It's a Jungle Out There

Image from Amanda Marcotte's "Book ad up." post at Pandagon

Twisty Faster of I Blame The Patriarchy has the perfect book-jacket blurb for Amanda Marcotte's It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments.

Jungle is all jokes, but it isn’t all jokey. Contained therein is some primo patriarchy-blaming. She takes on PETA, Hollywood, abstinence-only “education,” the famous anti-Girl Scout backlash, and plenty more. No, it’s not a lesbian separatist revolutionary tract, but I pity the hardcore radfem who doesn’t get a bang out this book.

Read the quote in context here.

I read the book last week on vacation and haven't had time to say nice things about it. I quite liked the book. Although there was this one personally embarrassing thing about it.

In format the book appears as a series of problems confronting women, with a brief intro, a bit of discussion, and then a list of things you can do. In other words it's laid out like most standard text-oriented travel/survival guides. And it's a great list of issues women, especially but not exclusively young academic or professional women, regularly find themselves confronting. In addition to the topics Twisty mentions there's...

Your conservative relatives discover you're a feminist? Check. Assumption that if you're vegetarian it's a feminist thing? Check. Men who like the "challenge" of dating feminists? Check. The office donut do-or-don't-damnation conundrum? Check. Intelligent defense of the Girl Scouts? Check. "Asshole-bleaching?" Check, and handled with all the dignity the subject deserves. Dealing with Nice Guys™, MRAs, fundamentalists, anti-choicers, and wedding consultants? Check.

Embarrassing admission of utter cluelessness while reading? For maybe the first five or ten chapters I kept reading these fantastically incisive, classically-Marcott-ish zingers in the chapter intros and then totally wincing at the comparable level of snark in her proposed remedies. I mean, I kept saying WTF? (You could see them in my copy of the book, right there, in the margins, in pencil.) I kept thinking the same thing about the so-over-the-top-it-almost-stops-being-appalling 50s-era mainstream adventure-babe comics cover and chapter-break art.

So what was my problem? I didn't notice the "politics/humor" classification. It reads like a snarky joke book because, incisive introductions aside it's a snarky *joke book!* Doh! The illustrations are offensive because Marcotte was offended. The suggestions are acidly (and if you get it, humorously) sarcastic because sincerity has so often been ignored or misinterpreted these last 37 years -- so might as well have fun while being misinterpreted.

Ok, so I might not give it to my eight year old right away, not till she's read a few more straight-ahead and age-appropriate introductions**. But I'll definitely give her a copy before she's ready for high school. I think it'll be perfect for her then, just like I think it'll be perfect all kinds of people high-school age and up.

[** Bleg: Speaking of which, what *are* the age-appropriate (3rd-5th grade, 6th-8th grade, and high-school level) introductions to feminism for kids? Preferably suitable for both girls *and* boys. Let me know in comments if you've got 'em. --fl]