In a sense, Joan Smith is also preaching to the converted. When I started reading her most recent work, The Public Woman , I had long since been branded as the raging feminist in most of my social circles. And in a way, yes, it did. It confirmed what I already knew: that society treats women like shit, despite maintaining an illusion that women are equal. The points Smith makes and the case studies she uses echo a truth that I, as a woman, am eternally confronted with.
Smith picks up on a myriad of issues, using case studies and statistics to make her point. She discusses the way women are treated by society, the way they are turned into a commodity, the barriers they face in politics, in the public sphere, social circles and in the home.
The whole book carries a trigger warning for general misogyny and violence against women, but the chapters describing in-depth about torture and murder of women Possession and The Witches of Perugia carry massive trigger warnings β I managed to slowly work through Possession, but I started and could not finish The Witches of Perugia, because it was just too distressing, due to extremely high levels of sexual and physical violence.
She explains the problem is that our patriarchal society trains both men and women to accept and in some cases even relish a perverse simultaneous infantilising and hypersexualisation of women, using the glamour model Jordan and the description of a particular strip club as examples.
The title of her chapter on women in politics, Calm Down, Dear , actual words spoken by the current British Prime Minister, David Cameron, to a female Labour politician, perfectly embody the blatant condescension and disdain most male politicians have for women.
