Book Review: The Mockingbirds by Daisy Whitney

I'd heard good things about The Mockingbirds, and decided to check it out when I randomly came across it at the library. I'm very glad I did; it made for excellent reading.

The story opens to find Alex in an unfamiliar bedroom in the dormitories of her boarding school, Themis. As the room spins around her while she's collecting her clothing, her eyes light upon two ripped-open, empty condom wrappers. From that moment on, her world is upended. In the ensuing weeks, she pieces together what happened that night through conversations with friends who witnessed some of it and flashbacks that appear out of nowhere. She comes to realize that she's been raped by a popular water polo player. Rather than go to the school or the police (out of a fear that it would disrupt her life even more), Alex enlists the aid of the Mockingbirds, a secret society that administers justice to wronged students.

Overall, I was very impressed by this book. Date rape is a tough subject for a writer to address in the first place, but especially within the context of a Young Adult novel. Whitney handles the subject very well; Alex's experiences are not only realistic, she's a very sympathetic character. Whitney also does an excellent job addressing false notions about date rape (mainly, that sleeping with unconscious people is okay and/or that silence equals consent) while promoting the idea of affirmative consent. All of the characters are very well-rendered and believable, and the writing is excellent.

I wish this had been around when I was in high school. As it is, I think it should be included in curricula everywhere. 5 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men by Lundy Bancroft

I'll admit it: I feel woefully unprepared for grad school. There are a variety of reasons for this, and I'll go ahead and list a few:

• I didn't major in the social sciences in undergrad. My degree is in literature, and while I have a minor in women's studies that involved taking several sociology courses, the sum total of my knowledge of psychology and human behavior comes from having dated a therapist who specialized in treating personality disorders. Useful, but far from comprehensive. 
• I haven't been in school for four years. I feel out of practice.
• I'm Type A and will feel unprepared pretty much no matter what.

Most of my insecurities are reflected in the first bullet point, though. I'm sort of worried there's going to be a gigantic knowledge gap in between my classmates, who may have actually studied things germane to social work, and myself, who is haphazardly-read in the social sciences at best. I never took classes in psychology or anthropology, and have read very little in those fields. I'm more at home in sociology, particularly the branches that focus on women's rights, racial issues, healthcare, and public policy as it relates to those three things. In short, lots of depth, not a lot of breadth.

I've decided to read some psychology/behavioral science-oriented books during the summer to make myself feel slightly less neurotic about my educational prospects come this fall. Why Does He Do That? is the first book in the docket. From what I've seen in court as part of my volunteering duties, domestic abuse (sadly) plays a big role in family court cases. In the state of North Carolina, exposing one's children to spousal abuse or other forms of domestic violence constitutes neglect, and can result in the children being removed from the parents' custody if they do not take appropriate steps to ameliorate the abusive situation. I therefore thought gaining some insight into domestic violence and those who perpetrate it would be a worthwhile endeavor.

I enjoyed Why Does He Do That? for a variety of reasons. Foremost among them is that Bancroft doesn't fall prey to political correctness* in his descriptions of abuse or his analysis of it. He doesn't shy away from the fact that men comprise the vast majority of abusers, nor does he fall prey to the notion that homosexual relationships are inherently ideal and violence-free in the way that so many progressive activists tend to. More importantly, Bancroft doesn't fall into the trap of allowing abusers to shirk responsibility for their destructive behaviors by blaming their actions on others. He carefully elucidates what many anti-DV advocates have known for a long time: abusive men are assholes, and they behave that way because they benefit from it. They're not crazy and they're not victims themselves: they're master manipulators who will do or say anything to justify the way they treat women. 

Bancroft reiterates time and again that it's the attitudes and belief structures of abusive men that need changing. They don't require therapy (at least, not the conventional type), love, care, or someone to listen; they need to be compelled to un-learn their beliefs about women (and, sometimes children). The root of the problem, Bancroft argues, is entitlement. Abusive men feel entitled to absolute control over the people they consider to be "theirs." Until they stop regarding women/their children as their property, they won't change. Conventional therapy can't fix that kind of entrenched misogyny, in fact, even the special therapy that Bancroft has pioneered doesn't have a high success rate because men are offered so few incentives to make meaningful change. The best thing that women in that kind of a relationship can do, therefore, is to get out as soon as they can safely do it. 

