Book picks similar to
You Still Don't Understand: Typical Differences Between Men and Women--And How to Resolve Them by Richard Driscoll
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The Good Body
Eve Ensler - 2004
They had a blond Clairol wave in their hair. They wore girdles and waist-pinchers. . . . In recent years good girls join the army. They climb the corporate ladder. They go to the gym. . . . They wear painful pointy shoes. They don’t eat too much. They . . . don’t eat at all. They stay perfect. They stay thin. I could never be good.”The Good Body starts with Eve’s tortured relationship with her own “post-forties” stomach and her skirmishes with everything from Ab Rollers to fad diets and fascistic trainers in an attempt get the “flabby badness” out. As Eve hungrily seeks self-acceptance, she is joined by the voices of women from L.A. to Kabul, whose obsessions are also laid bare: A young Latina candidly critiques her humiliating “spread,” a stubborn layer of fat that she calls “a second pair of thighs.” The wife of a plastic surgeon recounts being systematically reconstructed–inch by inch–by her “perfectionist” husband. An aging magazine executive, still haunted by her mother’s long-ago criticism, describes her desperate pursuit of youth as she relentlessly does sit-ups.Along the way, Eve also introduces us to women who have found a hard-won peace with their bodies: an African mother who celebrates each individual body as signs of nature’s diversity; an Indian woman who transcends “treadmill mania” and delights in her plump cheeks and curves; and a veiled Afghani woman who is willing to risk imprisonment for a taste of ice cream. These are just a few of the inspiring stories woven through Eve’s global journey from obsession to enlightenment. Ultimately, these monologues become a personal wake-up call from Eve to love the “good bodies” we inhabit.From the Hardcover edition.
Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today
Rachel Vorona Cote - 2020
So too is a fat woman, a horny woman, a woman shrieking with laughter. Women who are one or more of these things have heard, or perhaps simply intuited, that we are repugnantly excessive, that we have taken illicit liberties to feel or fuck or eat with abandon. After bellowing like a barn animal in orgasm, hoovering a plate of mashed potatoes, or spraying out spit in the heat of expostulation, we've flinched-ugh, that was so gross. I am so gross. On rare occasions, we might revel in our excess--belting out anthems with our friends over karaoke, perhaps--but in the company of less sympathetic souls, our uncertainty always returns. A woman who is Too Much is a woman who reacts to the world with ardent intensity is a woman familiar to lashes of shame and disapproval, from within as well as without. Written in the tradition of Shrill, Dead Girls, Sex Object and other frank books about the female gaze, TOO MUCH encourages women to reconsider the beauty of their excesses-emotional, physical, and spiritual. Rachel Vorona Cote braids cultural criticism, theory, and storytelling together in her exploration of how culture grinds away our bodies, souls, and sexualities, forcing us into smaller lives than we desire. An erstwhile Victorian scholar, she sees many parallels between that era's fixation on women's "hysterical" behavior and our modern policing of the same; in the space of her writing, you're as likely to encounter Jane Eyre and Lizzie Bennet as you are Britney Spears and Lana Del Rey. This book will tell the story of how women, from then and now, have learned to draw power from their reservoirs of feeling, all that makes us "Too Much."
