Lavinia reviewed Bitch doctrine by Laurie Penny
Review of 'Bitch doctrine' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
In her collection of essays, Bitch Doctrine:Essays for Dissenting Adults , written in a three years period and up to the election of Donald Trump, Laurie Penny shows that feminism today is about inclusiveness and intersectionality. There is a lot of stuff in this book, a lot of different topics.
Laurie’s writing is smart, provocative, emotional, thoughtful. She questions many of the underlying assumption that structure our lives and probing identity issues. We are not just women. We are women with different bodies, gender expressions, sexualities. We are humans full of contradictions and differences and we need to take these differences into account and how they affect us. Without this kind of inclusion, as Roxane Gay says, our feminism is nothing. Feminism needs to take into account the needs of women of colour, queer women, transgender women. “In the end,” writes Laurie Penny, “feminists and the LGBT community have all …
In her collection of essays, Bitch Doctrine:Essays for Dissenting Adults , written in a three years period and up to the election of Donald Trump, Laurie Penny shows that feminism today is about inclusiveness and intersectionality. There is a lot of stuff in this book, a lot of different topics.
Laurie’s writing is smart, provocative, emotional, thoughtful. She questions many of the underlying assumption that structure our lives and probing identity issues. We are not just women. We are women with different bodies, gender expressions, sexualities. We are humans full of contradictions and differences and we need to take these differences into account and how they affect us. Without this kind of inclusion, as Roxane Gay says, our feminism is nothing. Feminism needs to take into account the needs of women of colour, queer women, transgender women. “In the end,” writes Laurie Penny, “feminists and the LGBT community have all this in common: we’ are all gender traitors. We have broken the rules of good behaviour assigned to us at birth and we have all suffered for it.”
I don’t agree with everything Penny says, but there is a lot of food of thought in this collection. There is a great deal of humour too, and understandably, a great deal of anger too. I liked the energy and the passion on her essay “The women’s march and the triumph of the won’t” about the women’s march in Washington, a day after Trump’s inauguration, on 23 January 2017. I found her views about James Bond on the essay ‘The Tragedy of James Bond“, witty and hilarious. Perhaps the most interesting to me was the essay “Let’s not abolish sex work; let’s abolish all work,” which talks about the porn industry and capitalism and connects them in ways that I haven’t thought before.
This collection of essays is a provocative call for action. As Laurie Penny says in the introduction,
"The title is a provocation, but so is the rest of the book. How could it be otherwise? Anything any woman ever writes about politics is considered provocative, an invitation to dismissal and disgust and abuse, in much the same way that a short skirt is considered an invitation to sexual violence. That’s the point. I have learned through years of writing in public that if you are a woman and political, they will come for you whatever you say—so you may as well say what you really feel. If that makes me a bitch, I can live with that."
As a culture, patriarchy exists as a set of rules and values that specify how men and women should act in order to be safe and protected. Breaking the patriarchical rules can have real consequences. Women need to find their own voice. Only then we become able to communicate our own feelings, and to pick up the feelings of others we would be able to dismatle the structures of hierarchy.
Read the full review at Maquina Lectora