until am either spineful enough to read without feeling sick or am just generally a less anxious nightmare-ridden mess

yes, I don't think you should torture yourself with it if you're not feeling up to it. It will still be there when you're feeling better.