Review: Backlash

Title: Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

Author: Susan Faludi

Genre: Current Issues/Feminism

Trigger Warnings: Spousal abuse/intimate partner violence, sexism, misogyny, sexual assault (mentions), rape (mentions), gender discrimination

Back Cover:

“Opting-out,” “security moms,” “desperate housewives,” “the new baby fever”—the trend stories of 2006 leave no doubt that American women are still being barraged by the same backlash messages that Susan Faludi brilliantly exposed in her 1991 bestselling book of revelations. Now, the book that reignited the feminist movement is back in a fifteenth anniversary edition, with a new preface by the author that brings backlash consciousness up to date.

When it was first published, Backlash made headlines for puncturing such favorite media myths as the “infertility epidemic” and the “man shortage,” myths that defied statistical realities. These willfully fictitious media campaigns added up to an antifeminist backlash. Whatever progress feminism has recently made, Faludi’s words today seem prophetic. The media still love stories about stay-at-home moms and the “dangers” of women’s career ambitions; the glass ceiling is still low; women are still punished for wanting to succeed; basic reproductive rights are still hanging by a thread. The backlash clearly exists.

With passion and precision, Faludi shows in her new preface how the creators of commercial culture distort feminist concepts to sell products while selling women downstream, how the feminist ethic of economic independence is twisted into the consumer ethic of buying power, and how the feminist quest for self-determination is warped into a self-centered quest for self-improvement. Backlash is a classic of feminism, an alarm bell for women of every generation, reminding us of the dangers that we still face.

Review:

This is a great book to read if you want to be angry. Because wow.

This book is about the phenomenon of backlash against women’s rights. In the 70s, women’s rights made huge progress, and Backlash details how society reacted to that by emotionally, economically, and politically waging war against women to try and put them back in their place.

I don’t actually hate men. Men individually can be very nice. But men as an institution are absolutely horrible. This book is full of examples of men reacting to women becoming more independent with abuse, harassment, discrimination, and injustice. This is a tome of a book (nearly 600 pages) and it’s just full of men’s attempts to tear women down, organized by category. From the personal (rape, domestic abuse, verbal sexism, workplace harassment, etc.) to the institutional (beauty standards, hiring discrimination, discrimination in the courts, the message that women aren’t worth anything unless they’re mothers, and more), there’s a whole massive campaign against women and women (and I’d wager most men) aren’t consciously aware of it.

This is a very thoroughly journalistic work, and if you have doubts, Susan has sources. Chapter one had 7 entire pages of sources. Some of it is data from interviews and time the author spent observing the situations she writes about, and some of it is from research, but it’s very well-sourced and every place she got her information is listed in the back of the book.

Even though it is focused on the 80s (the original book was published in 1991), the 2006 edition that I read had a preface with updates – but even without that, it’s still incredibly relevant. It is super long, and I know a lot of people won’t have the time or the perseverance to get through it (I almost didn’t and I love reading), but it still makes my recommended reading list. Even if you can’t get through the entire thing, just a chapter or two will help you get the picture. And if you think feminism isn’t necessary anymore, this should be required reading. We’ve come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.

Review: Trust Me, I’m Lying

Title: Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator

Author: Ryan Holiday

Genre: Current Issues/Society

Trigger Warnings: Sexual innuendos

Back Cover:

You’ve seen it all before. A malicious online rumor costs a company millions. A political sideshow derails the national news cycle and destroys a candidate. Some product or celebrity zooms from total obscurity to viral sensation. What you don’t know is that someone is responsible for all this. Usually, someone like me.

I’m a media manipulator. In a world where blogs control and distort the news, my job is to control blogs–as much as any one person can. In today’s culture…

1) Blogs like “Gawker,” “Buzzfeed” and the “Huffington Post” drive the media agenda.

2) Bloggers are slaves to money, technology, and deadlines.

3) Manipulators wield these levers to shape everything you read, see and watch–online and off.

