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F 'em!: Goo Goo, Gaga, And Some Thoughts On Balls (2011)

by Jennifer Baumgardner(Favorite Author)

3.69 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1580053602 (ISBN13: 9781580053600)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Seal Press

review 1: Great book! A series of essays and articles written for various magazines from a feminist writer and activist. Interspersed with the essays, are interviews with some wonderful feminist authors, musicians, and activists. OKay, okay, I was totally starstruck by the fact that Jennifer had a five year relationship with Amy Ray. I also had no idea that Ani DiFranco wrote the introduction to Birth Matters and is deeply involved with the home birth movement.Jennifer's feminism is so honest, personal and refreshing. She covers it all... parenting, sexuality, reproductive justice, even abstinence education and purity balls (which are quite creepy). She also delves into the waves of feminism in a very logical way. I highly recommend this book. I'm looking forward to reading ... moremore!
review 2: This collection of essays and interviews, while generally interesting and while it contains a few really stellar pieces, suffers from a serious lack of organization. The essays contained within all have to do with feminism, but very few of them have anything to do with each other. There is no overarching premise to the book, no reason for all these essays to be bound together. The advertising and packaging of the book could have played into that - it could have been marketed as a collection of odds and ends from the author's brain, which it was - but instead advertised it as a straightforward book of feminist essays, which was a mistake. The misadvertising jars the reader and muddles the things Baumgardner's book has to say.All that aside, "F'em!" is a good book. It benefits from its author's wide-ranging feminist experience, from working at Ms. Magazine and writing some of the leading works in the Third Wave feminist movement to raising a son as a single mother and maintaining her bisexuality as a married woman. Her greatest asset is in her even, balanced tone, especially evident in the essay on the American abstinence movement. (She acknowledges that purity balls are onto something in terms of improving relationships between fathers and daughters but points out that their focus on virginity reduces girls' personhood to their sexual capacity.) The essays on pregnancy, parenting, and cross-nursing are always honest and frequently hilarious. She boldly lays out some oft-ignored truths about bisexuality (you are still bisexual regardless of your partner's gender), and her repeated examinations of the "waves" of feminist activism are well-researched and insightful. The essay "Sustainable Feminism" says some BEAUTIFUL things about the transformation of activism from protests and picket lines to speaking out and careful, individual conversation. The interviews with other feminists that pepper the book are sometimes infuriating (Debbie Stoller of Bust Magazine, whose inability to grasp the idea of intersectionality betrays her irrelevance to modern feminism), sometimes jaw-dropping (Shelby Knox, who's done more for sexual freedom at fifteen than most politicians have at fifty), and always enlightening (especially Loretta Ross, who schooled me on where the phrase "reproductive justice" REALLY came from).Despite all its good traits, though, I ended up just liking the book. It had the capacity to be so much more than it was, and I get the feeling that Baumgardner's other, more coherent works are much better to read. But for all its charm and bursts of brilliance, the book ends up being just a sloppy mish-mash of ideas that left me asking, "...so?" less

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