How to Be Successful without Hurting Men's Feelings: Non-threatening Leadership Strategies for Women
Sarah Cooper - 2018
Ask for a pay rise? Pushy.Take credit for an idea? Arrogant.Admit a mistake? Weak.Successfully juggle work and family? Unpromotable.In How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men's Feelings, Sarah Cooper, author of the bestselling 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings, illustrates how women can achieve their dreams, succeed in their careers and become leaders, without harming the fragile male ego.This wickedly funny tongue-in-cheek guide includes chapters on ‘How to Ace Your Job Interview Without Over-acing It’, ‘9 Non-threatening Leadership Strategies for Women’, and ‘Choose Your Own Adventure: Do You Want to Be Likeable or Successful?’. It even includes several pages to doodle on while men finish explaining things.When all else fails, there is a set of cut-outable moustaches inside to allow women to seem more man-like, which will probably lead to a quick promotion!PRAISE FOR 100 TRICKS TO APPEAR SMART IN MEETINGS:'A lot of fun and absolutely on the money' Daily Telegraph, Book of the Year'Even though it's mostly a comedy book, I can't help but think how legitmately useful I would have found this in my early twenties' The Pool'Sarah Cooper is uncannily spot on when describing the seemingly innocent behaviours of people attempting to impress others' Christine Tsai, Founding Partner, 500 STARTUPS
Era of Ignition: Coming of Age in a Time of Rage and Revolution
Amber Tamblyn - 2019
Through her fierce op-eds in media outlets such as the New York Times, Glamour, and Hollywood Reporter and her work as a founder of the Time’s Up organization, Tamblyn has tackled subjects including discrimination, sexual assault, reproductive rights, and pay parity, among others.Now, Tamblyn examines the very paradigm our society is built on, pulling at the threads of the ingrained patriarchal and misogynistic fabric. Tamblyn presents her insightful and pointed take on the current state of feminism and expertly weaves together her own experiences and opinions with the larger movement. In her late twenties and early thirties, Tamblyn experienced a crisis of character and a gradual awakening–her own era of ignition–that enabled her to take back the power in her own life and find her own voice as a bold, outspoken, and respected advocate for women’s rights. Using the same galvanizing voice that helped her recent op-eds go viral, Tamblyn delivers an incisive call-to-arms that will capture the heart of the movement as it educates and inspires readers.
The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade
Ann Fessler - 2006
Wade In this deeply moving work, Ann Fessler brings to light the lives of hundreds of thousands of young single American women forced to give up their newborn children in the years following World War II and before Roe v. Wade. The Girls Who Went Away tells a story not of wild and carefree sexual liberation, but rather of a devastating double standard that has had punishing long-term effects on these women and on the children they gave up for adoption. Based on Fessler's groundbreaking interviews, it brings to brilliant life these women's voices and the spirit of the time, allowing each to share her own experience in gripping and intimate detail. Today, when the future of the Roe decision and women's reproductive rights stand squarely at the front of a divisive national debate, Fessler brings to the fore a long-overlooked history of single women in the fifties, sixties, and early seventies. In 2002, Fessler, an adoptee herself, traveled the country interviewing women willing to speak publicly about why they relinquished their children. Researching archival records and the political and social climate of the time, she uncovered a story of three decades of women who, under enormous social and family pressure, were coerced or outright forced to give their babies up for adoption. Fessler deftly describes the impossible position in which these women found themselves: as a sexual revolution heated up in the postwar years, birth control was tightly restricted, and abortion proved prohibitively expensive or life endangering. At the same time, a postwar economic boom brought millions of American families into the middle class, exerting its own pressures to conform to a model of family perfection. Caught in the middle, single pregnant women were shunned by family and friends, evicted from schools, sent away to maternity homes to have their children alone, and often treated with cold contempt by doctors, nurses, and clergy. The majority of the women Fessler interviewed have never spoken of their experiences, and most have been haunted by grief and shame their entire adult lives. A searing and important look into a long-overlooked social history, The Girls Who Went Away is their story.
"If You Lean In, Will Men Just Look Down Your Blouse?": Questions and Thoughts for Loud, Smart Women in Turbulent Times
Gina Barreca - 2016
In her latest collection of essays, she turns her attention to subjects like bondage which she notes now seems to come in fifty shades of grey and has been renamed Spanx. She muses on those lessons learned in Kindergarten that every woman must unlearn like not having to hold the hand of the person you're waking next to (especially if he's a bad boyfriend) or needing to have milk, cookies and a nap every day at 3:00 PM (which tends to sap one's energy not to mention what it does to one's waistline). She sounds off about all those things a woman hates to hear from a man like "Calm down" or "Next time, try buying shoes that fit". "'If You Lean In, Will Men Just Look Down Your Blouse?'" is about getting loud, getting love, getting ahead and getting the first draw (or the last shot). Here are tips, lessons and bold confessions about bad boyfriends at any age, about friends we love and ones we can't stand anymore, about waist size and wasted time, about panic, placebos, placentas and certain kinds of not-so adorable paternalism attached to certain kinds of politicians. The world is kept lively by loud women talking and "'If You Lean In, Will Men Just Look Down Your Blouse?'" cheers and challenges those voices to come together and speak up. You think she's kidding? Oh, boy, do you have another thing coming.
Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward
Gemma Hartley - 2018
In relationships, we initiate the hard conversations. At home, we shoulder the mental load required to keep our households running. At work, we moderate our tone, explaining patiently and speaking softly. In the world, we step gingerly to keep ourselves safe. We do this largely invisible, draining work whether we want to or not—and we never clock out. No wonder women everywhere are overtaxed, exhausted, and simply fed up.In her ultra-viral article “Women Aren’t Nags—We’re Just Fed Up,” shared by millions of readers, Gemma Hartley gave much-needed voice to the frustration and anger experienced by countless women. Now, in Fed Up, Hartley expands outward from the everyday frustrations of performing thankless emotional labor to illuminate how the expectation to do this work in all arenas—private and public—fuels gender inequality, limits our opportunities, steals our time, and adversely affects the quality of our lives.More than just name the problem, though, Hartley teases apart the cultural messaging that has led us here and asks how we can shift the load. Rejecting easy solutions that don’t ultimately move the needle, Hartley offers a nuanced, insightful guide to striking real balance, for true partnership in every aspect of our lives. Reframing emotional labor not as a problem to be overcome, but as a genderless virtue men and women can all learn to channel in our quest to make a better, more egalitarian world, Fed Up is surprising, intelligent, and empathetic essential reading for every woman who has had enough with feeling fed up.
Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern
Joshua Zeitz - 2006
More important, she earned her own keep, controlled her own destiny, and secured liberties that modern women take for granted. Her newfound freedom heralded a radical change in American culture.Whisking us from the Alabama country club where Zelda Sayre first caught the eye of F. Scott Fitzgerald to Muncie, Indiana, where would-be flappers begged their mothers for silk stockings, to the Manhattan speakeasies where patrons partied till daybreak, historian Joshua Zeitz brings the era to exhilarating life. This is the story of America’s first sexual revolution, its first merchants of cool, its first celebrities, and its most sparkling advertisement for the right to pursue happiness.The men and women who made the flapper were a diverse lot. There was Coco Chanel, the French orphan who redefined the feminine form and silhouette, helping to free women from the torturous corsets and crinolines that had served as tools of social control. Three thousand miles away, Lois Long, the daughter of a Connecticut clergyman, christened herself “Lipstick” and gave New Yorker readers a thrilling entrée into Manhattan’s extravagant Jazz Age nightlife.In California, where orange groves gave way to studio lots and fairytale mansions, three of America’s first celebrities—Clara Bow, Colleen Moore, and Louise Brooks, Hollywood’s great flapper triumvirate—fired the imaginations of millions of filmgoers.Dallas-born fashion artist Gordon Conway and Utah-born cartoonist John Held crafted magazine covers that captured the electricity of the social revolution sweeping the United States.Bruce Barton and Edward Bernays, pioneers of advertising and public relations, taught big business how to harness the dreams and anxieties of a newly industrial America—and a nation of consumers was born.Towering above all were Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, whose swift ascent and spectacular fall embodied the glamour and excess of the era that would come to an abrupt end on Black Tuesday, when the stock market collapsed and rendered the age of abundance and frivolity instantly obsolete.With its heady cocktail of storytelling and big ideas, Flapper is a dazzling look at the women who launched the first truly modern decade.
The Black Male Handbook: A Blueprint for Life
Kevin Powell - 2008
William Jelani Cobb, Ryan Mack, Kendrick B. Nathaniel, and Dr. Andre L. Brown deliver an essential collection of essays for Black men at all stages of their lives on surviving and thriving in an unjust world.The Black Male Handbook answers a collective hunger for new direction, fresh solutions to old problems, and a different kind of conversation—man-to-man and with Black male voices, all from the hip hop generation. The book tackles issues related to political, practical, cultural, and spiritual matters, and ending violence against women and girls. The book also features an appendix filled with useful readings, advice, and resources. The Black Male Handbook is a blueprint for those aspiring to thrive against the odds in America today. This is a must-have book, not only for Black male readers, but the women who befriend, parent, partner, and love them.
