I'm sort of ashamed to start off by saying this, and I certainly didn't want it to be this way, but I absolutely hated this book. I went in with high expectations because I'm very interested in analyses of how women are devitalized by the negation of their autonomous libido and sexuality in patriarchal systems, and this book seemed to be exactly about that. I was disappointed right away, not only by the lack of focus on this specific topic but also because of the general... flaccidity, weakness, ineffectiveness of Germaine's concept of feminism. From what's lauded as a foundational feminist text I expected way more revolutionary impetus, so I was appalled to see her espousing the spineless kind of "feminism" where women attempt to rescue men from their own depravity and from the system that they knowingly uphold. This servile, tender-hearted bullshit seems utterly antithetical to actual women's liberation - and then she has the gall, in the final chapter, to exhort us to "revolution"!!! I agree with her basic assertions that the feminist revolution that must take place should first and foremost be a mental phenomenon, and that it would surely lead to massive and positive changes in men's self-image, but it's delusional and outright dangerous to believe that women must expend themselves in order to shed men of their conditioning.

And not only is this approach demeaning and ineffective: Germaine is also outright contemptuous not only of women in general but other feminist thinkers in particular. She champions this type of milquetoast, inoffensive feminism, where the "liberated" woman is still serving men and wiping their asses and directing them and bolstering their egos and praising them for being good boys, and yet she constantly belittles other feminist intellectuals for being less enlightened than her. She starts off the book by shittalking the suffragettes for being too mild!! A disgustingly large part of the book is dedicated to slandering the works - literary or practical - of other feminist women. Of course intellectuals can critique each other, but Germaine does it in such a baseless, cartoonishly mean-spirited and ridiculous way that it's almost unbelievable. An egregiously bad example that stuck with me is her comment - it can't be called a critique - on Anne Koedt's The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm. It was undeniable then, as it is undeniable now, that the orgasm gap between men and women is largely because of men prioritizing their pleasure over that of their partners. What is Germaine's rebuttal to this? First off, she sardonically says that Koedt has only ever had bad sex and that she isn't fucking the right men - she unironically spouts this quintessential misogynist talking point that's often used to demean feminist writers. Then she says that poor men have performance anxiety about sex, poor men are expected to be this way and that way, poor men, poor men... This pitying of men is a constant in this book, but it was especially laughable here: incels reading this passage would nod passionately with tears in their eyes!! She ends this brilliant critique with a very insightful reflection on women's universal experience of sexuality: "At all events a clitoral orgasm with a full cunt is nicer than a clitoral orgasm with an empty one, as far as I can tell at least." and she ends it like that. That's it. Okay. Pack it up everyone. Women as a class should not correct misconceptions about our sexuality and we should not assert our right to authentic pleasure, because miss Germaine here likes her cunt full, as she so gracefully and professionally puts it. 👍

Aside from shitting on feminist thinkers, she spends most of the book shitting on all other women, in that same baseless and hyperbolic way. I understand that it's Germaine's choice of subject: while many others have analyzed and criticized the behaviours of men in patriarchy, she chose to talk about how the imposition of femininity on women often makes them insufferable, annoying and whatnot, but I think this topic should be treated with respect and sensibility since women are not the ones initiating this process and at any rate they are the victims, not the abusers. Germaine wasn't able to do that. The amount of woman-hatred in this book is genuinely appalling and it makes me question how the hell it was even considered a feminist work in the first place. Germaine believes in a bilateral "war of the sexes" where women can be oppressors just as much as men (although she timidly and euphemistically concedes that men are winning). She spends whole chapters giving credence to the typical boogeymen of misogyny: the nagging wife, the tyrannical mother... Especially the tyrannical mother. I cheered when I saw her socking it to Freud, but then she turned around and started spouting bullshit eerily similar to his: the antisociality of the romantic bond, the antisociality of the mother-child bond (?!), the overbearing omnipotent cruel castrating mother that oppresses her children what the fuck??? The specific concept of the cruel, overbearing mother came up so many times that it made me a bit suspicious: at around halfway through the book I thought that a particularly mean-spirited reader could have made snide remarks about Germaine's childhood, since this specific topic she loves to bring up seems based on personal experiences and not actual statistical reality... but of course that was, again, mean-spirited and I gave up the idea. Until she admitted it. Towards the end of the book she starts fucking traumadumping, for the lack of a better word, about her mother beating her and manipulating her and screaming at her... Okay... Certainly, personal anecdotes must not be dismissed - especially in a feminist context where women discover the common nature of their oppression by noticing reoccurent patterns in each other's lives - but it simply doesn't work if you try to sell them as universal experiences. From how she talks about it, you'd think the entirety of the western population was raised by psychopaths.

