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gracejaninah's review against another edition
Transphobic, hate towards younger women
harriet_dolby's review against another edition
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
A book which reflects upon a subsection of feminism I often don’t think about, the treatment and attitudes towards middle aged women. Tackling myths and stereotypes in each chapter, this book made an incredibly readable, yet reflective book.
bgb81's review against another edition
Got to "Terf vibes", decided to look a bit further on - transphobia is present later on. DNFd.
aw_katie's review against another edition
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
5.0
smartacus's review against another edition
1.0
This book is a repetitive, anti-woman screed. Smith alleges her thesis is how hated the middle aged woman is. This interested me because I am a middle aged woman. Okay, I thought. I’ll bite. I wish I hadn’t.
Here’s a list of issues with the book:
1. Dutchman-Smith paints a picture of middle aged women as objects of hatred by men. She tosses the word “patriarchy” around a LOT. Yet instead of dismantling patriarchies with her arguments, Dutchman-Smith spends 300+pages raging on…young women.
Huh?
These young women are, in her mind, ungrateful, privileged simpletons who ALL hate middle aged women. These impertinent youngsters hate middle aged “hags” because they (the young’ us) are unreflective, unappreciative, and not gobsmacked with fangirl awe every time they meet a woman over 40.
Dutchman-Smith castigates the young for being young. She decries that they rob her and her ilk (an age category I belong to) of agency, even as she robs THEIR entire category of agency. Also they are all somehow instagram dingbats who we get to dismiss because they haven’t suffered like we have? This brings me to my next point.
2. Dutchman-Smith says we are supposed to solve the anti-women hatred (specifically that aimed at middle aged women) by bridging the generation gap. This is written with the same straight face as her derisive, constant negative comments about women in their 20s. After Dutchman-Smith’s unrelenting firehose of bile aimed at young women, I’m left wondering why any of them would feel like extending the olive branch of peace and sisterhood to her.
3. She makes disingenuous arguments - that TERFs (which she calls “so called”) are “merely” being feminist and not propagating extremely harmful anti-trans messages. Half the book is an apologia to “poor, misunderstood” JK Rowling. I don’t buy it. Dutchman-Smith, and Rowling, and many other “victims” Smith provides ample page counts to, are not, as Smith posits, harmless. Hogwash. Her (and JKR’s) words are dangerous and cruel.
Dutchman-Smith makes the ideas of women showing inclusivity to trans women (who are women, btw), and violence against women by men, into related concepts. Meaning: If women must allow the inclusion of trans women into their spaces, a logical future step is increased violence against women. In Smith’s telling, there can only be one victim, and it is middle aged women who were born as women. This is a harmful and tragic argument. Firstly because it’s being presented by a woman herself (which feels like a betrayal to all women). Secondly because it does not allow for the many, many types of pain and victimization that can be, have been, and are inflicted on every type of woman. I want to tell Smith: you can hurt, but that does not mean that trans women, or young women, or BIPOC women, hurt less. It’s not pie.
4. Smith makes blanket statements and does not back them up. Like…men prefer young women because they are the acceptable feminists - (which, again, huh? Have no younger women ever been victimized? Golly, I must live in a bubble). The statement very well might be true. But just because Dutchman-Smith says so isn’t enough. Give me numbers. Show me statistics.
Also, many of the examples Dutchman-Smith draws from are from ten, twenty, sometimes forty years ago. The line she draws connecting those cherry picked examples (seemingly designed to elicit outrage) to her thesis is tenuous at best. I’m fairly certain she could come up with more representative examples with a little bit of a google search. But that wouldn’t serve the polemic arc of the book.
5. Dutchman-Smith offers no legitimate counterarguments. Rather, she points out (in Every. Single. Instance.) “I used to think thus (e.g. when she was young and carefree), but now I am wise/victimized/misunderstood, I think THIS.” Okay, I’ll give you that argument once. Maybe twice. But as a foundational underpinning of her supposed legitimacy, that tactic is weak. Give me a solid, honest counterargument.
6. Dutchman-Smith positions privileged white middle aged women as the biggest victims of misogyny. Wait, what??? Smith does make some glancing references to women of color and LBGTQ-identifying women, but those are fleeting and insubstantial. She does not engage meaningfully with the reality of any other subset of women’s suffering. This book is about how Dutchman-Smith considers economically sound white women to the most victimized population among women. I would love to be proven wrong about my interpretation, so If I’ve missed something please let me know. But this book has a real tone deaf “I’ve had it harder than you” vibe that, positioned against countless examples of Black and Brown women’s, and LGBTQIA+ women’s pain and marginalization, is appalling.
7. As for the writing: it’s overly wordy and could stand to use a solid introduction to the concept of the paragraph. It’s also oddly repetitive (I could have made a drinking game about how many times she mentions “pearl clutching”). What’s worse, Dutchman-Smith re-uses large chunks of text and plunks them nearly verbatim into various sections. I kept having a weird sense of Deja vu until I realized I had, in fact, read that section before.
—
Bottom line - it hurts my heart and my sensibilities to read these words and think that this woman claims to speak for people like me. She most certainly does not.
