February Round-Up

"Lots of women can hang tight with one another and bond if one of them has a problem or it they share a problem. Affirming another woman's success is the difficult issue for many females, even those of us who claim to be feminists. From girlhood on, females learn how to use terroristic tactics of exclusion, ostracism, and shunning to police one another. Studies show that boys may fight with one another in competitive conflicts rooted in envy or jealousy but rarely employ long-range terroristic tactics to "ice" one another. Girls compete often to the death, and by that I mean symbolic murder of one another. All this essentially woman-hating behavior continues into adulthood. It is woman-hating because it is rooted in the same fairy-tale logic that teaches us that only one female can win the day or be chosen. It is as though our knowledge that females lack value in the eyes of patriarchy means we can gain value only by competing with one another for recognition."

-bell hooks, "Sisterhood: Love and Solidarity" in Communion: The Female Search for Love

well it is the last day of February. Here's my report:

I finished King Kong Theory and ended up loving it, which is funny because I started off not loving it. I still think it's theoretically flawed, but as art it's super great. as someone pointed out in my book club, she speaks in archetypes. at first I thought she was over-generalizing and wanted more specificity but then I began to see that she was exposing contradictions and limitations by way of dialectics, using poetry to expose all this crap. the chapters on prostitution and porn are totally right on.

I am still working on A Strange Stirring by Stephanie Coontz, who will be at the Olympia library in April, so I kind of took a step back on that one

I've been re-reading Woman's Inhumanity To Womsn by Phyllis Chesler, which I also disliked at first, but now am super into

And today I just started Communion The Female Search For Love by bell hooks, which I think I've actually read before but I'm not sure

This weekend I started reading a novel by feminist writer Mariyln French called The Love Children which I don't like as much as the last two I read by her, The Women's Room and In the Name of Friendship but I'm sure I will finish it soon and maybe change my mind

And I also have been reading Jealousy: the Other Life of Catherine M. by Catherine Millet...I don't know if I like it well enough to finish it, but it is supposedly a sequel to another book where she talks about her poly-amorous lifestyle and this is the book where she addresses jealousy.

I also read a lot about George Eliot and after watching Daniel Deronda.

Right now bell hooks is leading in the race to the finish line!