Quicklet Outliers Malcolm Gladwell
The Quicklet Team - 2011
Attributing achievements to a combination of long hours of practice, strong community support, and just being born at the right time, Gladwell analyzes the small factors which lead to success. If you want to learn everything you want to know about Outliers without reading more than 300 pages, our Quicklet book and eBook is for you - fast, fun, and the best material up front!CHAPTER OUTLINEQuicklet On OutliersIntroductionList Of Important PeopleKey Terms & DefinitionsIntroduction Summary: The Roseto Mystery...and much more
Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire
Eric Berkowitz - 2012
However, that's not to say that the Sumerians, Victorians, and every civilization in between and beyond have not tried, wielding their most formidable weapon: the law. At any given point in time, some forms of sex were condoned while others were punished mercilessly. Jump forward or backward a century or two (and often far less than that), and the harmless fun of one time period becomes the gravest crime in another. Sex and Punishment tells the story of the struggle throughout the millennia to regulate the most powerful engine of human behavior.Writer and lawyer Eric Berkowitz uses flesh-and-blood cases—much flesh and even more blood—to evoke the entire sweep of Western sex law, from the savage impalement of an Ancient Mesopotamian adulteress to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde in 1895 for "gross indecency." The cast of Sex and Punishment is as varied as the forms taken by human desire itself: royal mistresses, gay charioteers, medieval transvestites, lonely goat-lovers, prostitutes of all stripes, London rent boys. Each of them had forbidden sex, and each was judged—and justice, as Berkowitz shows, rarely had much to do with it. With the light touch of a natural storyteller, Berkowitz spins these tales and more, going behind closed doors to reveal the essential history of human desire.
The New Girl: A Trans Girl Tells It Like It Is
Rhyannon Styles - 2017
Love this book' Grace Dent The remarkable transgender memoir you won't stop hearing about. Rhyannon Styles will do for transgender what Matt Haig did for mental health. Elle columnist Rhyannon Styles tells her unforgettable life story in THE NEW GIRL, reflecting on her past and charting her incredible journey from male to female. A raw, frank and utterly moving celebration of life.Imagine feeling lost in your own body. Imagine spending years living a lie, denying what makes you 'you'. This was Ryan's reality. He had to choose: die as a man or live as a woman.In 2012, Ryan chose Rhyannon. At the age of thirty she began her transition, taking the first steps on the long road to her true self.Rhyannon holds nothing back in THE NEW GIRL, a heartbreakingly honest telling of her life. Through her catastrophic lows and incredible highs, she paints a glorious technicolour picture of what it's like to be transgender. From cabaret drag acts, brushes with celebrity and Parisian clown school, to struggles with addiction and crippling depression, Rhyannon's story is like nothing you've read before.Narrated with searing honesty, humour and poignancy, THE NEW GIRL is a powerful book about being true to ourselves, for anyone who's ever felt a little lost.
Feminine Gospels: Poems
Carol Ann Duffy - 2002
Sometimes erotic and personal, sometimes historical and grand, sometimes witty and full of surprises, the poems here are all beautifully crafted works that are as varied in style as the poems in Duffy's earlier acclaimed volume The World's Wife. Together, they will challenge and entertain as they explore the fullness of the female condition through their author's unique poetic voice.
The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century
Amia Srinivasan - 2021
Yet consent is a blunt tool. To grasp sex in all its complexity—its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race and power—we need to move beyond yes and no, wanted and unwanted.We do not know the future of sex—but perhaps we could imagine it. Amia Srinivasan’s stunning debut helps us do just that. She traces the meaning of sex in our world, animated by the hope of a different world. She reaches back into an older feminist tradition that was unafraid to think of sex as a political phenomenon. She discusses a range of fraught relationships—between discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, students and teachers, pleasure and power, capitalism and liberation.The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century is a provocation and a promise, transforming many of our most urgent political debates and asking what it might mean to be free.
Gender & Grace: Love, Work & Parenting in a Changing World
Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen - 1990
Yet today those questions are harder and harder to answer. Traditions about the "real man" and the "woman's place" have been challenged. Scientists debate what nature actually dictates for male and female. And theologians engage in heated controversy over what the Bible really says about female submission and male headship.