Why am I giving away these secrets? Because I’m tired of a world where blogs take indirect bribes, marketers help write the news, reckless journalists spread lies, and no one is accountable for any of it. I’m pulling back the curtain because I don’t want anyone else to get blindsided.

I’m going to explain exactly how the media “really” works. What you choose to do with this information is up to you.

Review:

I’ve finally figured out why I was never very good at my former career in marketing: I was far too ethical.

This book is about Ryan Holiday’s experiences in marketing and PR – mainly how he completely fabricated news and how the structure of internet news helped him do it. He combines an extended discussion of how “blogs” (his overarching name for all online news) work and why they bite so hard on irrelevant or untrue news with examples of campaigns he ran that got non-events or even outright falsehoods picked up as major news by news outlets we generally think of as trustworthy. He goes in depth on how journalism has become about volume and fact-checking is cursory or outright ignored.

It’s really quite horrifying. It’s “don’t trust everything you read on the internet” extended to even organizations you thought you could trust. You thought the New York Times was a trustworthy place to get your online news? Not necessarily, and this book tells you why. It’s enough to make me want to opt out of the internet altogether, even while the marketer left in me was excited by all the strategies that could be used to sell a brand even more. (Because these days, marketing is selling a brand, not a product.)

The only thing that this book is missing is anti-capitalism. Ryan makes it very clear that capitalism – the relentless pursuit of ever-increasing profits – is what brought online news to the point where he can manipulate it and it doesn’t care (or even appreciates it), but he stops short of poining out that capitalism is the problem. He also offers no solutions, and I actually think he’s still doing media manipulation as a career, despite the guilt/change-of-heart/whatever that made him write this book in the first place.

Although now that I think about it, it’s very possible that he wrote this book not because of any guilt or change of heart, but becuase he thought it would sell and he could make some money. He seems like the type.

With everything about “fake news” in politics these days, this book is shockingly relevant. I honestly think it should be part of high school curriculum in whatever class they teach media awareness. (Do they teach that in actual high schools? They should.) It’s very rare that I say “everybody should read this book,” but if you have an internet connection, you should read this book.

Review: No Logo

Title: No Logo

Author: Naomi Klein

Genre: Current Issues/Society

Trigger Warnings: Death (mentions), sweatshop labor conditions, miscarriage (mention)

Back Cover:

As global corporations compete for the hearts and wallets of consumers who not only buy their products but willingly advertise them from head to toe—witness today’s schoolbooks, superstores, sporting arenas, and brand-name synergy—a new generation has begun to battle consumerism with its own best weapons. In this provocative, well-written study, a front-line report on that battle, we learn how the Nike swoosh has changed from an athletic status-symbol to a metaphor for sweatshop labor, how teenaged McDonald’s workers are risking their jobs to join the Teamsters, and how “culture jammers” utilize spray paint, computer-hacking acumen, and anti-propagandist wordplay to undercut the slogans and meanings of billboard ads (as in “Joe Chemo” for “Joe Camel”).

No Logo will challenge and enlighten students of sociology, economics, popular culture, international affairs, and marketing.

Review:

This book is broken into four sections: “No Space,” “No Choice,” “No Jobs,” and “No Logo.” Each section goes over a different aspect of the capitalism/consumerism/everything-is-branded phenomenon that this book is about.

“No Space” talks about brands’ invasion of the public sphere and how the idea of the “commons” has disappeared. We don’t have public squares to hang out in, we have shopping malls. Events are put on by corporate sponsors. Advertising pushes itself on us in public spaces. Brands have gone from selling products to selling a “brand image” and idea about themselves, and it’s hurting us as a society. It’s basically the reasons I left a marketing career, but with citations and examples.

“No Choice” talks about franchising, monopolies, and how Ronald Reagan’s destruction of anti-trust laws eliminated any meaningful personal choice when purchasing anything. This section was three chapters long and the least memorable for me.

