A review by _gabrielle
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson

adventurous mysterious medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No

3.0

  • The violence men act against women doesn’t come from nowhere. It isn’t the result of insane psychopaths who are nazis and rape their children and have sex dungeons that they kidnap and kill women in. It’s the result of a culture that tells ALL men women are the “safety valves for everything that goes wrong in their lives”. Women’s bodies and experiences are sexualized to the point of normalization. To the point that it looks like nature and not culture are the root of our sexuality. 

  • Constantly talking about breasts 

  • Salander is written as bisexual only to fetishize her. She “much prefers men” …it’s only to make her cool and interesting and hot to the reader 

  • Every male character is attracted/fantasizes about salander even the “good ones” all of whom are old enough to be her father

  • There is no female character with dialogue (beside briefly Isabella) who is not described sexually and wants to sleep/does sleep with Blomvquist 

  • Salander throwing herself at Blom and him accepting…. The book is about the sexual violence men enact against women. Even the “good guy” looks at this CHILD who is clearly fucked up and thinks yeah i should fuck her. I’m not taking advantage of this broken girl in any way. He even mentions he’s old enough to be her father and salander tells him he’s one of the good ones. THE GOOD ONES DONT FUCK BROKEN 24 YEAR OLDS MORE THAN HALF THEIR AGE. 

  • Author clearly sees himself as Blom

  • You can’t write a book trying to bring to light the sexual violence enacted against women while simultaneously reinforcing the culture that creates and enables this violence. Women do not exist to be the providers of men’s sexual satisfaction. By writing a book that portrays every single female character in a sexual light; By writing salander in a way that is “strangely” irresistible to every man that comes across her; the author calls out the symptom of the problem while writing a book that reproduces the root of the problem. It’s a display of liberal male privilege that he gets to call out the “bad guys” and make himself the “good guy”. But both are participating in the same behaviour only to different extremes. 
Federici quote: We have the responsibility of making the sexual experience pleasurable for the man. This is why women are usually less sexually responsive than men. Sex is work for us, it is a duty. The duty to please is so built into our sexuality that we have learned to get pleasure out of giving pleasure, out of getting men aroused and excited. Since we are expected to provide a release, we inevitably become the object onto which men discharge their repressed violence. We are raped, both in our beds and in the streets, precisely because we have been set up to be the providers of sexual satisfaction, the safety valves for everything that goes wrong in a man’s life, and men have always been allowed to turn their anger against us if we do not measure up to the role, particularly when we refused to perform. 
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