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A brutal takedown of society's blinders around misogyny.

The author is from the UK, but I can only speak to the US. Our society is so inured to violence against women that we don't even see it as avoidable, much less as terroristic. Women are literally afraid to say no to men they don't know because we don't know what shit they'll pull on us after that. We do live with that terror every day.

Bates chronicles how our children (boys especially) are being indoctrinated into misogynistic ideals. She also calls out the almost complete lack of charging white people, men especially, with terrorisim. She gives a very thorough analysis and shows that there have been attacks targeted against women by incels because of their beliefs. Yes, there is some room to argue about whether or not incels have a political ideology, but there is a lot of talk in the groups about restricting women's autonomy and rights.

Terrorism: noun the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.

We see this every day against women and LGBTQIA+ peoples.

Well, I really enjoyed the first one. This one, not so much. The story arc Luo Ji and his "one true love" really pissed me off. She was so one dimensional - the demure, deferential, woman who (literally and figuratively) takes up very little space. It was this that made me realize that in his whole world (in 2 books), there were 4 female characters with speaking roles who lasted for more than a chapter. And only 3 or 4 who only lasted a chapter. On top of that, he fridged two (three? maybe four, if you count cold sleep) female characters to move the plot forward.

All that aside, it was a very slow book, which I'm usually good with, but this was... more rambly. In the end, I was pretty much skimming to finish the story.

I will say the world was imaginative and interesting to me. Just not the way the story was written. His mechanic for not having to predict the future of human discovery was an interesting one (from the first book).

Set across thousands of years, it nevertheless reads through without feeling stretched. It follows two threads. The first is the story of uplifting a species. The second is the far-off descendants of those who started the uplift. Themes of the nature of humanity and the drive for survival.

As a life-long arachnophobe, Tchaikovsy did something I honestly never thought could happen. He made me pull for an arachnid species. He wrote them in such an empathetic way. He had me rooting for them and their species. If the movie is ever made, though, I'm NOT going to see it.

I liked the parallels he maintained between the two story lines. And I really enjoyed the gender flip on oppression for the spiders. Of course the male spiders were lower ranked in society. It was a bit heavy-handed at times, but maybe that'll just help men who don't get it now see it.

This was one of the few books I have ever marked up.

When I started the book, I thought I was basically nice to myself. You know, supportive, kind, understanding... Ohhelllno. I was so much nicer and more understanding to other people than I was to myself. It's still hard, in some ways, given my upbringing, to be compassionate at all. But I learned so much from the book.

I read it carefully and slowly, digesting the chapters along the way. I think I read about 1 chapter every week or two. It was so helpful to me to be able to sit with the information and think about how I really felt about it and how to integrate the advice into my life.

There was one chapter I had a problem with... what was it? I think where she spent the chapter slamming another tool. Self-esteem? She basically said it was the root of all evil in the US, creating narcissists. While I agree that it's not the tool we thought it was, I felt she took it too far.

Her research into compassion was very helpful to me, and I highly recommend this book.

You want an example? Before I read the book, my self thoughts were similar to "I'm fat and ugly." I couldn't see beyond my weight. The other day, I actually thought to myself, "I know I'm still pretty. I also know most people don't find people my size attractive. And I'm OK with that."