“No Jobs” is about the outsourcing of production from the brands themselves to contractors overseas. It touches briefly on how Americans get screwed over when factory jobs leave, but mostly focuses on the atrocious sweatshop conditions of the overseas workers who make branded goods. A horrifying read, but not really new information for me. I have been aware of sweatshops and such for a while, though, so if you don’t know a lot about the inner workings of the garment industry, you might learn more than I did.

“No Logo” is about the “current” work being done to combat all the bad stuff mentioned in the prevous three chapters. I put “current” in quotes because the book came out in 2000 and all the work talked about are movements from the 90s. It was interesting to read about what was happening in the 90s, but considering that none of the horribleness mentioned in the first three sections has really changed, it’s not really relevant.

The book’s biggest drawback is that it’s two decades old. In the first three sections, there are only a few reminders of that – Borders being mentioned frequently despite closing in 2011, for example, or the conspicious lack of anything to do with Amazon – because nothing’s really changed since then. So you get to the last section, which promises to tell you what’s being done and what you can do, only to have it be a discussion of activism in the 90s.

There was one thing that stood out to me in that section: Naomi recounts meeting activists fighting against sweatshop conditions in Southeast Asia wearing Nike, Adidas, and products from other brands that are causing the conditions they’re fighting against. They didn’t even consider “consumer activism” and “voting with their dollar” – what they bought didn’t factor into their fight at all. As long as they were doing actual tangible actions, who cared what they bought or didn’t buy?

I really wish there was an updated version of No Logo. To the best of my knowledge, the most recent edition was published in 2011, although I don’t know if it’s been updated or it was just a 2011 reprint. We need a No Logo for the 2020s – with a section full of activism happening now and what we can do today to take action.

Review: The American Way of Death Revisited

Title: The American Way of Death Revisited

Author: Jessica Mitford

Genre: Current Issues/Society

Trigger Warnings: Discussion of death, funerals, dead bodies, and embalming processes

Back Cover:

Only the scathing wit and searching intelligence of Jessica Mitford could turn an exposé of the American funeral industry into a book that is at once deadly serious and side-splittingly funny. When first published in 1963 this landmark of investigative journalism became a runaway bestseller and resulted in legislation to protect grieving families from the unscrupulous sales practices of those in “the dismal trade.”

Just before her death in 1996, Mitford thoroughly revised and updated her classic study. The American Way of Death Revisited confronts new trends, including the success of the profession’s lobbyists in Washington, inflated cremation costs, the telemarketing of pay-in-advance graves, and the effects of monopolies in a death-care industry now dominated by multinational corporations. With its hard-nosed consumer activism and a satiric vision out of Evelyn Waugh’s novel The Loved One, The American Way of Death Revisited will not fail to inform, delight, and disturb.

Review:

Really my only problem with this book is that it was published in 2000. It’s an updated version of a book that came out in the 60s, but we really need an The American Way of Death Revisited Again to update the information. I realize the author is dead and that’s unlikely to happen, but the age of this book really limits its usefulness.

This book is mainly about how predatory the American funeral industry is and how it preys on grieving people to get as much money out of them as possible. It’s really quite horrifying. But a lot of it relies on exact numbers, which I’m sure are way outdated. If funerals in the 90s are way more expensive than funerals in the 60s, imagine how much more expensive funerals in the 2020s are than funerals in the 90s! I have no reference for the numbers currently, because this book’s data is from the 90s.

There’s also very little consumer protections against the predatoryness of the funeral industry – at least there weren’t in the 90s. Again, I don’t know how the law has changed, or if it’s changed, in the past two decades.

This is a great book. It’s solidly researched and well-written, and it’s a great look at the funeral industry in the 90s. The problem is that was two decades ago. I’m sure prices have gone up and laws have changed. So while it’s a good eye-opener for general industry practices, the numbers and laws are out of date and it’s not great for specific information or making funeral plans.

