left_adjoint reviewed Sexy but Psycho by Jessica Taylor
Skip this read "Trauma and Madness" instead
1 star
This really sucks to say but [insert tyra banks we were rooting for you gif] this book took a turn for the bad really fast.
I loved that she was coming out of the gate swinging at the historic misogyny of psychiatry, talking about how experiencing sexual violence gets you retroactively cast as mentally ill in a way that made the violence your fault, &c.
She also was incredibly critical of diagnosis as an objective construct, of how we even conceptualize the idea "mental illness", and all of that was great. Not super novel, but this book was shaping up into a more accessible version of "Trauma and Madness In Mental Health Services" and I was looking forward to reccing it as Fisher-Price's My First Anti-Psych
The first blow came when, literally two pages after criticizing the historic ways that queerness in women was framed as not …
This really sucks to say but [insert tyra banks we were rooting for you gif] this book took a turn for the bad really fast.
I loved that she was coming out of the gate swinging at the historic misogyny of psychiatry, talking about how experiencing sexual violence gets you retroactively cast as mentally ill in a way that made the violence your fault, &c.
She also was incredibly critical of diagnosis as an objective construct, of how we even conceptualize the idea "mental illness", and all of that was great. Not super novel, but this book was shaping up into a more accessible version of "Trauma and Madness In Mental Health Services" and I was looking forward to reccing it as Fisher-Price's My First Anti-Psych
The first blow came when, literally two pages after criticizing the historic ways that queerness in women was framed as not a love of women but trying to escape men
...she goes on a rant about how teenage "girls" are "identifying as boys" to escape patriarchy
which felt buck wild since the previous 70 pages had been hammering home the message that you can't just undermine someone's interiority and testimony about their own experiences because you see them as women/girls.
But, okay, I went into "see what's worth extracting from the rest of the text" mode
Then my partner tor (@bittertea@tilde.zone) was digging into the author and found this: vxtwitter.com/sallyann98745/status/1628731304282927105?s=61
Where the author apparently did not get consent to include stories of sexual violence survivors she talked to
And that means I cannot in good conscience read any further
Goddamnit