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A review by flufficorn
90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality by Allison Yarrow
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.75
A lot happened in the 90s. Like a lot. I think a lot of folks have forgotten all that happened back then. And so much of it was a fertile (pun intended?) battleground for feminism and the idea of femininity. The book goes into depth about the many, highly publicized, pop culture moments that our political and social system had no issue politicizing and weaponizing against women and girls.
I was fully embarrassed about all of the opinions I was taught to have about femininity and my own gender. This book invited me to question that upbringing. And while I am currently working on deprogramming these things from my brain, it was so interesting to have cultural insight into what seeded those ideas in the people that raised me, in the society I was in as a growing adolescent, and what I carried with me into my young adulthood that only ended up confusing and confounding me. I ended the book feeling like I had run through the gamut of emotions and just been through one hell of a therapy session.
This book really shook me in the best possible way. I was but a child and pre-teen in the 90s. Even if I do remember a lot of the big moments of the 90s, they sort of played in the background because I was so young that I did not understand the implications of them until I was an adult. What I found most interesting about this book is that all these moments that I thought had skated by me; all these social attitudes I thought were beyond my young ken at the time; these were all things that even now as an adult I have internalized. All of them having to do with femininity, sex, and sexuality. And that all means I am going to end up paying for multiple houses for my therapist.
I was fully embarrassed about all of the opinions I was taught to have about femininity and my own gender. This book invited me to question that upbringing. And while I am currently working on deprogramming these things from my brain, it was so interesting to have cultural insight into what seeded those ideas in the people that raised me, in the society I was in as a growing adolescent, and what I carried with me into my young adulthood that only ended up confusing and confounding me. I ended the book feeling like I had run through the gamut of emotions and just been through one hell of a therapy session.
This book really shook me in the best possible way. I was but a child and pre-teen in the 90s. Even if I do remember a lot of the big moments of the 90s, they sort of played in the background because I was so young that I did not understand the implications of them until I was an adult. What I found most interesting about this book is that all these moments that I thought had skated by me; all these social attitudes I thought were beyond my young ken at the time; these were all things that even now as an adult I have internalized. All of them having to do with femininity, sex, and sexuality. And that all means I am going to end up paying for multiple houses for my therapist.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Drug use, Misogyny, Sexism, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Suicide, and Gaslighting