Review: How to Change Your Mind

Title: How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

Author: Michael Pollan

Genre: Current Issues/Society

Trigger Warnings: Drug use, psychedelic trips, heart problems

Back Cover:

When LSD was first discovered in the 1940s, it seemed to researchers, scientists and doctors as if the world might be on the cusp of psychological revolution. It promised to shed light on the deep mysteries of consciousness, as well as offer relief to addicts and the mentally ill. But in the 1960s, with the vicious backlash against the counter-culture, all further research was banned. In recent years, however, work has quietly begun again on the amazing potential of LSD, psilocybin and DMT. Could these drugs in fact improve the lives of many people? Diving deep into this extraordinary world and putting himself forward as a guinea-pig, Michael Pollan has written a remarkable history of psychedelics and a compelling portrait of the new generation of scientists fascinated by the implications of these drugs. How to Change Your Mind is a report from what could very well be the future of human consciousness.

Review:

I found this while browsing for audiobooks at my local library. I read the title and thought, “Oh cool, a book on how to evaluate evidence and form better opinions!” Then I read the back and went, “Oh, okay. Psychedelics are cool too.”

I don’t know if it’s my rebellious streak or just curiosity, but I’ve recently been wanting to try drugs (the non-addicting ones, at least). Reading this book just made me want to try psychedelics all the more.

First off, there’s a lot of research, science, and history in this book. In fact, there’s a lot of everything in this book – it’s 11 CDs long (an average 350-page book is 6-7 CDs). If you ever wanted to know how LSD was invented, how psychedelics were used in psychiatric research, and the different kinds of psychedelics out there, this is your book. Michael is very, very thorough on reporting the history and science of psychedelics – and there is a remarkable amount of legitimate scientific research.

Surprisingly for a self-professed atheist, though, a fair bit of the book focuses on the spiritual aspect of psychedelics. When used as a treatment for things like depression and addiction, the more mystical of a trip the patient had, the better their recovery. Which I think makes sense – the stronger the sensations, the more likely they are to have a lasting effect. But in places Michael seems almost convinced that there is some sort of something “beyond,” if not a deity than at least universal consciousness or something similar, that psychedelic experiences let you tap into.

Some of that may be a “you had to be there” phenomenon. Michael relates five different trips he went on with four different psychedelic drugs, and does his best to describe the altered consciousness he experienced. (He stresses that we don’t currently have language to fully express the feelings and experiences of such trips.) I, personally, have never tripped on anything more than an accidental overdose of marijuana, which just made everything feel like a dream and did not provide any mystical revelations. So while I’m skeptical that I will end up believing the drugs connected me to anything more than altered consciousness and whatever’s happening inside my own mind, I’ll reserve judgement.

Though it was long, this book was above all else interesting. From discovery to de-legalization to the current research going on, to Michael Pollan’s own trips and experiences with underground “psychedelic guides” who set up and guide a psychedelic session, it was all a fascinating intro to a world that I knew nothing about. And I would someday love to try having my own psychedelic “mystical experience.”

Review: Bright-Sided

Image from Barbara Ehrenreich

Title: Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America

Author: Barbara Ehrenreich

Genre: Current Issues/Society

Trigger Warnings: Extended discussion of breast cancer

Back Cover:

Americans are a “positive” people—cheerful, optimistic, and upbeat: this is our reputation as well as our self-image. But more than a temperament, being positive, we are told, is the key to success and prosperity.

In this utterly original take on the American frame of mind, Barbara Ehrenreich traces the strange career of our sunny outlook from its origins as a marginal nineteenth-century healing technique to its enshrinement as a dominant, almost mandatory, cultural attitude. Evangelical mega-churches preach the good news that you only have to want something to get it because God wants to “prosper” you. The medical profession prescribes positive thinking for its presumed health benefits. Academia has made room for new departments of “positive psychology” and the “science of happiness.” Nowhere, though, has bright-siding taken firmer root than within the business community, where, as Ehrenreich shows, the refusal even to consider negative outcomes—like mortgage defaults—contributed directly to the 2008 economic crisis.

