Feminist book club 5: what book?

[sethstarkaddersmum]

So far we've had:

-The Equality Illusion
-Female Chauvinist Pigs
-Against our will: men, women and rape
-Heartbreak + various other Dworkin extracts

Some initial suggestions - The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf; The Whole Woman by Germaine Greer.

There's also Reclaiming the F Word which is just out but I am reading this atm and think it is a bit similar to The Equality Illusion.

any views?

LOL, I still haven't caught up on the Susan Brownmiller.

Catharine Mackinnon would be interesting.

I've got the Beauty Myth on order from the library and was going to ask if anyone had read it.

The Surrendered Wife, only joking hahahahaha

LOL!
It's a thought though - we could do the most misogynistic book we could find and spend a therapeutic hour in outraged ranting.

It'd all look like this

............

...........

Actually I read a book - though not The Surrendered Wife - about living as a surrendered wife(I'll read anything...!)

It was bizarre as I spent half the time going ,but more time than I would have expected fighting off the insidious idea that I'd got it all wrong and should eschew feminism,and defer to DH more...I think I may be too suggestible.

I guess reading it in the safe enviroment of the MN Feminism threads would be ok though

I'd like to read The Beuaty Myth,or Are Women Human - and I'd really like to read The Whole Woman at some point.

Whole Woman's fine by me, I've already got that.

Sorry I've missed the other ones though, read a bit of the Heartbreak thread and looked fascinating.

Actually I have got The Surrendered Wife and although I don't agree with it all, especially the bit about never saying no to sex even if you don't feel like it, I could see the logic in some of it:

There was a bit about women doing loads of the work in the home and being pissed off with men for not helping, but when they do try to help out, we often criticise the way they've done it and make them feel useless. If we think we are the only ones who can do it properly and we make them feel that too, they will become even less motivated to help. The book said we should let them make mistakes, and not say anything, and they would learn by their mistakes themselves and want to do it better next time.

I actually thought that a lot of the book was really about how to mentally manipulate the man into behaving the way we want and it seemed quite clever in some ways.

I have the book The Surrendered Single by the same author and agree OdrinarySAHM. From what I remember there's some utter bollocks (such as the bit suggesting that you go out with men you don't fancy) and some sound advice (if he doesn't treat you with kindness and respect, best to move on quickly).

how can you have a surrendered single? Who would they surrender to?

That's the problem, you have no one to surrender to and how can a woman possibly by happy like that? So you need a book like Surrendered Single to help find a man to surrender to and then to show you how to trick him into marriage. Doh

So have we decided anything?
(assuming we won't be reading The Surrendered Wife...)

Beauty Myth please.

yes please because apart from anything else, my copy of The Whole Woman is at my mum and dads' house but I have The Beauty Myth here!

actually I think it would be good for other reasons too - would be a good book for new feminists to read and we could advertise the discussion on other sections of MN, not just the feminist section.

The Beauty Myth - ok! On Wednesday 28th,a month from the last?

I've just finished reading The New Feminism by Natasha Walter - has that been discussed here before? Really want to hear other people's views...

Goes off to buy the beauty myth

if you don't want to wait for a book club on the Natasha Walter you could start a thread Hotcheese! there have been several 'has anybody read....?' threads as well as the actual book clubs.

is this for the 28th JUly?

Yes, I think so.