so many choice bits … and this is just a small percentage of what I’ve underlined in my copy …

“…how wonderful it was that men had now increased the time they spent with their children to up to forty minutes a day!  Well, hell, let’s have a fucking parade.”  p7

“A basement dweller getting his kicks out of harassing women on the internet because he’s never talked to one in his entire life?”  p8

Okay, see, right there: a solution would be if in school, every day involved ‘group’ work wherein one boy and one girl had to talk, talked, to each other

[re ‘reveal’ parties] “If the idea of gathering your closest friends and family to celebrate your child’s genitalia isn’t disconcerting enough …” p14  (see “Mr. and Ms.“)

[re the party theme “Guns or Glitter”] “I cannot fathom what kind of strange vortex you’d need to live in to think it was appropriate to enthusiastically connect an innocent little baby with a fucking gun…” p14

Yeah.  Even the concept of toy guns … (see “Bang Bang” )

“When I read stories about little boys who have their softness and love shamed out of them by parents who are in thrall to their own fear, my heart breaks.”  p32

We said all this [sexist conditioning has negative effects on both girls and boys] fifty year ago.  FIFTY YEARS ago.  So WTF? 

Ah.  ‘We’.  As in ‘women’.  To whom no one was listening.

“[J]ust ask yourself why women for the most part do all the work of growing and birthing children only to turn around and give naming rights to men who did barely anything at all.” p40-1

“… a marked difference between what was expected of us and what was expected of our brother.  He was never told to wash dishes, sort and fold laundry or—heaven forbid!—iron the shirts my father wore to work.  Instead, he was given the wholly undemanding task of sweeping the footpath outside and taking out the bins, both of which he seemed to do only sporadically.” p41

It was that way in the 60s too.  SIXTY YEARS and nothing’s changed.  WTF.

“…I found myself washing and folding yet another load of tiny leggings and singlets that my partner had just stepped over or walked past without even noticing.”  p52

Frankly, I’m surprised she expected anything different, given her and her brother.

Why I didn’t get married and have kids.  How do so few women see the writing on the wall?

“Men who look after their children aren’t ‘babysitting’. …  What they’re doing is called ‘parenting’.” p58

“It isn’t helping to do a handful of chores in a house you live in.”  p58

“… the dangerous notion that women exist to amplify the greatness of his own life.” p68

well-put

“That’s impossible to do when you have one demographic of people—white, straight, cisgender men—in charge of deciding what matters and what doesn’t.”  p74

I’d change ‘cisgender’ to ‘sexist/MRA-advocate’ …

“We didn’t grow up with fucking George Lucas telling us that we could be a Jedi Master …” p78

again, well-put

“We love little girls!/ Yeah, sure we do.  Right up until they hit puberty, then we slap ’em across the face and scream, ‘Welcome to hell, sweetheart!  WHO’S SPECIAL NOW?'”  p83

Ford should take this shit on the road.  Open mic night …

“And according to the Geena Davis Institute, ‘Films with female leads made considerably more on average than films with male leads … [grossing] 15.8 percent more …'” p91

“Catherine Hardwicke’s opportunities didn’t explode after directing Twilight. … [S]he couldn’t even get an interview to be considered as the director for The Fighter … As Hardwicke noted wryly at the time, ‘It’s about action, it’s about boxing, so a man has to direct it … But they’ll let a man direct Sex in the City and any girly movie you’ve ever heard of.'” p91

“[Geena Davis told NPR] ‘If there’s 17 percent women [in a crowd scene], [men surveyed] think it’s fifty-fifty.  And if there’s 33 percent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.'” p93

“According to this definition, being A Boy menas having sexual impulses that are stronger than your moral ones.  It means being so base in your desires that criminality will always win out over doing the right thing.  It means viewing the incapacitation or vulnerability of the girls and women around you not as a responsibility, but as an opportunity.” p116

This reminds me of a short video I once saw, maybe an ad?, of a young woman asleep or passed out on a couch, and a young man sees her and—gets a blanket and gently puts it over her.  And I was surprised.  And then, the point, I was APPALLED (but not surprised) that I was surprised.

“… the absolute repression of male emotional maturity”  p142

yes.  that.

“[How did] the language of misogyny most hateful become incorporated into the standard vocabularies of boys and men all over the world?”  p168

yes.  that.