Even aside from this, Germaine is fucking weird on the topic of parenting in general. Just as often as she rants about the cartoonishly evil tyrannical mother which she believes to be a common type of person, she rages and seethes about... parents having to pay attention to their children. She becomes the shining white knight for all the poor couples who've been fucking less than usual since their child was born. For her, raising a whole another human being whose mind is a blank slate is no big deal, and the fact that parents have to make sacrifices in their lives for the sake of their child is viewed as an outrageous social custom instead of a biological necessity. She RAGES, my god, she RAGES over the obvious, natural fact that children are owed attention and care. She says that neglected children do better in school (it's because they have to grow up too fast and on their own??) therefore children should be neglected; that children are guilty of "exploitation of their adult slave". Other Freudian bullshit ensues: "A sterilized parent is a eunuch in his children's harem." (??!!) And the mind-blowing thing is that she shits on contraception, too!!! And she is supposed to be a feminist! She rages at the fact that contemporary middle-class couples are sane enough, THANKS GOD, to NOT have children that they cannot afford. This is because she believes that they just want to brainwash their children into being "clean, well-disciplined middle-class children who go to good schools and grow up to be professionals". Okay? And this is a bad thing? What sort of psychopath would not want their child to grow up in a physically suitable environment and have the possibility of pursuing higher education? This is already ridiculous enough - but in the same breath (in the "Family" chapter specifically) Germaine spends a disgusting amount of time waxing poetically about dirt-poor rural communities where children are unwanted and numerous. In that chapter, I swear to god, she expresses nostalgia for impoverished preindustrial communities where women were overworked and forced to birth high numbers of children that they couldn't even properly take care of. She idealizes this sort of life like a fucking Roman bucolic poet, to the point of being ridiculous: "Once upon a time everyone lived in a house full of friends with large communal areas, where the streets were full of friends"! Are we serious?? She romanticizes the awful life of actual families she met in impoverished regions: "I think of the filthy two-roomed house in Calabria where people came and went freely, where I never heard a child scream except in pain, where the twelve-year-old aunt sang at her washing by the well, and the old father walked in the olive grove with his grandson on his arm." So true and realistic! I too wanna be a farmer with early onset arthritis who gives birth once a year!! And it's not as if she simply mentions this "organic family" (as she weirdly calls it) as an alternative model to the nuclear family, she stops abruptly in the middle of the chapter to talk about her plans to buy a farmhouse in Italy (presumably dirt-poor, mafia-infested south Italy) to raise her children there along with some other random sods. LARPing as a poor farmer is her dream. I seriously find it hard to comment on this stuff.

There currently is a tendency among non-feminists and liberal feminists to call women who rightly criticize other women "misogynists", "pick-mes" and whatnot, and I want to point out that this is not what I'm doing. I'm not pissed because Germaine is criticizing other women - I do that too, god knows it's holy work, it's necessary! Tough love. What I'm saying is simply that Germaine sounds - please forgive my bluntness - like a psycho. DISMISSES VICTIMS OF ACTUAL PHYSICAL VIOLENCE TOO. Says that men's threat of physical violence is "usually histrionic, to silence nagging wives" and "almost always a sham" (!!!), "a game of nerves [that] can be turned aside fairly easily". To buttress this absurd claim she shares yet another anecdote that no one cares about: on two occasions she allegedly lived with men known for their propensity for physical violence, but they never hurt her because, and I quote, "it was abundantly clear from my attitude that I was not impressed by it." I don't think I have to say anything. "Male violence isn't real because it didn't happen to me, and also I'm too cool to be assaulted, other women simply aren't built like me!" Says that men are COERCED BY WOMEN to be violent because women like violent men, and says that women must be the ones to step forward and "offer a genuine alternative to the treadmill of violence". Us???? Again, is it women's job to save men from themselves, when they're getting killed and raped by them?? Says that "female intellectuals are arrogant, aggressive, compulsive". Says that "contraception has increased the egotism of the couple" and that unwanted children aren't so bad after all, because they aren't so strictly controlled by their parents (again with her weird antisocial neuroses about parenting, and again, very feminist!) Says that contraception for economic reasons (due to not being able to afford a child or more children) is "squalid" - again, nothing more feminist than nagging women with "why aren't you having children?? Your reasons aren't valid". When she started earnestly psychoanalyzing Lucy from the fucking Peanuts comics and presenting her as an example of how women victimize men, my soul left my body. "her ruthless aggravation of Charlie Brown's inadequacy fears"... The horror!!! Why does no one care about those bitter manhating hags oppressing Charlie Brown!!! Incels wouldn't be this funny if they tried. Call me heretical, but I really really can't see how this is a feminist text at all. Again, call me heretical, stone me, draw and quarter me, but I can't for the life of me see where the feminism is in this book. If a woman smarter than me wants to hop in my inbox and tell me why I'm wrong, I'd appreciate that; hell I hope I'm wrong, because Germaine's opinions seem way too fucking unhinged to be real.

Now that I've stated my case I can say with less embarassment that this was absolute torture to read. I think I deserve a medal for finishing it.