With the myth-busting powers for which she is acclaimed, Ehrenreich exposes the downside of America’s penchant for positive thinking: On a personal level, it leads to self-blame and a morbid preoccupation with stamping out “negative” thoughts. On a national level, it’s brought us an era of irrational optimism resulting in disaster. This is Ehrenreich at her provocative best—poking holes in conventional wisdom and faux science, and ending with a call for existential clarity and courage.

Review:

I have never been red-pilled so hard in my entire life, so fasten your seatbelts, we’re about to go on a wild ride all about how you should read this book and also FUCK Calvinism.

(To clarify, I’m not talking about red-pilling in an incel sense, just in the sense that this book was the Matrix’s red pill that made me see all the lies in the world around me. Just so we have that straightened out. Fuck incels too.)

So what exactly is positive thinking? It’s not just thinking happy thoughts – it’s a combination of magical thinking and self-policing. Positive thinking pushes the belief that merely thinking a thought influences the world and affect your life (such as the “law of attraction“). It says that you can make good things happen to you by focusing on positive things (and conversely, that if bad things happen to you, it’s your fault because you were thinking about negative things). But in order to stay so positive, you have to relentlessly police your own thoughts to weed out any negativity that might come up – even if that “negativity” is a perfectly normal human response to a difficult situation.

Positive thinking has its roots in Calvinism, that idea that people are predestined to go to heaven or hell. How does that work, you ask? Calvinism has two main ideas about how to live your life – constant introspection to see if you’re a sinful person, and hard work. In the 1800s, the middle class didn’t have much of that hard work to do, so they were left with excessive introspection that tended to make people generally sickly without much of a diagnosis. A doctor person figured out that by encouraging positive thinking (called “new thought” then), he could “cure” this general malaise – his successor turned New Thought into a religion (Christian Science), and it spread from there. So yeah, Calvinism is behind these societal problems.

I had no IDEA how much this relentless positivity had affected America, especially in the business world, until Ehrenreich laid it all out for me. When she put it all out there plainly, it seemed positively ridiculous that you have all these smart, educated white-collar workers believing that the perfect job will come to them if they repeatedly imagine what that perfect job looks like. Or that people pay tens of thousands of dollars to “success coaches” who tell them to say positive things every morning and that will make you successful. It’s magical thinking, pure and simple.

Once upon a time, I was a witch. I believed that combining different herbs and rocks would make things happen, and that thinking certain patterns of words would change things. I gave up witchcraft when I realized it was all magical thinking and nothing I was doing had a success rate any better than chance. And people who subscribe to positive thinking are basically doing the same thing I was with my “witchcraft” – they’re just calling it “personal development” instead of literal magic.

One of the biggest ways I think positive thinking has undermined America, though, is in protests. Politically, I’m a leftist, and in a lot of leftist circles on the internet, people express a lot of surprise that workers aren’t getting up in arms about how company owners are screwing them over with layoffs, pay cuts, etc. After reading this book, I realized why – positive thinking has taught us to blame ourselves. If we got laid off or we didn’t get a raise, it’s because we weren’t thinking positively; the problem is with us, not the people who are doing it to us. We’ve been conditioned to roll over and blame ourselves for the greed of the 1%.

Now, before you think this is hit-it-out-of-the-park best book ever, though, there was one issue – the examples were unfocused. Ehrenreich would focus on telling a story, whether that’s about her breast cancer experience or the experience of the person who started the “new thought” that became positive thinking, and her point would get sidetracked in favor of details for the example. Don’t get me wrong, they were interesting examples, it just takes some brain work to hold onto the point through it.

That’s really a minor issue, though. Read the book. You will see so many things in a new light, and once you see how pervasive positive thinking is, you won’t be able to un-see it. You’ll notice it everywhere. And hopefully it will help you focus on what’s real instead of what’s positive.

