The Female of the Species

This might be one of the worst books I’ve read in a long time. I checked it out because I saw the description said it was “an examination of rape culture.” I wasn’t expecting some groundbreaking work from a YA novel, but I was definitely not expecting this. As I read I kept thinking “there is nothing feminist about this” and by the time I got to the end, I was thinking that this was actively -anti-feminist.-

The book is teeming with “unexamined” misogyny and rape culture. At first I thought these things were being set up to be subverted, but they never are.

Branley, for instance, is just a MRA “slut” meme trope, and at no point is this challenged. The book relishes in over the top descriptions (“friend to all penises” “auditioning for manga porn”). She gets beer dumped on her and we get a description of her jiggling breasts. This isn’t a teenage girl, this is how MRAs think teenage girls are.

When she’s not wearing makeup, when she’s described as not being “pouty” and speaking “normally” then everyone is like “wow Branley you could be cool without all that.” Pairing that with the fact that Jack found it sexy that Alex was a virgin (that is also rape culture, and also goes unexamined) this book heavily accepts as read that there is something wrong, weird, artificial about Branley. She is a slut, and it is kind of bad, according to the text.

Just before Ray tries to rape Branley, Branley is pressuring Jack for sex, which is also rape culture, and also goes unexamined. Egregiously so. Since this book loves nothing but to reiterate that teenage boys can’t help but want sex, including in that scene, congrats on reifying every single way that rape culture also affects boys. Holy god.

The text can’t seem to let Alex be a vigilante. So much of the book relies on telling us that Alex is motivated by an disturbing, inherent anger, a thing that is -wrong- with her. Up to and including having a part about how she got this anger from her father, who she knew sometimes -wanted- to hit their mother. So I guess fighting back against rapists=the same thing as being an abusive man?

So there’s no payoff, because she isn’t a vigilante. We get a little bit of character-tells-how-they-feel (this happens a lot, there is SO MUCH telling) at the end about how she felt after her sister died, but we get none of that from book. In fact, her guilt is treated as -character growth-. She’s not a “badass fighter against misogyny” she’s treated as an aberration that needs to learn her place.

By the end, the bad rapists are dead, and the good boys get to make sexually harassing comments toward girls, but it’s fine, it’s kind of funny even, because there is no examination of rape culture whatsoever. This book just is rape culture.

She dies in the end in such an asinine way because not only is this book anti-feminist, it’s also lazily written. She had to die, because her murdering which was treated as such an egregious act from her disturbed and dangerous self, is so meaningless that Jack’s just like “ok but like I still love you, so you’re cool” She has to die so the thinness of her murdering others remains thin, so that it doesn’t actually matter, either to the character, or to any real dent in rape culture as a whole.)

Also love that at the end there Branley is the one apologizing. You can’t uphold rape culture in your anti-feminist text without humbling the slutty girl. For a book about “examining rape culture” it can’t subvert any rape culture tropes and desires.

This book is so clichely rape culture I don’t even know if any feminist even signed off on this book. Any basic feminist understanding would’ve criticized 2/3rds of this book that never goes “examined.”

Anyway, I’ll cut this short to not keep writing a wall of text. This book deserves its own hard swift kick by some actual feminist woman, straight into the trash bin.

I am really afraid of dogs and once a character was bitten by a big dog I had to stop reading immediately. It's just way too triggering for me.

Also, in the first chapter, the main character kills the murderer of her sister, but then she gets all upset when puppies are hurt? That's just two huge no go's for me: vigilante and hate for other human beings that is masked as love for animals. I despise this "animals are better than humans" thing where they make it sound like violence towards an animal was worse than towards another person.. I mean, come on! I'm just tired of that crap. No one deserves to be killed, not even the murderer of your sister.. Americans and their death penalty shit. It's sickening.
Not to mention, that I then read a random page in the middle of the book where the above mentioned character eats eggs. Oh, the hypocrisy!!

those who say this book is a bad take on rape culture probably didn’t fully understand the message, imo. if you go on just those reviews alone and pass up this read, you’re missing a lot. it isn’t here to hold your hand and tell you “this is bad” because you should know it already. it’s here to tell you a story about how and why we don’t take this shit seriously, and how and why we’re willing to just be complacent for the sake of politeness and avoiding “drama”.

this book was...a lot. don’t read it if you’re triggered by rape or assault or anything else. just don’t, unless you want that heartache. it gets very real, very fast, and i get if that’s why people think it’s unrealistic (except it is. they’re all peekay, thinking they’d do something in the crisis, but being her when they’re comforted just by imagining violence instead of doing anything). i’d say complaints about lack of realism probably haven’t experienced this story exactly as it’s written out, because the underlying themes and “day to day” expressions happen daily, under our noses, and we’re all too willing to turn away from it and make anyone willing to take matters into their own hands a pariah just to make ourselves feel better.

or maybe we fancy ourselves alex and agree that we’d do the same thing, when we never actually would do something so “horrible” like resorting to violence or extrajudicial means of exacting justice. maybe we fancy ourselves alex because like peekay, imagining what we’d do in a situation is enough to quell our anger about it.

this book is going to stick with me a long time. i see myself in alex, almost too much. i’m going to miss her a lot and i wish more characters appreciated her before she died.

and she’s right—laws don’t control us. we control us. laws just say what the punishments are if we’re caught.

the proof of that is in our daily lives.