Review by New York Times Review
THIS PAST APRIL, editors at The Guardian published the results of a study that analyzed more than 70 million reader comments posted on the news site since 1999. Special attention was paid to the 1.4 million that had been blocked or deleted by moderators for violating community standards. Of the 10 authors who saw the most harassment - whose articles were most routinely met with hostile comments ranging from condescending to life-threatening - eight were women; the two men were black. The No. 1 recipient of such passionate expressions of free speech as "I hope you perish in a gasoline-explosion-induced car crash" was Jessica Valenti. This is not Valenti's first rodeo. A long-time blogger and a co-founder of the site Feministing, she is, at 37, now among the old guard of professional feminists who made their careers online. Since starting the blog in 2004, she has written four low-threshold-to-entry books on women's issues aimed at a general readership: "Why Have Kids?," about parenting; "The Purity Myth," about society's fixation on chastity; "He's a Stud, She's a Slut," about the sexual double standard; and "Full Frontal Feminism," a gateway text for young women who might fear the F-word but still align with its message. Not exactly cutting-edge stuff, but feminism is equal parts philosophy and praxis, and reactionaries are born every day. Should the thought occur to you that Valenti's beat is old news, that we've moved past it and should have more interesting questions to tackle, I suggest you read the comments. Valenti's commitment to holding the line for a certain common-denominator feminism in hostile territory is admirable. This is thankless work, and after more than a decade of it she is clearly tired. "I know I'm meant to be the bigger person," she writes in "Sex Object," her latest, addressing the anonymous men who flood her inbox with threats and insults. "I know you're not supposed to hate people because hate is bad for your soul." But so is knowing that "whatever you work on, whoever you are, the nameless horde of random people who go home at night and kiss their wives and children would like for you to disappear." Likewise, of the men who approach her after speaking engagements: "I have become too exhausted with men online to interact with well-meaning information seekers in real life." Of putting on a brave face and laughing off offenses: "This sort of posturing is a performance that requires strength I do not have anymore." "Sex Object" is Valenti's first memoir, and it sets out to tell the story of how women manage the expectation that they exist as vehicles for male desire first and as human beings second, and only once the primary aim is achieved. An ambitious person, young Valenti took the perfectionist's course: "If I was going to be a sex object, I was going to be the best sex object I could be." But the real story of "Sex Object" is one of burnout. Colorful material - coke binges, hospitalizations, the discovery that a stranger on the subway has ejaculated on her pants - is told straight, with minimal energy. The men who appear, two-dimensional figures with monosyllabic names, run together in a laundry list of half-sketched disappointments and transgressions. The writing that feels truest to life describes Valenti feeling sapped of it. Nowhere is it written that losing steam, or hope, is a betrayal of the feminist project. But Valenti is nevertheless on the defensive: "The feminism that's popular right now is largely grounded in using optimism and humor to undo the damage that sexism has wrought," she writes. "No one wants to listen to our sad stories unless they are smoothed over with a joke or nice melody. ... No one wants to hear a woman talking or writing about pain in a way that suggests that it doesn't end. Without a pat solution, silver lining or happy ending, we're just complainers - downers who don't realize how good we actually have it." Maybe, she offers, "it's O.K. if we don't want to be inspirational just this once." It is O.K., of course, and perhaps there's no better illustration of the way everyday sexism grinds one down than the fatigue that drags on this book. But Valenti short-sells her peers when she suggests humor is a pandering concession or a rictus grin women must wear to mask their pain. Humor needn't be a diluting agent; it can be a Trojan horse. As the saying goes, if you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, or they'll try to kill you. Lindy West, another American columnist at The Guardian who built her career writing online, has changed more minds this way than you could count. One of the most distinctive voices advancing feminist politics through humor, West is behind a handful of popular pieces - "How to Make a Rape Joke" on Jezebel, "Hello, I Am Fat" on The Stranger's blog, "Ask Not for Whom the Bell Trolls; It Trolls for Thee" on "This American Life" - that have helped shift mainstream attitudes about body image, comedy and online harassment over the past several years. Culture molds who we are, West argues, but it's ours to remold in turn. Aesthetic excellence and being a good person are mutually exclusive only to the lazy and insincere. We could keep laughing through "edgy" jokes about race, rape, S.T.I.s and fat people, for instance, but why should we if the jokes aren't funny, and the laughs only prove to someone, somewhere, that they are unlovable? "Isn't it our responsibility, as artists, to keep an eye on which ideas we choose to dump into the water supply?" "Shrill," West's first book, is a director's commentary of sorts on her most memorable stories, several of which are reprinted here. The later essays, about her father's death, are the most ambitious as writing, but the hits hold. My favorite is her work on being fat, the word she prefers. ("I dislike 'big' as