If I had a daughter, instead of grown sons, I would be hard pressed to decide whether to have her read this, or to bin it. I do know that this book would have crushed me if I’d read it as a young twentysomething. I am a feminist and a middle aged person. And I should have room in my heart for multiple perspectives, not just the one that makes me comfortable. Would that Dutchman-Smith, with her authorial reach, could do the same.
Here’s a list of issues with the book:
1. Dutchman-Smith paints a picture of middle aged women as objects of hatred by men. She tosses the word “patriarchy” around a LOT. Yet instead of dismantling patriarchies with her arguments, Dutchman-Smith spends 300+pages raging on…young women.
Huh?
These young women are, in her mind, ungrateful, privileged simpletons who ALL hate middle aged women. These impertinent youngsters hate middle aged “hags” because they (the young’ us) are unreflective, unappreciative, and not gobsmacked with fangirl awe every time they meet a woman over 40.
Dutchman-Smith castigates the young for being young. She decries that they rob her and her ilk (an age category I belong to) of agency, even as she robs THEIR entire category of agency. Also they are all somehow instagram dingbats who we get to dismiss because they haven’t suffered like we have? This brings me to my next point.
2. Dutchman-Smith says we are supposed to solve the anti-women hatred (specifically that aimed at middle aged women) by bridging the generation gap. This is written with the same straight face as her derisive, constant negative comments about women in their 20s. After Dutchman-Smith’s unrelenting firehose of bile aimed at young women, I’m left wondering why any of them would feel like extending the olive branch of peace and sisterhood to her.
3. She makes disingenuous arguments - that TERFs (which she calls “so called”) are “merely” being feminist and not propagating extremely harmful anti-trans messages. Half the book is an apologia to “poor, misunderstood” JK Rowling. I don’t buy it. Dutchman-Smith, and Rowling, and many other “victims” Smith provides ample page counts to, are not, as Smith posits, harmless. Hogwash. Her (and JKR’s) words are dangerous and cruel.
Dutchman-Smith makes the ideas of women showing inclusivity to trans women (who are women, btw), and violence against women by men, into related concepts. Meaning: If women must allow the inclusion of trans women into their spaces, a logical future step is increased violence against women. In Smith’s telling, there can only be one victim, and it is middle aged women who were born as women. This is a harmful and tragic argument. Firstly because it’s being presented by a woman herself (which feels like a betrayal to all women). Secondly because it does not allow for the many, many types of pain and victimization that can be, have been, and are inflicted on every type of woman. I want to tell Smith: you can hurt, but that does not mean that trans women, or young women, or BIPOC women, hurt less. It’s not pie.
4. Smith makes blanket statements and does not back them up. Like…men prefer young women because they are the acceptable feminists - (which, again, huh? Have no younger women ever been victimized? Golly, I must live in a bubble). The statement very well might be true. But just because Dutchman-Smith says so isn’t enough. Give me numbers. Show me statistics.
Also, many of the examples Dutchman-Smith draws from are from ten, twenty, sometimes forty years ago. The line she draws connecting those cherry picked examples (seemingly designed to elicit outrage) to her thesis is tenuous at best. I’m fairly certain she could come up with more representative examples with a little bit of a google search. But that wouldn’t serve the polemic arc of the book.
5. Dutchman-Smith offers no legitimate counterarguments. Rather, she points out (in Every. Single. Instance.) “I used to think thus (e.g. when she was young and carefree), but now I am wise/victimized/misunderstood, I think THIS.” Okay, I’ll give you that argument once. Maybe twice. But as a foundational underpinning of her supposed legitimacy, that tactic is weak. Give me a solid, honest counterargument.
6. Dutchman-Smith positions privileged white middle aged women as the biggest victims of misogyny. Wait, what??? Smith does make some glancing references to women of color and LBGTQ-identifying women, but those are fleeting and insubstantial. She does not engage meaningfully with the reality of any other subset of women’s suffering. This book is about how Dutchman-Smith considers economically sound white women to the most victimized population among women. I would love to be proven wrong about my interpretation, so If I’ve missed something please let me know. But this book has a real tone deaf “I’ve had it harder than you” vibe that, positioned against countless examples of Black and Brown women’s, and LGBTQIA+ women’s pain and marginalization, is appalling.
7. As for the writing: it’s overly wordy and could stand to use a solid introduction to the concept of the paragraph. It’s also oddly repetitive (I could have made a drinking game about how many times she mentions “pearl clutching”). What’s worse, Dutchman-Smith re-uses large chunks of text and plunks them nearly verbatim into various sections. I kept having a weird sense of Deja vu until I realized I had, in fact, read that section before.
—
Bottom line - it hurts my heart and my sensibilities to read these words and think that this woman claims to speak for people like me. She most certainly does not.
If I had a daughter, instead of grown sons, I would be hard pressed to decide whether to have her read this, or to bin it. I do know that this book would have crushed me if I’d read it as a young twentysomething. I am a feminist and a middle aged person. And I should have room in my heart for multiple perspectives, not just the one that makes me comfortable. Would that Dutchman-Smith, with her authorial reach, could do the same.
joan_anne's review against another edition
3.0
I listened to the audio version and I think this might be more worth it in print. I’m not sure how I feel about it. I liked it enough for a regular mid rating but halfway through it started getting too complex and unclear. Overall I think it lost its way but also it’s a valuable concept. And real.