Reviews with content warning for Rape - Usynlige kvinner. Hvorfor vi lever i en verden designet for menn

The author is a TERF, this is a TERF book. Not to undermine the honestly good work and important information in this book, but you can't remove it from the author's views. While it starts out seeming reasonable enough-- I think it's understandable even if not great to not separate sex and gender-- the author eventually begins to build her argument into women being an immutable biologically separate organism with most things in life attributed purely to biology. Of course there's no proof of this because of the data gap. The studies will surely show she's right though, as they always say.

The book does start out acknowledging queer and disabled people, and it does talk about other countries with a non dismissive and non bigoted attitude, however the author is very quick to paint groups of people (such as western women, or British women) with a singular brush. Despite admitting that the so called standard male doesn't represent men in general, she's very argumentative in favor of a standard female model. It's hard to untangle her personal views on sex and gender from the rest of the book and the more you begin to think about it, the worse it gets.

I would generally not recommend this book, and while it is a nice organization of some studies I have heard most of them before elsewhere.

Being a book about sexism, you can expect a TW warning for basically literally every topic, albeit only passingly.

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haleybre's review against another edition

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informative slow-paced

4.0

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sydneyhenshaw's review against another edition

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dark informative inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

4.75

I really enjoyed this book and I learned a lot from it. It really helped me realize that some issues that seem frivolous can actually really add up or be more dangerous than they seem. I appreciated it covering the realities for women all over the world and telling a diverse bunch of stories. I wish it would have spent a bit more time touching on intersectionality and how largely that impacts data gaps also.

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cvbazley's review against another edition

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informative slow-paced

3.5

This read like a PhD thesis - regurgitating too much data without making enough insightful connections between that data. The book was far too long for the point she made. I felt like her approach was often just “women are victimized by men” and… that’s not a helpful approach to this topic. The data quickly lost its meaning and became a sea of numbers. I did learn from this book and came away with new perspectives on my own experience - but I was mostly annoyed with the author’s quips and shallow conclusions and therefore struggled to finish this book. Oh, and I am a woman, so don’t hate.

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laurenca's review against another edition

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challenging informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

If there’s two things I love, it’s feminism and data

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isabellaci's review against another edition

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informative medium-paced

3.25

I read this as an audiobook; why were abbreviations, that are harder to say, not just said as their full title.
From what I remember there was 0 mention into how imperialism and colonialism affects women in the Global South, even as there was mention of exploitation of the countries mentioned.
nor was capitalism explicitly mentioned
Say that transwomen exist, I dare you!
Everything being put down to the gender data gap in lieu of misogyny got grating towards the end of the book. I realise that the gender data gap is caused by misogyny.
Not a direct mention on how the military/police affect women, esp those in the Global South; but the comfortability of soldiers or police was discussed.
Did not know when the book was published as the audiobook only said at the end of the reading which made trying to figure out the context of the writing harder.

All in all its not a bad book. The actual data and some specific studies themselves were interesting. However a lot of the takeaways you could get from the book I had already heard prior to listening to this (likely from someone who had also read this book but just before i had).

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floorse's review against another edition

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informative sad medium-paced

5.0

Great book but good god, I'm so angry. I was aware of about 40% of what's in this book and the other 60% just made me see red. Perez is right, we have to do better for the next generation.

I want to bite someone after reading this. 10/10.

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