“I stayed up late writing this, and I decided not to post it last night. I decided not to post it because I thought, âIs this going to be a good thing to post or is it a bad thing to post?â
I really did struggle about whether or not to post this because, hell, is this review a force for good or evil in the world?
And I think I decided something.
I really do believe that one of the problems with most articles and online news is that things are very, very black and white. Youâre either a complete saint or a demon. A Trump or a Bernie. A Slate or a Fox News.
What I feel I represent is a sector thatâs not aligned with a side. In the very specific case of this book, I represent people who do care about and agree with feminist causes, but didnât care for this book. I represent people who want good research, more engaging texts, and who donât give a text credit for having the right stance on something if that stance is not presented in a way that makes for a good book. I’m greedy. I want both.
Please, feel free to not read this review. You saw the star rating. Nobodyâs forcing you. I think I tried to be very honest and fair, and the political stance is not what caused me to rate the book the way I did. But please, if you feel like I canât review this book because Iâm a white man, then donât feel like you have to waste your time here.
****
Let me just start off saying that Iâm not a super smart dude or anything. Iâm not a genius. So some of what I have to say might miss the mark. I might have done the math wrong or read the words wrong. This isnât self-deprecation. This is the truth you live with when you are the kind of person who ran over his own iPod with his car somehow.
Let me also say this. I am not a rape apologist. I am not a denier. I am not going to make the case that violence is not happening to women and that this is not an important issue.
My case is that I think that the portions of this book that I read, rather than using the already horrific truth, is using the truth for the purpose of making a point rather than using the truth to tell the truth. Which is where this gets confusing. If thatâs what it takes to make the point and see some changeâ¦itâs difficult to take a position against that. But what I AM against is using science badly. While the ends (equality) might justify the means, I canât get behind the ethics that I saw at play.
For me, personally, this book did not help me understand or embrace the cause of equality in a new, different, or deeper way. Because when I look into what the author says and find a lot of untruth in the numbers and especially when it comes to race (LOTS more on this to come), I donât know which things to believe, and I canât help but see the whole thing cynically.
I consider myself in the middle, politically. Iâm traditionally liberal, for sure. Gay rights, womensâ rights, pro-choice, no religious affiliation, anti-gun, pro-welfare, pro-Earth, against corporations being treated as people. Iâm a total lefty, but when I read books like this one, I hear views that Iâm not really aligned with. Which is fine. I read it expecting that, to an extent. But I do think this is what left politics and agitation have become, which is a weird, very black and white thing. When you first read a stat like 20% of all humans will experience X, I feel like thereâs an expectation to believe that stat outright or not, and those are your options. Thereâs no option to say, âThatâs really high and doesnât seem to reflect my reality, but let me look into it further.
I feel, just a bit, that if you donât believe a stat or a study outright, or you question it, I feel like you then become the enemy.
I feel, as a lefty who questions the methods and the numbers, that my political voice can be seen as being against the causes of feminism and equality. So let me be clear. I do not question the spirit of this book or the fact that rape and violence against women are real and awful and something needs to be done. I do not question those things. Whatsoever.
What I question is the way in which this book mixes rhetoric and fact, and the way in which books like this are turning rhetoric into fact. What I question is the use of uncited stats in a book, which will itself be cited later, which creates a paper trail that doesnât lead back to studies and instead becomes a Mobius strip of works referencing themselves.
And yes, Iâm aware of the irony here, how this whole review could qualify as mansplaining. Iâm also aware of the convenience of writing a book where the title can be invoked to invalidate the opinions of men. I donât mean to patronize, and Iâm trying to be careful to avoid that. Iâm trying to walk a line and say that I AGREE with the spirit of this book, the idea that things are bad and need we need to be reminded and aware, but I donât agree with the way the spirit is being captured in the words.
Itâs like the classic battle between Spider-Man and the Punisher. Both are fighting for justice, and both find the methods of the other to be ill-fitting and unworkable.
I wanna be Spider-Man, by the way. Punisher is cool, and his outfit is undeniable, but Spider-Man is definitely my guy. Also, I donât think you get to be Punisher if you use the word âOutfit.â
Letâs get into it.
I got into the first essay, and I came across this line:
[Homicide is] one of the leading causes of death for pregnant women in the United States.
I found this line of the very first essay shocking. Which was the intent, yes? Iâm picturing Death Race 2000 with pregnant women being killed by a masked Stallone in a very scary and also cool car.
Homicide is one of the leading causes of death for pregnant women in the United States.
I looked into it.
True? Yes.
Expressing truth? Ehhhhâ¦
Iâm gonna make with the really short version. You can read this and skip down to the asterisks if youâd like.
