I liked this a lot, even if the central message can be boiled down to “power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and that’s as provocative a statement as “water is wet.” A frame tale where academics use historical documents to reconstruct a past much like our present as gender imbalance creates a crisis point and reveal their own biases in the interpretation is gonna get compared to Margaret Atwood for obvious reasons. To say this is not The Handmaid’s Tale is no slight to Alderman; […]
12: The Power
I’ve heard a ton of buzz about this book. One of my dear friends had read and raved about this book, and it made President Obama’s list of best books for 2017, alongside my book of the year, Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing. I had high hopes. The premise intrigued me. What would we do in a world where women had all the power and the tables were turned on the class and power dynamic? The problem starts when you look at a metaphor–power–and turn […]
It’s not about Gender, it’s about Power.
When my Buffy book club picked this book I couldn’t wait to tear in, but I was disappointed to find that feeling wore off pretty quickly. On the surface, the premise sounds perfect for a bunch of Buffy loving feminists – women suddenly develop the ability to create and control electricity. However, the further I got into the book the more obvious it became that the book had little interest in exploring feminism, or the patriarchy, or binary vs non-binary gender experiences at all. It used feminism as […]
Humans Are Monsters
Public figures like Bill Cosby, Bill Clinton, Harvey Weinstein and our (not my) president make the news for being men who use their positions of power and privilege to abuse women; to demean them, to call them sluts and whores, to make them feel weak. The sad state of things though is this isn’t a privilege reserved for men of wealth and power. All men can wield this power, if they choose to (in some circumstances). I think most women can think of a time where […]