{"id":81462,"date":"2024-03-08T23:50:56","date_gmt":"2024-03-08T23:50:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2024\/03\/08\/ontd-original-international-womens-day-book-post-part-ii\/"},"modified":"2024-03-08T23:50:56","modified_gmt":"2024-03-08T23:50:56","slug":"ontd-original-international-womens-day-book-post-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2024\/03\/08\/ontd-original-international-womens-day-book-post-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"ONTD ORIGINAL: International Women’s Day Book Post, Part II"},"content":{"rendered":"


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ONTD ORIGINAL: International Women’s Day Book Post, Part II: General and Feminist Non-Fiction<\/span><\/p>\n

Part I: Biographies & Memoirs<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

I’m back with another batch of 14 fascinating books by and about women that have had a real impact on me for one reason or another.<\/span><\/p>\n


Venus and Aphrodite: A Biography of Desire by Bettany Hughes<\/b>
Aphrodite was said to have been born from the sea, rising out of a froth of white foam. But long before the Ancient Greeks conceived of this voluptuous blonde, she existed as an early spirit of fertility on the shores of Cyprus — and thousands of years before that, as a ferocious warrior-goddess in the Middle East. Proving that this fabled figure is so much more than an avatar of commercialized romance, historian Bettany Hughes reveals the remarkable lifestory of one of antiquity’s most potent myths.<\/p>\n

Venus and Aphrodite brings together ancient art, mythology, and archaeological revelations to tell the story of human desire. From Mesopotamia to modern-day London, from Botticelli to Beyonc\u00e9, Hughes explains why this immortal goddess continues to entrance us today — and how we trivialize her power at our peril.<\/p>\n



No Visible Bruises: What We Don\u2019t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us by Rachel Louise Snyder<\/b>
In No Visible Bruises, journalist Rachel Louise Snyder frames this urgent and immersive account of the scale of domestic violence in our country around key stories that explode the common myths: That if things were bad enough, victims would just leave; that a violent person cannot become nonviolent; that shelter is an adequate response; that violence inside the home is separate from other forms of violence like mass shootings, gang violence, and sexual assault. Through the stories of victims, perpetrators, law enforcement, and reform movements from across the country, Snyder explores not only the dark corners of private violence, but also its far-reaching consequences for society, and what it will take to truly address it.<\/p>\n

OP note: I’ve included two books about domestic violence because I think they both contain some really important stuff for every woman to know. This one is focused on America, the other later on is more Australia-based.<\/i><\/p>\n


Republic of Shame: Stories from Ireland’s Institutions for ‘Fallen Women’ by Caelainn Hogan<\/b>
Until alarmingly recently, the Catholic Church, acting in concert with the Irish state, operated a network of institutions for the concealment, punishment and exploitation of ‘fallen women’. In the Magdalene laundries, girls and women were incarcerated and condemned to servitude. And in the mother-and-baby homes, women who had become pregnant out of wedlock were hidden from view, and in most cases their babies were adopted – sometimes illegally.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mortality rates in these institutions were shockingly high, and the discovery of a mass infant grave at the mother-and-baby home in Tuam made news all over the world. The Irish state has commissioned investigations. But the workings of the institutions and of the culture that underpinned it – a shame-industrial complex – have long been cloaked in secrecy and silence. For countless people, a search for answers continues.<\/p>\n

Caelainn Hogan – a brilliant young journalist, born in an Ireland that was only just starting to free itself from the worst excesses of Catholic morality – has been talking to the survivors of the institutions, to members of the religious orders that ran them, and to priests and bishops. She has visited the sites of the institutions, and studied Church and state documents that have much to reveal about how they operated. Reporting and writing with great curiosity, tenacity and insight, she has produced a startling and often moving account of how an entire society colluded in this repressive system, and of the damage done to survivors and their families. Republic of Shame<\/i> is an astounding portrait of a deeply bizarre culture of control.<\/p>\n


Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy by Hallie Lieberman<\/b>
In Buzz, Hallie Lieberman\u2014who holds the world\u2019s first PhD in the history of sex toys\u2014starts at the beginning, tracing the tale from lubricant in Ancient Greece to the very first condom in 1560 to advertisements touting devices as medical equipment in 19th-century magazines. She looks in particular from the period of major change from the 1950s through the present, when sex toys evolved from symbols of female emancipation to tools in the fight against HIV\/AIDS to consumerist marital aids to today’s mainstays of pop culture. The story is populated with a cast of vivid and fascinating characters including Dell Williams, founder of the first feminist sex toy store, Eve\u2019s Garden; Betty Dodson, who pioneered \u201cBodysex\u201d workshops in the 1960s to help women discover vibrators and ran Good Vibrations, a sex toy store and vibrator museum; and Gosnell Duncan, a paraplegic engineer who invented the silicone dildo and lobbied Dodson and Williams to sell them in their stores. And these personal dramas are all set against a backdrop of changing American attitudes toward sexuality, feminism, LGBTQ issues, and more.<\/p>\n

Both educational and titillating, Buzz will make readers think quite differently about those secret items hiding in bedside drawers across the nation.<\/p>\n

OP note: despite the description here, this is very much an American history.<\/i><\/p>\n


Bitch: On the Female of the Species by Lucy Cooke<\/b>
Studying zoology made\u00a0Lucy Cooke\u00a0feel like a sad freak. Not because\u00a0she\u00a0loved spiders or would root around in animal\u00a0feces:\u00a0all\u00a0her\u00a0friends\u00a0shared the same curious kinks.\u00a0The problem\u00a0was\u00a0her\u00a0sex. Being female meant\u00a0she\u00a0was, by nature,\u00a0a loser.<\/span><\/p>\n

Since Charles Darwin,\u00a0evolutionary biologists\u00a0have been convinced\u00a0that\u00a0the\u00a0males\u00a0of the animal\u00a0kingdom\u00a0are\u00a0the interesting ones -dominating\u00a0and\u00a0promiscuous,\u00a0while\u00a0females\u00a0are\u00a0dull,\u00a0passive,\u00a0and devoted.<\/p>\n

In Bitch<\/i>,\u00a0Cooke\u00a0tells a new story.\u00a0Whether investigating\u00a0same-sex\u00a0female\u00a0albatross\u00a0couples\u00a0that raise chicks, murderous mother meerkats, or the titanic battle of the sexes waged by ducks,\u00a0Cooke\u00a0shows us a new evolutionary biology, one where females can be as dynamic as any male.\u00a0This\u00a0isn\u2018t\u00a0your\u00a0grandfather\u2019s evolutionary biology.\u00a0It\u2019s more inclusive, truer to life, and, simply, more fun.<\/p>\n


Don’t Call It a Cult: The Shocking Story of Keith Raniere and the Women of NXIVM by Sarah Berman<\/b>
They draw you in with the promise of empowerment, self-discovery, women helping women. The more secretive those connections are, the more exclusive you feel. Little did you know, you just joined a cult.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sex trafficking. Self-help coaching. Forced labour. Mentorship. Multi-level marketing. Gaslighting. Investigative journalist Sarah Berman explores the shocking practices of NXIVM, a global organization run by Keith Raniere and his high-profile enablers (Seagram heir Clare Bronfman; Smallville actor Allison Mack; Battlestar Galactica actor Nicki Clyne). Through the accounts of central NXIVM figures, Berman unravels how young women seeking creative coaching and networking opportunities found themselves blackmailed, literally branded, near-starved, and enslaved. With the help of the Bronfman fortune Raniere built a wall of silence around these abuses, leveraging the legal system to go after enemies and whistleblowers.<\/p>\n

Don’t Call It a Cult shows that these abuses looked very different from the inside, where young women initially received mentorship and protection. Don’t Call It a Cult is a riveting account of NXIVM’s rise to power, its ability to evade prosecution for decades, and the investigation that finally revealed its dark secrets to the world. It explores why so many were drawn to its message of empowerment yet could not recognize its manipulative and harmful leader for what he was\u2014a criminal.<\/p>\n