Review: Deluxe

Image from Penguin Random House

Title: Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster

Author: Dana Thomas

Genre: Current Issues/Society

Trigger Warnings: None

Back Cover:

There was a time when luxury was available only to the rarefied and aristocratic world of old money and royalty. Luxury wasn’t simply a product, it was a lifestyle, one that denoted a history of tradition, superior quality and offered a pampered buying experience.

Today’s luxury marketplace would be virtually unrecognizable to its founders. Gone are the family-owned businesses dedicated to integrity and quality; the industry is now run by multi-billion dollar global corporations focused on growth, visibility, brand-awareness, advertising and above all, profits. Handcrafted goods are practically extinct, and almost all manufacturing has been outsourced to large factories in such places as China, where your expensive brand-name handbag is being assembled right next to one from a mass-market label that will cost substantially less.

Dana Thomas, a journalist who has covered style and the luxury business for The Washington Post, Newsweek and The New York Times Magazine from Paris for the past fifteen years, digs deep into the dark side of the luxury industry to uncover all the secrets that Prada, Gucci and Burberry don’t want us to know.

Traveling from the laboratories in Grasse, where the ingredients for Christian Dior and Prada perfumes are produced, to the crowded factories in China, where workers glue together “Made in Italy” bags by the thousands, Thomas explores the whole of today’s high-end shopping experience to answer some pressing questions: What is the new definition of luxury when advertising for this lifestyle is targeted mainly toward the mass market? What are we paying for when quality has given way to quantity? Can integrity survive in a corporate culture driven to meet regular growth and profit projections? Is luxury still the best that money can buy?

Review:

This promised to be a book in the vein of Bobos in Paradise – i.e. a fascinating and in-depth look at a social phenomenon. Plus, I see the appeal of luxury items and thought it would be a good read to learn more about the luxury industry. And Deluxe delivered on all fronts.

Let’s talk about what it covers, because there is a lot. The book starts off with a history of the luxury industry – how companies like Louis Vuitton got started and how artisans transitioned from making custom items for the 1% to mass-produced items for the middle class. It spends some time on the global luxury market, especially how Japan is a huge luxury consumer and China and India are on the rise. It goes over how celebrities made designer brands popular for the middle class and how the luxury shopping experience works now for the average person. It talks about how the genuine items are made and how the counterfeit industry works. It touches briefly on luxury designers working for “fast fashion” companies like H&M. And it finishes by exploring how luxury is done for the 1% of today, which is remarkably different from the shopping experience most people encounter.

Going into the book as someone who knew next to nothing about luxury items (I knew some brand names from social media and Google has to help me spell Louboutin), this book was a really comprehensive education – see the last paragraph for all the things you’ll learn. Plus, it’s absolutely fascinating. If you’re interested at all in luxury items, you’ll find this book interesting. And also probably find yourself wanting to purchase some luxury items.

In some ways, this book reads like a long, albeit entertaining, advertisement for luxury goods. The quality, the sophistication, the elegance and refinement all ooze through the pages and surround the luxury products with an aura of being the best. I’m in need of a new purse anyway, and reading this book made me wish I could afford a nice Hermes bag. But then in the second-to-last chapter, the author talks about fast fashion and how you can get items by famous designers for under $100 at places like H&M, which somewhat reduced my desire for designer clothes. (I would still love a Hermes bag, though.)

I found this book thoroughly engrossing, and not only did I learn a lot about the luxury industry (including the terrible conditions that make it unethical to buy affordable fakes), it made me wish I had enough money to experience luxury for myself.

I’ve gone on quite a bit on how much this book made me want to buy luxury items, and that was a big aspect of the book for me. It inspired a desire and a dream to experience the things the book talked about. But besides that, it was informative, entertaining, and absolutely fascinating. I highly recommend it.