Short version:
Homicide IS a leading cause of death amongst pregnant women, however it is a comparable cause of death amongst American women of likely child-bearing age, pregnant or not, and while homicide is a âleadingâ cause, itâs highly unlikely, statistically, and trails FAR behind the top cause of death, âunintentional injury.â
Long version:
Hereâs what I found in the original study in addition to other information gained from some poking around. By the way, ALL my sources are linked at the end, and I want to be open, the original cited study ran from 1993-1999, and the CDC stats I have are from 2013. Which is a problem, I admit, however if weâre citing a 90âs study about homicide and pregnancy in a book published in 2014, and weâre using the present tense, the past and the present need to converge in some useful way, and the 90âs study does not seem to have been replicated in more recent years. Just laying it all out there.
+The mentioned studyâs findings talk about pregnancy-related and pregnancy-associated deaths. The ultimate conclusion cites pregnancy-associated deaths, and I think itâs of note that a homicide was considered pregnancy-associated if the victim had been pregnant within the last year. This might sound like quibbling, but I donât think weâd accept a news headline that said âPregnant woman murderedâ if we then found out the woman had delivered her baby 8 months ago. Thatâs hedging the numbers to favor your overall point. This extends the period of pregnancy, in the context of this study, to 17 months as opposed to 9, nearly doubling the timeline. And in fact, ââ¦analysis in this report revealed that pregnancy-associated homicide occurred most frequently during the first 3 months after delivery of a live-born or stillborn infant.â Itâs awful itâs sad, but itâs a distortion and manipulation of whatâs true to say that pregnant women were being killed at the rate cited in the study.
If I wanted to make a point, if I were doing a study to prove a point as opposed to doing a study to make a discovery, it would certainly give me a better shot if I was allowed to change the numbers this way. If I wanted to do a study that showed you were more likely to be murdered after eating a pizza, it would be helpful if âafter eating a pizzaâ included a timeframe up to 12 months after a pizza was consumed.
+Whatâs the homicide rate for women in general? Well, google causes of death for women, and youâll find homicide is very low. Itâs not in the top 10 leading causes of death.
Maybe thereâs something to this!
But then I thought, wait a second, you canât compare women across their entire lifetimes to pregnant women. A woman being pregnant puts certain boundaries on her age range and likely health.
When weâre studying pregnant women, we are studying what is, in general, a healthy-ish subset of humans. Their basic health needs are being met in such a way that means child-bearing is biologically possible. In short, you could only really compare women who were in a biological condition that would allow child-bearing and THEIR homicide death rate to women who were pregnant and murdered. So what happens when we look at women of child-bearing age and their leading causes of death?
Ages 10-14, homicide comes in 5th. Of note, birth defects are 4th, and as I was saying above, if you were to have a birth defect that caused your death between the ages of 10-14, the likelihood of you being considered in a study of pregnant women is nonexistent. This age bracket isnât likely to have babies, but its far end represents the far end of the spectrum, so there you go.
Ages 15-19, homicide climbs to 4th.
Ages 20-24, homicide is 3rd. And some interesting stuff starts happening here. At 15-19 and younger, cancer is more likely to cause death than homicide. However, at this level they flip. And then from 25-34, cancer shoots up to number 1. From 20-24, women are more likely to die from homicide than cancer, and this is the only age range at which this is true. With the exception of ages 1-4 when homicide is actually at its highest, 8.8%.
Interestingly, 20-24 years is ALSO the age range at which most American women give birth, the ONLY exception being Asian-American women, who have are more likely to have babies from 25-29.
When we look at the age range comparison, homicide is the second-most likely way for a pregnant woman to die in the 1999 study, and itâs the third most-likely way for ANY woman within the age range of 20-24 to die in 2013.
+The most-likely cause of death is âunintentional injuriesâ, which encompasses a LOT of stuff, including some biggies like auto accidents. So itâs not like cancer and murder are a close second and third. Theyâre quite far behind. Homicide is a leading cause in that itâs number 2 or 3, depending on which study you look at. But thatâs misleading. Itâs like boasting about winning the silver medal in the 100-meter dash when I WAS second place, but I was a few hours behind first and the only other contender had to recharge his mobility scooter every 25 meters.
+I think this study glossed over a factor that has more to do with homicide.
Weâre talking about 4.3 homicides/100000 people for white women, 15.8 homicides/100000 people for black women. I think that disparity more than indicates that the murder of women has a lot more to do with the color of their skin than the status of their uterus, and in fact, another study showed that black women are four times more likely to die pregnancy-related deaths related to major complications.
The mortality rate of pregnant, black women far outpaces that of white women, so itâs interesting to me that this study is being cited to talk about violence against women more than it is the disparity in quality of life for white and black women. That, to me, seems to be the more telling and interesting result of the study, even if that wasnât its intended outcome.