a euphemism," she writes, because "I don't want the people who love me to avoid the reality of my body.") With patience, humor and a wildly generous attitude toward her audience - meeting readers at their point of prejudice so that she may, with little visible effort, shepherd them toward a more humane point of view (it's worth noting that West is the only writer to have an internet troll publicly apologize to her on national radio) - she reminds us that "fat people are not having fun on planes. There is no need to make it worse." Before you ask, West knows from diet and exercise: "I know the difference between spelt bread and Ezekiel bread. ... I could teach you the proper form for squats and lunges and kettle bell swings, if you want" - but "the level of restriction that I was told, by professionals, was necessary for me to 'fix' my body essentially precluded any semblance of joyous, fulfilling human life." She decided instead to stop treating her body as a work in progress. Her blood work, if you care to know, is perfect. As a teenager, West thought that "chasing perfection was your duty and your birthright, as a woman, and I would never know what it was like - this thing, this most important thing for girls." Such is the double bind of sex-objecthood: You resent the standards but still want to meet them, because that's the ticket to love. Ultimately, she did come to know this most important thing, and like Valenti, saw the double bind thrown back at her in the form of a contradictory threat, issued from deep inside the great male unconscious of the internet: You are too fat and ugly to rape, but I would rape you anyway. West's humor, I admit, is not always my style. At times it feels juvenile, irritating - "a bit much," as she says. I dislike all caps in print, of which she is fond, because I am NO FUN. Overall, "Shrill" feels hasty and unfinished, less like a book than the assembled material required to consummate a book deal. But no matter, there is good work here that represents a decade of public service for which she deserves years of back pay. If this is the culture industry's way of thanking West, so be it. She deserves the moment in the sun. DAYNA TORTORICI is an editor of n+1.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 19, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In this uproariously funny debut, West, GQ writer and fat-acceptance activist, blends memoir, social commentary, and ribald comedy in a biting manifesto. Starting with the admission that she was not at all happy to get her period, West describes her inspiring progression from body hate to body love. Readers will delight in West's clarity as she describes her childhood (there are no positive depictions of fat people in Disney) and beliefs (why it's so offensive to ask fat people where they get their confidence), illuminating the insidious way our culture regards those who are overweight as subhuman and revolting moral and intellectual failures. She debunks objections to the obese as a drain on health care and advocates movingly for empathy because it's hard being fat. Despite the book's serious subject, West's ribald jokes, hilarious tirades, and raucous confessions keep her narrative skipping merrily along as she jumps from painful confession to powerful epiphany. Sure to be a boon for anyone who has struggled with body image, Shrill is a triumphant, exacting, absorbing memoir that will lay new groundwork for the way we talk about the taboo of being too large.--Grant, Sarah Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
West, a GQ culture writer and former staff writer for Jezebel, balances humor with a rare honesty and introspection in her debut. Over the course of the book, West details finding her voice as a writer and a feminist through stories about her family, her weight, having an abortion, and the emotional toil of being harassed online. West's chronicle of the series of highly personal online attacks-and of how much Internet conversations have changed in the past decade-marks this book as required reading. Always entertaining and relatable, West writes openly and with clear eyes about embarrassing moments and self-esteem issues, and has a remarkable ability to move among lightheartedness, heavy hitting topics, and what it means to be a good person. By reading about West's thought-provoking responses to online rape jokes, gender-specific attacks, and being trolled about a family tragedy, readers learn by example how to navigate the Internet's sometimes soul-sucking terrain with dignity and retain a sense of adventure. Agent: Gary Morris, David Black Agency. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
GQ culture writer West's essay collection addresses topics such as fantasy literature, fat acceptance, rape jokes, and being a woman on the Internet with sometimes bittersweet, frequently hilarious results-step five of "How To Stop Being Shy in Eighteen Steps" involves joining a choir with "uniforms that look like menopausal genie costumes." In one of the most powerful pieces, the author describes being targeted by an online troll who had adopted the persona of her late, beloved father (his Twitter bio read "Location: Dirt hole in Seattle"). After writing about the situation for Jezebel.com, West was contacted by the troll, who apologized and agreed to join her on an episode of NPR's "This American Life" to discuss why he'd done such a cruel thing to a complete stranger. West's prose is conversational and friendly in tone, hacking away at the patriarchy with a smile. VERDICT This is a natural fit for fans of Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist, Felicia Day's You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost), and Jenny Lawson's Furiously Happy.-Stephanie Klose, Library -Journal © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
