Feminism is For Everybody by Bell Hooks
This book, is without a doubt, the single worst piece of published text I have ever read. It pains me, as a man that identifies as a feminist, that a book entitled “feminism is for everybody” is as poorly written as it this, with grammatical errors, logical fallacies, and extremely polarizing opinions abounding. Besides all of these detracting attributes of the book, Bell Hooks also has decided to not cite any of her sources, so the reader is unable to tell if everything she accepts as true is her personal opinion or something else.
It is ironic to me that a book with this title has the phrase “male domination” appearing 53 times in its 118 pages, and the phrase “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” appearing 15 times, let alone without even giving any kind of definition of how she would like the reader to interpret her use of these polarizing phrases. In addition to these polarizing phrases, there are passes such as the following:
“If welfare not warfare was sanctioned by our government and all citizens legally had access to a year or two of their lives during which they received state aid if they were unable to find a job, then the negative stigma attached to welfare programs would no longer exist.”
“Many men blame women working for unemployment, for their loss of the stable identity being seen as patriarchal providers gave them, even if it was or is only a fiction.”
“… but as the movement progressed evidence showed… that children were also victims of adult patriarchal violence enacted by women and men.”
“The term ‘patriarchal violence’ is useful because unlike the more accepted phrase ‘domestic violence’ it continually reminds the listener that violence in the home is connected to sexism and sexist thinking, to male domination.”
“Clearly most women do not use violence to dominate men… but lots of women believe that a person in authority has the right to use force to maintain authority. A huge majority of parents use some form of physical or verbal aggression against children.
What’s worse is the abhorrent punctuation, or lack thereof, that she uses. For example, the following passage,
“More than other religious faith Christian doctrine which condones sexism and male domination informs all the ways we learn about gender roles in society”
is pretty much unintelligible without proper use of commas. Without them, the reader must re-read the sentence a handful of times and make assumptions about what is being said. I am assuming the sentence that she intended to construct was: “More than other religions, Christian doctrine, which condones sexism and male domination, informs us of all the ways we learn about gender roles in society.” Is it christian doctrine that condones sexism and male domination, or is it christian doctrine that only condones sexism? Does christian doctrine alone inform, or christian doctrine and male domination? What I’m getting at is that no one is able to understand what the verb informs is applied to, and who is the subject? Informs is a 3rd person present tense verb, but what is the subject? us?