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Review: Rebecca Traister’s “All the Single Ladies†is a validation of feminine history, thought and experience. A family member claims to know the percentage of women had erotic dreams about Bill Clinton while he was in office. A Georgia boy chews tobacco on the plane and argues harshly with the flight attendant about putting his seat tray up during takeoff.
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“Bitch,†I hear him mutter. Later, at baggage claim, he kisses his girlfriend. A writer at a party tells us there isn’t enough “pussy†in his novel told from the perspective of a young woman. “I hope you’re not offended,†he says only to me and not to my long-time partner and recent husband, who is equally insulted though maybe the comment doesn’t rub quite as deeply against a boiling forest of scar tissue. Sometimes I cry when I feel men say these things. Sometimes I pity them in their blatant inability to see all the bodies around them. Sometimes I snap back at them, “Every person should be offended by a comment like that.†Sometimes I think of the book I’m reading. The book I’m reading, Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies , coincidentally sits on the table at the party with a bouquet of yellow Post-it notes spilling over its edges. What does it mean when a book can recognize you as a living being, can recognize women as living beings with an intensely complex, often misunderstood history, but a person cannot? Is it shocking? No, says a chorus of bodies that surround me, bodies that are women and bodies that are not women. Rebecca Traister. Image courtesy the author. Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies thoughtfully traces and parses out the multitudinous life of (primarily heterosexual, cis) single women throughout America’s young, troubled past. What brought us to this contemporary point in which many women don’t choose to marry or delay having children or a downright plethora of in-betweens? Have we arrived to a point in which women wield more societal power than ever? What is collective about that power? What isn’t? What about this power precedes us? The history of women is soaked in darkness, in wounds, in confusion, in questions. The idea of women deeply examining and speaking something closer to their true history, or rather, their lived history, their mother’s or grandmother’s lived history, the lived histories they intimately share with friends, is new and perhaps frail, though, in this sense, that word has nothing to do with “weakness.†What I mean is a blossom still smoking in the morning light, the energy of emergence or survival.
All my single ladies
The single ladies
All the single ladies video
Review: Rebecca Traister’s “All the Single Ladies†is a validation of feminine history, thought and experience. A family member claims to know the percentage of women had erotic dreams about Bill Clinton while he was in office. A Georgia boy chews tobacco on the plane and argues harshly with the flight attendant about putting his seat tray up during takeoff.
ENTER TO THE SITE
“Bitch,†I hear him mutter. Later, at baggage claim, he kisses his girlfriend. A writer at a party tells us there isn’t enough “pussy†in his novel told from the perspective of a young woman. “I hope you’re not offended,†he says only to me and not to my long-time partner and recent husband, who is equally insulted though maybe the comment doesn’t rub quite as deeply against a boiling forest of scar tissue. Sometimes I cry when I feel men say these things. Sometimes I pity them in their blatant inability to see all the bodies around them. Sometimes I snap back at them, “Every person should be offended by a comment like that.†Sometimes I think of the book I’m reading. The book I’m reading, Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies , coincidentally sits on the table at the party with a bouquet of yellow Post-it notes spilling over its edges. What does it mean when a book can recognize you as a living being, can recognize women as living beings with an intensely complex, often misunderstood history, but a person cannot? Is it shocking? No, says a chorus of bodies that surround me, bodies that are women and bodies that are not women. Rebecca Traister. Image courtesy the author. Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies thoughtfully traces and parses out the multitudinous life of (primarily heterosexual, cis) single women throughout America’s young, troubled past. What brought us to this contemporary point in which many women don’t choose to marry or delay having children or a downright plethora of in-betweens? Have we arrived to a point in which women wield more societal power than ever? What is collective about that power? What isn’t? What about this power precedes us? The history of women is soaked in darkness, in wounds, in confusion, in questions. The idea of women deeply examining and speaking something closer to their true history, or rather, their lived history, their mother’s or grandmother’s lived history, the lived histories they intimately share with friends, is new and perhaps frail, though, in this sense, that word has nothing to do with “weakness.†What I mean is a blossom still smoking in the morning light, the energy of emergence or survival.
All my single ladies
The single ladies
All the single ladies video