Laurie Penny is a feminist.\u00a0 She’s not a feminist in the way that many dilettantes – and I include myself here – are.\u00a0 She is a deep thinker on matters of sex, gender, and society.\u00a0 She’s also a vivid, engaging writer.\u00a0 She’s compassionate without excusing accidental sins.\u00a0 Her writing is passionate and analytical at the same time.\u00a0 Readers always know a person is speaking, but never hear someone excusing poor thought with emotional language.<\/p>\n
Her book, Unspeakable Things<\/em>, largely reflects these brilliant qualities. It’s a fine introduction to feminist thought in our modern, daily, technical world. If you’re interacting with people on the internet, it’s a great book to read.\u00a0 If you’re thinking about why women’s issues and diversity issues are moving to the core of so many discussions, the book is a must. It has ramifications for hard core techies, too, but that’s not what I mean by “technical world.”<\/p>\n Unspeakable Things<\/em> expanded my thinking about these issues from the personal to the political.\u00a0 Other friends and Internet writers have made me understand how often and effectively individuals’ rights are trampled.\u00a0 Penny showed me how these same attitudes and the mores and laws that they have spawned create our society.\u00a0 Viewing that society in terms of how those mores and laws control and constrain populations in society was new to me.\u00a0 It’s the difference between sympathizing with people who have been harassed and seeing that the same attitudes prevent women from taking part in the world. Things<\/em> is very effective at opening the mind.<\/p>\n Particularly enlightening to me was the discussion of birth control.\u00a0 That’s a technical innovation that could restructure society, except for the fact that society – people who make it up – are resisting that technical change.\u00a0 As powerful as the personal stories one often hears are (both sides) – the political issues are at least as important.\u00a0 Penny brought those to me.<\/p>\n Unspeakable Things is not a perfect book, of course.\u00a0 There are times when I found the writing repetitious.\u00a0 Some parts were more opaque than others. I can’t tell if it will make others think new thoughts as it made me do.<\/p>\n Overall, the ideas in here are powerful and the writing accessible.\u00a0 Strongly recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Laurie Penny is a feminist.\u00a0 She’s not a feminist in the way that many dilettantes – and I include myself here – are.\u00a0 She is a deep thinker on matters of sex, gender, and society.\u00a0 She’s also a vivid, engaging writer.\u00a0 She’s compassionate without excusing accidental sins.\u00a0 Her writing is passionate and analytical at the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2084"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2084\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2087,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2084\/revisions\/2087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}