The Abortion Caravan: When Women Took to the Streets, Shut Down Government, and Battled for the Right to Choose by Karin Wells<\/b>
In January of 1970 a ‘Dear sisters’ letter goes to women’s liberation groups across the country enlisting support in the fight for greater access to abortion. In the spring of 1970, seventeen (mostly) young women set out from Vancouver in a big yellow convertible, a Volkswagen bus, and a pickup truck. It was called the Abortion Caravan. Five thousand kilometres later, they led a rally of 500 women on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, “occupied” the Prime Minister’s front lawn, chained themselves to their chairs in the visitors’ galleries and shut down parliament–the first and only time this was accomplished. The seventeen were a motley crew. They argued, they were loud, and they took no prisoners. In an era when there was no social media and no one could afford long-distance phone calls, they pulled off a national campaign. It changed their lives. And at a time when thousands of women in Canada were dying from back-street abortions, it pulled women together across the country.<\/p>\n


Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers by Barbara Ehrenreich & Deirdre English<\/b>
Women have always been healers, and medicine has always been an arena of struggle between female practitioners and male professionals. This pamphlet explores two important phases in the male takeover of health care: the suppression of witches in medieval Europe and the rise of the male medical profession in the United States. The authors conclude that despite efforts to exclude them, the resurgence of women as healers should be a long-range goal of the women\u2019s movement.<\/p>\n

OP note: this one is really short but so worth it. Everything Barbara Ehrenreich is worth it.<\/i><\/p>\n


Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity by Sarah B. Pomeroy<\/b>
\u201cAn essential text in the process of retrieving women’s part in history, it is also an absorbing story, fascinating and dramatic to read.\u201d
\u2014Marilyn French<\/p>\n

\u201cWith this book Sarah Pomeroy created a new area of modern classical studies. . . . The book has itself become a classic.\u201d
\u2014H. A. Shapiro, University of Canterbury<\/p>\n

\u201cPomeroy\u2019s pioneering study on the status and activities of women in antiquity was, and has remained, a milestone in classical historiography. . . . That no one today would dream of writing a major work on ancient social history with no index entry for \u2018women\u2019 is due in no small part to her revolutionary, yet scrupulously scholarly, trail-blazing work.\u201d
\u2014Peter Green, Univerity of Texas at Austin<\/p>\n

\u201cExtraordinary and durable. . . . Opens up a traditional discpline to a whole new range of questions and issues while providing enlightenment about the past for feminists and nonfeminists alike.\u201d
\u2014Natalie Kampen, Barnard College<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first general treatment of women in the ancient world to reflect the critical insights of modern feminism. Though much debated, its position as the basic textbook on women’s history in Greece and Rome has hardly been challenged.\u201d
\u2014Mary Beard, The Times Literary Supplement (London)<\/p>\n


The Women of the Far Right: Social Media Influencers and Online Radicalization by Eviane Leidig<\/b>
On mainstream social media platforms, far-right women make extremism relatable. They share Instagram stories about organic foods that help pregnant women propagate the \u201cpure\u201d white race and post behind-the-scenes selfies at antivaccination rallies. These social media personalities model a feminine lifestyle, at once promoting their personal brands and radicalizing their followers. Amid discussions of issues like dating, marriage, and family life, they call on women to become housewives to counteract the corrosive effects of feminism and champion the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which motivated massacres in Christchurch, El Paso, and Buffalo.<\/p>\n

Eviane Leidig offers an in-depth look into the world of far-right women influencers, exploring the digital lives they cultivate as they seek new recruits for white nationalism. Going beyond stereotypes of the typical male white supremacist, she uncovers how young, attractive women are playing key roles as propagandists, organizers, fundraisers, and entrepreneurs. Leidig argues that far-right women are marketing themselves as authentic and accessible in order to reach new followers and spread a hateful ideology. This insidious\u2014and highly gendered\u2014strategy takes advantage of the structure of social media platforms, where far-right women influencers\u2019 content is shared with and promoted to mainstream audiences. Providing much-needed expertise on gender and the far right, this timely and accessible book also details online and offline approaches to countering extremism.<\/p>\n

