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A review by veelaughtland
Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution by Laurie Penny
2.0
I don't disagree with a lot of what Laurie Penny says in this book, I really don't. But this made it so much more frustrating of a read for me, because I just couldn't deal with the wide sweeping generalizations she makes. Granted, this book was published in 2014, so it's definitely not anything fantastically fresh and new to me on the subject of feminism, but I expected her to go into a little more detail and not just focus on the one box for men and one box for women approach. Which, if you think about it, is frustrating because that specification of gender roles is exactly what Penny rails against (and rightly so).
I also found this really lacking in the diversity department - not as a check box incident, but if you're going to talk about intersectional feminism, you really need to do more than just drop a comment here and there about minorities, whether it's race or sexual orientation. Maybe it's just Penny's writing style not working for me though - her many good points just felt overshadowed with hyperbole and an annoying overuse of the word 'fucking' to describe any and all sexual activity. It read more like a casual blog post at times than a piece of feminist discourse.
Having said all that, one chapter that did still work for me even in 2020 was the Cybersexism chapter (one I think quite a few other people reviewing this book have highlighted). Despite knowing a lot about internet sexism and how it is to be a woman on the internet, she definitely brought some still fresh takes on the idea of the internet as a predominantly male arena, and I hadn't really thought about that in much depth before. Her discussion of the subject was well reasoned and made me feel even more frustrated than I already am about how women are treated when expressing opinions online. So kudos to her for that one.
But other than that chapter, I think you can probably skip this book (unless of course you love Penny's writing and haven't got around to it yet). I think it's definitely a bit dated, and doesn't really bring much new to the table reading it these days.
I also found this really lacking in the diversity department - not as a check box incident, but if you're going to talk about intersectional feminism, you really need to do more than just drop a comment here and there about minorities, whether it's race or sexual orientation. Maybe it's just Penny's writing style not working for me though - her many good points just felt overshadowed with hyperbole and an annoying overuse of the word 'fucking' to describe any and all sexual activity. It read more like a casual blog post at times than a piece of feminist discourse.
Having said all that, one chapter that did still work for me even in 2020 was the Cybersexism chapter (one I think quite a few other people reviewing this book have highlighted). Despite knowing a lot about internet sexism and how it is to be a woman on the internet, she definitely brought some still fresh takes on the idea of the internet as a predominantly male arena, and I hadn't really thought about that in much depth before. Her discussion of the subject was well reasoned and made me feel even more frustrated than I already am about how women are treated when expressing opinions online. So kudos to her for that one.
But other than that chapter, I think you can probably skip this book (unless of course you love Penny's writing and haven't got around to it yet). I think it's definitely a bit dated, and doesn't really bring much new to the table reading it these days.