“… because of course the best way for men to disprove a feminist’s central world view …  is to gather together and threaten her with sexual violence.” p179

another one for her stand-up routine.

along with one I remember from her previous book, ‘Why do you hate men so much?  You’re a fucking cunt, you know that?!’

lovely bit on p217 re MRA definition of abuse compared to women’s definition

see also p227-228 re the MRA agenda

“They’re barely out of adolescence, but they already believe that the world belongs to them.  Why shouldn’t they?  Everywhere they look, they’re reminded that they were born to rule.” p255

There ought to be a study of the change in sons’ attitudes toward their mothers when they hit puberty; I wonder how many here experienced that ‘sudden’ turn, when their lovely little boys started to show nothing but contempt for them …

“… the rich young white men whose careers and futures are treated with more respect than the bodies of the women they assault …” p287

“[After she was raped, she said] ‘I hadn’t even shaved my legs.'” p299

YES!  If women’s behavior was actually used as the standard for consent, we could settle the consent issue sooooo easily.  Reminds me of the story “A Jury of Her Peers”.

“‘All you need to say is, “Do you want to be here? … Do you want to have sex with me?”  And if it’s not an enthusiastic “yes”, it’s a “no”.  That’s it.’ … It’s really not that fucking hard …” p319

Yeah, or we could do it that way.

“We should be focusing instead on making a world in which women get to be considered just as big a fucking deal as men.”  p322

“Women’s bodies are still being used as the conduit for men’s reckoning with each other.” p323

again, well-put.

I live on a lake in a forest in mid-northern Ontario.  It’s bad enough that people come here to kill animals they have no need to kill, in often painful ways, which they do every weekend all summer long, when the animals are struggling as it is, given what we’ve done to their homes and their food supplies, and call it sport no less, but yesterday I was struck—

Rounding a point in my kayak, I saw a little boy, maybe six years old, standing in a boat holding a fishing rod (his father was standing behind him).  The boy saw us and pointed with delight, seeing my little dog perched on the prow like a little hood ornament.  I smiled.  But then he turned back, no doubt reprimanded by his father to concentrate, to pay attention, and resumed trying to kill.

How does that little boy turn from being delighted to see Keezi on the prow to trying to kill another animal?  There must be a disconnect.  He must not think of the barbed hook tearing at the lip of the fish, he must not think of its pain as he pulls the fish by that hook in its lip through the water as it struggles to get away, then up out of the water where it will contort itself trying to get free, unable to breathe—

And that’s how, I realized, six year old boys become twelve, and eighteen, and twenty-four year old boys—who rape.  Oblivious to the woman’s screams of pain, to her squirming to get free—

*

https://thehumaneleague.org.uk/article/do-fish-feel-pain

https://sentientmedia.org/do-fish-feel-pain/

Need I provide links that prove women are sentient as well?

“Behind every well-respected man, there’s a woman who probably does his washing [laundry].” p103

“Why is it that men who prioritise adventure and independence over family are called ‘committed bachelors’ and ‘wanderers’ who just can’t be tied down, but women who similarly pursue a life free form burdens are called ‘spinsters’ and ‘cat ladies’ and are viewed as pitiful cautionary tales?  It’s because men are given the complexity to be fully rounded individuals while women are still treated like plants in need of a man’s attention to fully bloom.” p103

“The state cannot and should not be able to force anyone to give their body over to medicine for any purpose—just as a person cannot be forced to donate a kidney to someone who will otherwise die, nor should a woman be forced to provide nine months of shared living space to a foetus she does not want to keep or care for.” p117

“All of a sudden, they can’t rely on being rewarded just for turning up.  And instead of sitting down for a moment and thinking about what that means, most of them lash out …” p145

“Do feminists hate men?  When you consider the level of hostility women are subjected to just for standing up for ourselves, surely the better query is why do so many men seem to hate women so fiercely, so aggressively, so violently, and so passionately?” p152

“Almost two women in this country [UK] are murdered weekly by aggrieved partners or ex-partners, and the all-too-common response is ‘Well, why didn’t she leave?’ instead of ‘Why did he kill her?'” p153

“If safety [is] such an important consideration for girls, [why don’t their parents] talk to their brothers about not hurting women?” p158

Indeed.

“The abuse received after exposing abuse proves how very prevalent this problem is.” p177

Must read the entire previous page.

“While women complain about the abuse we receive, we’re told to ‘get over it’ or ‘harden up’, two pieces of advice that completely miss the irony of the fact that the most thin-skinned, sensitive and retaliatory people online are white men aged between fifteen and thirty-five.” p179

Brilliant observation.

re her Facebook ban – “To be clear, all I had done was post images of the messages and comments sent to me that had been declared fine by Facebook’s standards.” p183

So “while it was evidently acceptable for these men to send these messages in the first place, it suddenly became an act of hostility for me to make an example of them.” p183

“He’s probably married and has daughters, and he uses this fact to establish himself as some kind of common sense expert and champion for women’s rights.” p235

p237.  just—p237

perhaps a good summary of which would be

“Why do you hate men?  You’re a fucking cunt, you know that?”

