(One of those reviews where I spend more time ruminating on my own mind than on the book in question.)
If the goal of F-Bomb was self-reflection, than hurrah! It succeeded. Because I sit here and think and think and think and think about what I want to say about this book, about what didn’t really work for me with it, and then I end up thinking about my twenties and then that day in my thirties where I just decided to take all the liberal feminism blogs off my RSS feed (yes, this was a while ago), mainly because there had been a whole string of ewww breastfeeding is gross and yay I’m not pregnant statements in articles* and it really hit me then that the feminism that these blogs was in very narrow focus, and me, non-USian, non-single, non-childfree, was not what they were ever going to focus on. F-Bomb doesn’t have that same teensy focus, but it has the same feel of trying to appeal to someone who isn’t me. That’s fine for me to not be in the audience — I don’t expect every book on every issue to cater to me (although I am awesome, so if you are looking for someone for your book to cater to, I do suggest me), but F-Bomb does have a bit of an echo-chamber feel to it. Who is going to pick up this book? Middle (and up) class twenty somethings with an interest in liberal feminism. Who is going to say hell yeah! to the message in this book? Middle (and up) class twenty somethings with an interest in liberal feminism. Who is the audience for this book? Middle (and up) class twenty somethings with an interest in liberal feminism. Did it teach me (middle class and thirty something more aligned with non-liberal-feminism) anything I didn’t already know? No.
Am I done posing questions? About F-Bomb, no. Plus I have more to say.
Sometimes the book had snide quips for people, places, or things that McKeon holds in contempt. When it comes right down to it, that was what really annoyed me most about this book. But why? I know ridicule is a time-honoured tradition for revealing the sheer idiocy of idiotic movements. So why did this grate so much in F-Bomb? Because it was unnecessary, in which case I can blame McKeon, or because I found it catty — which is such a loaded, gendered term — in which case I have no one to blame but myself for falling prey to my own internalized misogyny. Am I mad at McKeon or am I mad at myself? If I am angry at myself, is that what is colouring my reaction to F-Bomb? I just can’t get past the feeling that F-Bomb made me angry at the wrong things.
F-Bomb by Lauren McKeon went on sale March 6, 2018.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
* I actually emailed a complaint to the blog (I can’t rightly remember which one it was now, but it was a relatively major one in terms of liberal feminist blogs) in question about how for some women pregnancy was a radical act (W/POC, people with disabilities, or any other people for whom body autonomy had been denied to them by governmental and/or social forces). The article in question disappeared, but there was no acknowledgement, not even an insincere mea-culpa, they didn’t even email me back. Just whoosh, gone, no interest in engaging. It’s shitty to be called out, yes, but these blogs had no problem calling out others, and I’d like to think I was polite about it. Didn’t matter. No engagement back. Oh well.
Google Reader shuttered a few years later, so the golden age of RSS was coming to an end in any case.