This should be required reading for all girls when they become able to reproduce and for all young women who think they want kids (probably because of tv and their friends who are similarly deluded about what will happen).

https://www.reddit.com/r/regretfulparents

so many choice bits … and this is just a small percentage of what I’ve underlined in my copy …

“…how wonderful it was that men had now increased the time they spent with their children to up to forty minutes a day!  Well, hell, let’s have a fucking parade.”  p7

“A basement dweller getting his kicks out of harassing women on the internet because he’s never talked to one in his entire life?”  p8

Okay, see, right there: a solution would be if in school, every day involved ‘group’ work wherein one boy and one girl had to talk, talked, to each other

[re ‘reveal’ parties] “If the idea of gathering your closest friends and family to celebrate your child’s genitalia isn’t disconcerting enough …” p14  (see “Mr. and Ms.“)

[re the party theme “Guns or Glitter”] “I cannot fathom what kind of strange vortex you’d need to live in to think it was appropriate to enthusiastically connect an innocent little baby with a fucking gun…” p14

Yeah.  Even the concept of toy guns … (see “Bang Bang” )

“When I read stories about little boys who have their softness and love shamed out of them by parents who are in thrall to their own fear, my heart breaks.”  p32

We said all this [sexist conditioning has negative effects on both girls and boys] fifty year ago.  FIFTY YEARS ago.  So WTF? 

Ah.  ‘We’.  As in ‘women’.  To whom no one was listening.

“[J]ust ask yourself why women for the most part do all the work of growing and birthing children only to turn around and give naming rights to men who did barely anything at all.” p40-1

“… a marked difference between what was expected of us and what was expected of our brother.  He was never told to wash dishes, sort and fold laundry or—heaven forbid!—iron the shirts my father wore to work.  Instead, he was given the wholly undemanding task of sweeping the footpath outside and taking out the bins, both of which he seemed to do only sporadically.” p41

It was that way in the 60s too.  SIXTY YEARS and nothing’s changed.  WTF.

“…I found myself washing and folding yet another load of tiny leggings and singlets that my partner had just stepped over or walked past without even noticing.”  p52

Frankly, I’m surprised she expected anything different, given her and her brother.

Why I didn’t get married and have kids.  How do so few women see the writing on the wall?

“Men who look after their children aren’t ‘babysitting’. …  What they’re doing is called ‘parenting’.” p58

“It isn’t helping to do a handful of chores in a house you live in.”  p58

“… the dangerous notion that women exist to amplify the greatness of his own life.” p68

well-put

“That’s impossible to do when you have one demographic of people—white, straight, cisgender men—in charge of deciding what matters and what doesn’t.”  p74

I’d change ‘cisgender’ to ‘sexist/MRA-advocate’ …

“We didn’t grow up with fucking George Lucas telling us that we could be a Jedi Master …” p78

again, well-put

“We love little girls!/ Yeah, sure we do.  Right up until they hit puberty, then we slap ’em across the face and scream, ‘Welcome to hell, sweetheart!  WHO’S SPECIAL NOW?'”  p83

Ford should take this shit on the road.  Open mic night …

“And according to the Geena Davis Institute, ‘Films with female leads made considerably more on average than films with male leads … [grossing] 15.8 percent more …'” p91

“Catherine Hardwicke’s opportunities didn’t explode after directing Twilight. … [S]he couldn’t even get an interview to be considered as the director for The Fighter … As Hardwicke noted wryly at the time, ‘It’s about action, it’s about boxing, so a man has to direct it … But they’ll let a man direct Sex in the City and any girly movie you’ve ever heard of.'” p91

“[Geena Davis told NPR] ‘If there’s 17 percent women [in a crowd scene], [men surveyed] think it’s fifty-fifty.  And if there’s 33 percent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.'” p93

“According to this definition, being A Boy menas having sexual impulses that are stronger than your moral ones.  It means being so base in your desires that criminality will always win out over doing the right thing.  It means viewing the incapacitation or vulnerability of the girls and women around you not as a responsibility, but as an opportunity.” p116

This reminds me of a short video I once saw, maybe an ad?, of a young woman asleep or passed out on a couch, and a young man sees her and—gets a blanket and gently puts it over her.  And I was surprised.  And then, the point, I was APPALLED (but not surprised) that I was surprised.

“… the absolute repression of male emotional maturity”  p142

yes.  that.

“[How did] the language of misogyny most hateful become incorporated into the standard vocabularies of boys and men all over the world?”  p168

yes.  that.

“… because of course the best way for men to disprove a feminist’s central world view …  is to gather together and threaten her with sexual violence.” p179

another one for her stand-up routine.

along with one I remember from her previous book, ‘Why do you hate men so much?  You’re a fucking cunt, you know that?!’

lovely bit on p217 re MRA definition of abuse compared to women’s definition

see also p227-228 re the MRA agenda

“They’re barely out of adolescence, but they already believe that the world belongs to them.  Why shouldn’t they?  Everywhere they look, they’re reminded that they were born to rule.” p255

There ought to be a study of the change in sons’ attitudes toward their mothers when they hit puberty; I wonder how many here experienced that ‘sudden’ turn, when their lovely little boys started to show nothing but contempt for them …

“… the rich young white men whose careers and futures are treated with more respect than the bodies of the women they assault …” p287

“[After she was raped, she said] ‘I hadn’t even shaved my legs.'” p299

YES!  If women’s behavior was actually used as the standard for consent, we could settle the consent issue sooooo easily.  Reminds me of the story “A Jury of Her Peers”.

“‘All you need to say is, “Do you want to be here? … Do you want to have sex with me?”  And if it’s not an enthusiastic “yes”, it’s a “no”.  That’s it.’ … It’s really not that fucking hard …” p319

Yeah, or we could do it that way.

“We should be focusing instead on making a world in which women get to be considered just as big a fucking deal as men.”  p322

“Women’s bodies are still being used as the conduit for men’s reckoning with each other.” p323

again, well-put.