Why Does He Do That? is an invaluable resource for several reasons. Apart from explaining the motivations of abusive men, Bancroft also details different types of abusers and delineates the different methods they use to terrorize their targets. He also does an excellent job revealing the long-term effects of psychological (and physical) abuse on women and children, along with providing resources for women in abusive relationships and those who know a woman who may be in one. I found it both easy to read an highly informative. 5 out of 5 stars, though I still feel pretty unprepared.

*I hate using that term, but it's the only way I can think of describing the gendered white-washing of domestic abuse.

Book Review: Denial: A Memoir of Terror by Jessica Stern

I don't generally read a lot of memoirs. I find them tedious, often unsatisfactorily dishonest, and generally prefer my own navel-gazing to that of others. However, I made an exception for Denial: Memoir of Terror by Jessica Stern, as it seemed like it would be more complex and interesting than the usual topics of living wackily for a year, cooking a whole bunch, adopting a new quirky behavior to compensate for a bad breakup, or, my personal favorite, better living through pseudophilosophical poverty tourism (it seems that the best selling personal journey memoirs involve all of the above). Denial's source material was a little different.

Sterns, a renowned terrorism expert, was contacted by a detective from the police department in her hometown out of the blue one day. He had reopened her and her sister's rape case, and was attempting to connect it to a series of assaults that had taken place in nearby towns over the years. He asked for her help. Sterns agreed, and decided to document the process, believing that it would provide her with clues as to why she was capable of interacting with terrorists who had few, if any, qualms about murdering Americans without being afraid, yet was totally crippled by fear when attempting everyday activities and was unable to have a normal relationship with other people. Over the course of the narrative, Stern's research takes her back to her hometown, to the childhood home of her rapist, and eventually to the seaside town of a fellow victim. All the while, she attempts to unravel long-suppressed, complicated feelings concerning the attack and its aftermath, along with the chaos of a childhood that, quite frankly, would have been traumatic even if she hadn't been raped.

This, of course, leads me to what bothered me about Denial. While I found Stern's exploration of her assault and the life of her rapist illuminating, along with her frank discussion of how it came to negatively (and positively, if in a perverse way) affect her adult life most illumination, I was often frustrated by her unwillingness to honestly investigate the full implications of her relationship with her dysfunctional family. Throughout the narrative, she continually hints at having been molested by her grandfather, but never seems to make the connection between that and her present difficulties. The same, for the most part, applies to her emotionally distant father (who basically foisted her and her sister off on a series of stepmothers following her mother's early death) and her possibly-abusive stepmothers. Her insistence on hashing out one traumatic instance in her life in hopes of improving herself while refusing to engage in a number of others simply didn't make any sense to me. It caused what would have been an otherwise engaging, honest read to bellyflop into the pit of navel-gazey denial.

That's memoirs for you.

Intriguing, but still more navel-gazing and dishonest than I care for. 3 out of 5 stars.

This sums up my entire opinion where Assange is concerned:

Naomi Wolfe's most recent blog post over on goodreads:

In other words: Never in twenty-three years of reporting on and supporting victims of sexual assault around the world have I ever heard of a case of a man sought by two nations, and held in solitary confinement without bail in advance of being questioned -- for any alleged rape, even the most brutal or easily proven. In terms of a case involving the kinds of ambiguities and complexities of the alleged victims' complaints -- sex that began consensually that allegedly became non-consensual when dispute arose around a condom -- please find me, anywhere in the world, another man in prison today without bail on charges of anything comparable.

Of course 'No means No', even after consent has been given, whether you are male or female; and of course condoms should always be used if agreed upon. As my fifteen-year-old would say: Duh.

But for all the tens of thousands of women who have been kidnapped and raped, raped at gunpoint, gang-raped, raped with sharp objects, beaten and raped, raped as children, raped by acquaintances -- who are still awaiting the least whisper of justice -- the highly unusual reaction of Sweden and Britain to this situation is a slap in the face. It seems to send the message to women in the UK and Sweden that if you ever want anyone to take sex crime against you seriously, you had better be sure the man you accuse of wrongdoing has also happened to embarrass the most powerful government on earth.

ETA: It probably bears mentioning that I find the other Naomi wolf article to be supremely screwed up and victim-blaming. Referring to Interpol as the "Bad Date Police"? Not. Cool.

This whole brouhaha has (once again) led to me being seriously disappointed with many male (and a few female) so-called progressives who seem to think that since Assange did Important Things, it's okay to treat the women who accused him of sexual assault like crap. His arrest and detainment are undeniably politically motivated, but that does not make attacking his accusers okay.