Book 88 - Let's Be Best Friends

Title: Feminasty: The Complicated Woman's Guide to Surviving the Patriarchy Without Drinking Herself to Death   Author: Erin Gibson Genre: memoir & collection of essays

This book is exactly the sort of thing I needed to read, and is the kind of feminism I am interested in. Erin Gibson is crude, rude, and unapologetically herself. She treats every single subject with the sarcastic, take-no-prisoners sort of hilarity she brings to her and Bryan Safi's podcast, Throwing Shade, and it all makes me want to fly to L.A. and become her best friend over tacos and champagne.

Okay, there is so much gold in these pages that I have to focus on the three best things:

1. Babes in Beauty

One of the essays in the book is around makeup and beauty brands, and who actually owns the majority of this female-geared industry. Big whopping surprise...it's women!

Oh c'mon - clearly I'm kidding. Like everything else in this world, it's run by, you guessed it: da boys.

After reading this essay, I made up a colour-coded spreadsheet of brands I use and love, and whether they are a) cruelty-free, b) vegan, and c) female owned. Of the 60 brands I identified, only 25% of them were owned by women. Sure, it's an itty bitty sample size, but still - pretty demoralizing. Funny pattern, though: female-owned brands were more likely to be both cruelty-free and vegan. Not sure if that's because women are just more awesome-er, or if female-owned brands tend to be less conglomerate-y (hello, Estee Lauder and Dior) and therefore don't distribute in mainland China where animal testing is required...correlation isn't causality, but still an interesting finding.

Anyways, after reading Gibson's piece looking at who actually profits from the female beauty industry, an industry impacted by and propagating unattainable and often harmful female beauty standards...I'm definitely more critical of who gets a slice of my hard-earned lady-dollars.

2. Periods in the Patriarchy

Recently I've been really into this discussion of the space periods occupy within North American society and culture, and Gibson's piece on PMS and periods is an excellent addition to this repertoire. She identifies a lack of research and general knowledge among health professionals when it comes to periods and, in one of my all-time favourite quotes that almost made me snort red wine all over my gnarly lazing-around shirt, says that "ibuprofen isn't strong enough to treat anything. Taking ibuprofen for my period cramps is like throwing a cup of water at the sun".

3. BRCA Woes

Finally, Gibson has an entire essay on something that is personally extremely relatable - the BRCA2 mutation and what a woman's life looks like after that genetic test comes back positive. FYI, if you are positive for the mutation (at least in Canada), you're classified as high risk, and benefit from screening every six months - which is absolutely wonderful, and you are lucky to have it, but it also means that you get nice and familiar with...

• MRIs (and in this scenario you're me and you hate needles and all you can think when you're jammed into that stupid machine is that a) the whole thing is going to fly apart like an errant Ferris wheel and cut you up, and b) that you would KILL for an Ativan),

• Mammograms (Gibson puts it perfectly when she says she'd "rather be repeatedly punched in the tit than have a mammogram"),

• The women's health clinic (which is stocked to the brim with absolute angels doing good and wonderful work),

• Breast exams (coldhandscoldhandscoldhands), and

• Ultrasounds (and that blue goo gets fucking EVERYWHERE).

I love and appreciate Gibson (may I call you Erin?) for sharing her experience with getting her results, processing her results, and eventually chopping the gals off to save her own life. Women are SO damn tough.

Rating: 🎒🎒🎒🎒🎒/5