Reviews with content warning for Sexism - Forrest Gump

Reviews tagging 'Sexism'

Forrest Gump by Winston Groom

2 reviews

nikogatts's review against another edition

dark lighthearted fast-paced

Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

1.0

I read this as a sort of pregame before the start of the next season of the podcast 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back. I've never seen the 1994 movie adaptation of this book, so my impressions are based solely on the text.

This book is less of a series of events and more of a cycle of two recurring instances:

1. Forrest Gump doesn't understand a situation and acts instinctively, doing the wrong thing in a way that results in immense personal success and makes him a national/international hero. Despite the many times this happens, no one ever recognizes Forrest as a war hero/famous astronaut/pro wrestler/guy who publicly mooned the president.
2. Forrest Gump doesn't understand a situation and acts instinctively, doing the wrong thing in a way that hurts the people around him and results in his girlfriend, Jenny Curran, dumping him. Despite the many times this happens, Forrest never learns from his missteps, and Winston Groom tosses out the phrase "I guess I'm just an idiot" as a shortcut to avoid writing character development.

There are attempts at "deep" moments sprinkled in here and there, particularly during the chapters dealing with Forrest's deployment in Vietnam, but the emotional impact is minimal because these moments last for, at most, a page and a half before the story moves along to Forrest's next implausible adventure. Ditto any attempts at satire -- there are a couple of political jabs at the popular targets of the time (Nixon, war protestors, Hollywood stars, etc.), but they're quickly shuffled offstage so Forrest can get back to publicly stating that he needs to pee.

To say the book has not aged well is to put it lightly. Every female character is written as either a weeping mess or a nagging shrew. Forrest's adventures take him across the United States and to several different countries, so readers are treated to a wide spectrum of racist slurs and stereotypes. And in addition to treating Forrest's disability as a get-out-of-jail-free card for personal conflict, Groom also uses it as a superpower, a punchline, and an excuse for sexual assault.

I'm not expecting any better from the sequel, Gump & Co., but at least I'll be reading that with a podcast, so I won't be cringing alone.

Content Warnings

sillyduckie's review against another edition

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challenging dark fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

0.5

I’ve been meaning to read Forrest Gump for years, ever since I heard that the movie was an adaptation and the book had lots more adventures. It took me only a few pages to regret choosing to read it. It’s a mess. The fact that it was published in 1984 in the USA and 1994 in the U.K. says a lot about the publishing industry.

I’m gonna bulletpoint my thoughts below.

Content note: sexual assault, racism, war, sexism, cursing.

Every single time Gump runs into a non-white person he calls them a slur. And most of the time he recalls them in memory he still calls them a slur.
There is a lot of sexual assault in this book. Whilst you can debate whether Gump consents to his sex with Jenny, his first experience of sex definitely wasn’t consensual.
Several women have their clothes accidentally torn off to the point of either exposing their breasts or their entire naked body.
Gump regularly gets taken advantage of but claims to be smarter than everyone else and it’s honestly tough to read. He’s clearly an asshole, always talking down to and about people but then you read about him doing manual labour and only being paid a dollar, being drafted into the military and having to fight in the Vietnam War and seeing his peers die in front of him, being sent to an asylum, being called an idiot and other things.
Whoever wrote the script for the movie needs a special prize because they sanitised Gump so well the movie makes him look like Little Orphan Annie instead of the foul mouthed, racist, sexist Gump in the book.
There are so many things that happen in this book that are ridiculous to the point I don’t think anybody would believe me if I told them. Like the fact Gump gets sent into space with an orangutang and a woman (the only qualified astronaut, yet somehow the dumbest on board or so they want you to believe) and after an incident with urine their rocket crash lands in Papua New Guinea where they are found by a tribe of cannibals. For these chapters the intelligence order is clearly: Gump, the orangutang, the cannibals, the woman. The woman is abducted and assaulted although the scene is played as romance, and she moves into the assailant’s hut and ultimately stays with him rather than go back to America. Oh did I mention the chief speaks English and allegedly went to an Ivy League College but says stuff like “jolly good old boy”?
Gump is a millionaire by the end of the book.
His mother doesn’t die but her house does burn down and she ends up in a poor house until she runs off with a Protestant. This is clearly the worst thing she could have done. Later on he leaves her for a sixteen year old and she says that Protestants have no morals. Because I guess a little sectarianism is what this book needed?
Gump gets addicted to weed briefly to the point of being absolutely useless.
Jenny deserves to be written better to be honest. She’s made out to be some sort of loose moral woman when she clearly isn’t.
There’s a lot I could say about the police in this book. But not right now. I’m still processing the whole thing.

Don’t read this book.

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