“The reality of rape is that it’s overwhelmingly more likely than not to be ‘unplanned and spontaneous’ and for a judge to decide that this makes it somehow ‘not threatening or violent’ is absurd.” p250

Yes!  The fact that it can happen anywhere, anytime, to anyone, willy nilly, is what makes it MORE threatening.

re his son “didn’t deserve to be punished for ‘twenty minutes of action’ – p251 – a gunshot takes 2 seconds – so no deserving to be punished in that case either?  wtf kind of logic is that?

“But shades of grey about consent can be very easily resolved by establishing whether or not your sexual partner is present in the situation, enjoying themselves, and being afforded a dignity that recognizes and respects their humanity.”  p255

I’d just stop at “enjoying themselves”.  I mean, seriously, how hard can that be?  To determine.

And earlier comment by a woman who was gang-raped: “They never spoke to me, they spoke just to themselves, amongst themselves, laughing and thinking it was really funny.  When you have sex with someone, it’s nice and you talk and you touch and this was awful.  This was nothing like that.” p255

Yes, well those men had probably never had sex with someone.

“Why are you so angry?  I’m angry that this is even a question, because implicit in it is the suggestion that women have nothing to be angry about. …” p266

and just carry on and read the whole paragraph.  the whole chapter.

“What happened to you that made you so fucking bitter and angry? [A lifetime in] a society that not only freezes us out of its core operations unit but seizes every opportunity to hurt and demean us.” p271

“We should be angry.  Because if we aren’t, we aren’t paying enough attention.” p271

“… equivalent numbers of middle-aged men are not getting themselves treated in order to look less angry, aggressive, or miserable.”  p49

“When female bodies deviate from the paths set by male ones, this is till treated as a design flaw …  We need different ways of organizing education, work, and relationships to accommodate specifically female needs.  Workplace accommodations are ‘special treatment’; the front-loading of education and career progression into the life stage during which one might also get pregnant cannot be questioned.” p76

Right.  And isn’t justice supposed to compensate for bad luck?  Both male and female choose to reproduce, but it’s just the female’s bad luck that the thing grows in her body, not his.

“Women are penalized towards the end of life for having been progressively exploited at earlier life stages.” p97  (re wages)

“… during the 2020 lockdowns women’s home work involved far more interruptions for domestic and care work, ‘irrespective of [the couples’] pre-lockdown relative pay’ …” p98

“You know what men could do that would ‘dispel the myth of a binary existence’?  Do the laundry.  Wash the dishes.  Do the cooking …  Do some of their family’s emotional labour … Now THAT would be revolutionary.” Gia Milinovich  p104

“… men are progressively stealing time and money from women”  p106

“People find it particularly shocking when a woman refuses to be kind: there’s something unnatural, offensive about a female mouth declaring that the limits of her care are here and she will not be giving any more.”  Sarah Ditum p116

“For younger women, the belief that you are destined for greatness … relies on the conviction that older women were never really worth it, and that you will never be them.” p133

“women who began their adult life assuming their sex didn’t matter can be shocked to find that, actually, it matters a great deal.” p141

And men who made a similar assumption remain clueless, have yet to be shocked.  (Tell them to read What Happened to Tom.  And about those two people, one male and one female, who accidentally switched email accounts and found response to them, their work, waaaaay different …)

“Imagine we lived in a time in which there was no Pornhub, no OnlyFans, no revenge porn, no mega brothels, no normalization of prostitution as a way for female students to fund university courses.  No choking and hitting as ‘standard’ sex, no ‘rough sex’ defences, no child sex dolls on Amazon, no exponential rise in sexual assaults in schools. …” p159

I don’t have to imagine it.  I lived then.  I was a girl, a teenager, a young adult then.  A popular book was The Joy of Sex.  The Hite Report.  Masters and Johnson.

And I’m appalled at the present.  HOW THE FUCK DID WE GET HERE — TO ALL THAT?

“there is no male equivalent of the scold’s bridle, no history of women using ‘nagging’ as an excuse for slaughtering their husbands, no stories of great civilizations in which women forbade men from speaking at political assemblies.”  p209

re being at the YWCA … p227

“That in Salem widows were allowed to own property outright may have been the reason that the witch hunt there was especially intense.”  Barstow  p261 

Interesting.

“Until 2018, the murders of women over the age of fifty-nine were not included in the Crime Survey for England and Wales.” p276

WHAT?

“In response to the “informed consent” bill the Kentucky House passed on January 28th, which requires women to consult a doctor–by video conference or in person–at least 24 hours before having an abortion, Kentucky state representative Mary Lou Marzian proposed a rather tongue-in-cheek bill of her own: a law requiring women to approve their husband’s request for Viagra, and making only married men eligible to receive the drug.”

Great idea!

Covering Viagra, But Not Birth Control?

Covering Viagra, But Not Birth Control?