stevia333k's review against another edition

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The magic exercises are assimilationist & harmful, and were obviously written that way in order to get into school libraries.

Also as a cultural sampler we get told that we need to reach out to actual practicioners in order to avoid cultural appropriation or in words I've word from people who seek ancestral history if you get your people mixed up then you severely curse yourself. So while that was maybe the most responsible part of this book, audiobooks don't give citations nor bibliographies. So having the sampler/encyclopedia approach via the audiobook removes me too much. This becomes especially crucial when the author starts talking about Europe because they openly admit that greco-roman sources are unreliable as hell.

That being said, this book actually did a good job at explaining to me the sex culture of ancient Greco-Rome which is important to know because colonizers use greco-roman imagery as a dogwhistle for republics with slavery. So learning about how Greco-Rome contributed to that colonial war rape culture is something I give credit to this book for.

It should also be noted that we could argue that this book talks about in the sociological definition of the term, alternative gender ideology systems than the racial capitalist patriarchal ones in say USA. So technically even if the patriarchy is not powerful in the societies mentioned, it's still talking about gender norms, some more feminist & some more patriarchal. Point being, while I don't mind that the term queerness is being used from a euro-american colonizer centric perspective, I say this in hopes of getting the anti-sexism & decolonial vocabulary expanded for readers of this review.

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