Trainwreck

Tiger Beatdown wrote a book! It was kinda depressing and enraging at parts and then it was kinda uplifting if not necessarily reassuring at the end and I glad I got to read one of the excellent early bloggers of my youth in a good book. The historical bits were very good as well, I knew a tiny bit about what had happened to Wollstonecraft prior to this but not the whole of it.

Examines our culture's need to keep women in “their place”. A tightly constrained little box where we can police their voices, sexuality, clothing choices, and general behaviour. Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Bronte, Sylvia Plath, Whitney Houston, Britney Spears are all examined and understood in their time to be difficult, unhinged, irrational, too emotional or just downright crazy.

“By zeroing in on the messiest and most badly behaved women, and rejecting them, we make a statement about what makes a woman good. The trainwreck is the girl who breaks the rules of the game and gets punished, which means that she's actually the best indication of which game we're playing and what the rules are.”

Why is Jennifer Aniston understood as a sad, childless, lovelorn woman? Why do we love to hate on the Kardashians. Why is Janet Jackson reviled for her NippleGate halftime antics but Justin Timberlake is hardly mentioned? What is the standard we hold Hillary Clinton to that Donald Trump manages to avoid. Where does Christine Blasey Ford stand in relation to Brett Kavanaugh?

It's a readjusting of focus, an altered view of our voyeurism fuelled by TMZ and the message it sends into the world. How we, whether we realize it or not, police women everyday. We snigger at Taylor Swift for singing about her breakups while conveniently forgetting that Steven Tyler of Aerosmith adopted an underage girl and impregnated her or applauding the bad behaviour of male rock stars in movies like The Dirt.

It's no screed but a smart, engaging book that reads like your smartest friend dropping some serious knowledge on your ass over beers.