OP note: this one was published within the last 6 months and will definitely help you understand the current ‘tradwife’ trend that is constantly going viral as what it really is.<\/i><\/p>\n


Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein<\/b>
Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience\u2015she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?<\/p>\n

Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us\u2015and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror.<\/p>\n

OP note: this one is super recent and getting a lot of praise, and it’s deserved. Probably the best look at how the internet has merged into culture that I think I’ve ever read.<\/i><\/p>\n


Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and Toxic Masculinity by Clementine Ford<\/b>
Fearless feminist heroine Clementine Ford is a beacon of hope and inspiration to hundreds of thousands of Australian women and girls. Her incendiary first book, Fight Like A Girl , is taking the world by storm, galvanising women to demand and fight for real equality and not merely the illusion of it.<\/p>\n

Now Boys Will Be Boys examines what needs to change for that equality to become a reality. It answers the question most asked of ‘How do I raise my son to respect women and give them equal space in the world? How do I make sure he’s a supporter and not a perpetrator?’<\/p>\n

All boys start out innocent and tender, but by the time they are adolescents many of them will subscribe to a view of masculinity that is openly contemptuous of women and girls. Our world conditions boys into entitlement, privilege and power at the expense not just of girls’ humanity but also of their own.<\/p>\n

Ford demolishes the age-old assumption that superiority and aggression are natural realms for boys, and demonstrates how toxic masculinity creates a disturbingly limited and potentially dangerous idea of what it is to be a man. Crucially, Boys Will Be Boys reveals how the patriarchy we live in is as harmful to boys and men as it is to women and girls, and asks what we have to do to reverse that damage. The world needs to change and this book shows the way.<\/p>\n

OP note: this is the book for all the ONTD moms with boys<\/i><\/p>\n


See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence by Jess Hill
Domestic abuse is a national emergency: one in four Australian women has experienced violence from a man she was intimate with. But too often we ask the wrong question: why didn\u2019t she leave? We should be asking: why did he do it?<\/p>\n

Investigative journalist Jess Hill puts perpetrators \u2013 and the systems that enable them \u2013 in the spotlight. See What You Made Me Do is a deep dive into the abuse so many women and children experience \u2013 abuse that is often reinforced by the justice system they trust to protect them. Critically, it shows that we can drastically reduce domestic violence \u2013 not in generations to come, but today.<\/p>\n

Combining forensic research with riveting storytelling, See What You Made Me Do radically rethinks how to confront the national crisis of fear and abuse in our homes.<\/p>\n


How Many More Women?: Exposing how the law silences women by Jennifer Robinson & Keina Yoshida<\/b>
In this powerful and accessible exploration of our legal systems, two human rights lawyers break open the big judgments, developments and trends that have and continued to silence and disadvantage women. This book is about a movement. A movement made up of women and men around the world who are no longer afraid to speak out about violence, abuse, harassment, sexism, abuse of power, and patriarchy. A movement which started with the courage of a number of women in the media and advertising industries and has spread across countries, industries and social class. This movement has uncovered the global scale of gender discrimination, sexual abuse and exploitation which women and girls face. As the years have passed, the movement has grown – with peaks of activity coinciding around the latest revelation of sexual harassment or abuse in the halls of power and in different industries – a domino effect in society. From Hollywood and #MeToo<\/a> in 2017, to Iran and #IranMeToo<\/a> in 2020, to the Women’s March 4 Justice in Australia in 2021, women have spoken out about their experiences, sparking mass protests for change. But, as with all social movements for change, there has been and there continues to be pushback. Those brave enough to speak out have faced legal threats from those they accuse in legal systems that protect the powerful and the patriarchy.<\/p>\n

OP note: Jennifer Robinson was Amber Heard’s lawyer in the UK and there’s an entire chapter devoted to the case.<\/i>
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source: 1<\/a> 2<\/a> 3<\/a> 4<\/a> 5<\/a> 6<\/a> 7<\/a> 8<\/a> 9<\/a> 10<\/a> 11<\/a> 12<\/a> 13<\/a> 14<\/a>
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