+Letâs talk about the alarming level of the stat as well.
To talk about a percent, according to the study, the chance that youâll be murdered as a white woman who is pregnant (or has been in the last year) was .00043% in 1999. As a black woman, that number was .00158%. And bear in mind, those are naked statistics. They have nothing to do with your current life circumstances. Just the factors of being a pregnant woman in the United States.
Your chances of dying in a car crash are .1% in 2013. For white women, if youâll allow me to compare the stats across time periods, that means they are somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 times more likely to die in an auto accident.
When we talk about statistical likelihood, .002 of a percent is not a statistical likelihood. Scientifically, itâs not. Itâs still a social problem, itâs still a bad thing, and Iâm not denying that it happens and itâs awful and we need to put an end to it. This is a difficult thing to say because weâre talking about human lives. Itâs the intersection of probability and the value of singular human lives, which is always troubling.
What Iâm saying is, to make a comparison, NASA operates at a 95% success rate. That means 5% of launches will fail. The range of acceptable failure for a NASA rocket is far higher than .002%, and thatâs something were mess-ups are important and costly. Where people are tasked with making sure they donât mess up.
I guess what Iâm getting at here, after a little digging, is that the statistic may be true, however I donât think itâs alarming in the way the author intends it to be alarming. Yes, of course, ANY homicide is bad. And women are getting killed a lot more than theyâre killing, and itâs definitely proven beyond a shadow that a woman is more likely to be killed by an intimate acquaintance than a stranger. These are all legit, awful problems.
But I feel like this cited line is meant to make the reader envision the slaughter of pregnant women in the streets.
I think the truth of this statistic is that pregnant women are more likely to die from homicide than women, in general, because pregnant women are ALSO more likely to be within an age range that is more likely to die of homicide. They are healthy. They are not likely to die of ânatural causes.â
And this is where I think the bad science-ing happens. From what I read and saw, I donât think thereâs causation here. This study does not prove that pregnancy caused an increase rate of homicide amongst women.
â[Homicide is] one of the leading causes of death for pregnant women in the United Statesâ is accurate, however, to me, the fact that this statistic regards pregnant women, specifically, makes me think that the pregnancy is an important factor, that the pregnancy is whatâs causing the violence, that pregnancy is being posed as the source of this issue.
But statistically, thatâs just not accurate.
************************************************************************************
Thatâs the statistical side of things. Letâs talk about the other part of the first essay, which is more opinion-based on my part, and why the cited stuff matters.
We have Solnit telling us personal stories about her encounters with mansplainers in academia. Who are easy to discount because I think we all know that most professors are dicks and dildos, and itâs generally easy to picture a room full of professors who all are in love with the sounds of their own voices and donât really give a shit what anyone else has to say.
And in order to back those stories up and tie them to larger social issues we have lines like â[Homicide is] one of the leading causes of death for pregnant women in the United States.â This is how we go from the micro, an exchange at an academic party in Aspen, to the larger social issue, that women are told to shut up and have the will of men imposed upon them. These studies are how we tie dildos in Aspen to serious, social issues that make the Aspen dildos relevant.
And part of the difficulty in reading, for me, is that the personal stories in the first essay are not that strong.
I would challenge people who read this book more than a week ago to tell me as many details about the personal encounters Solnit recounts as possible. Where were they? What were they talking about, specifically? Can you describe any of the players physically? What was the context? Did she have friends with her or was she alone? I would issue that challenge because I donât think these personal accounts are memorable, which, to me, equals weakness in the narrative and exposition.
And this can still work if the information contained is good. But the statistical backing doesnât hold up too well. It leaves me feeling like the first essay has this non-redundant system going on. The weakness of the personal story, the fact that itâs not really fleshed out, relies on the ties to the larger issues.
I am cool with an essay thatâs primarily factual and an essay thatâs primarily personal, and Iâm cool with mixtures of both that play with the form. But my honest opinion on this first essay is that we have the two weak components taking turns, and neither is strong enough to hold up this essay and turn it into something truly interesting or novel.
I honestly believe that the title is the strongest thing about this piece.
I will say this. I understand that an essay like this can be powerful to people who have experienced what Solnit has experienced. That feeling of âYes, Iâm not alone.â I get that, and thatâs a useful purpose for a piece of writing, always, always, always. Iâm not seeking to invalidate that experience.
What Iâm trying to do is critique the essay. The writing. Its purpose might be genuine. It might be to give a voice to the voiceless. It might be Solnit capitalizing on the brief fame of the term âMansplainingâ, which was coined by someone in reference to this essay. But letâs assume that the purpose is genuine and it fulfills that purpose. Letâs just talk about it as a piece of writing.
The story itself is fairly flat. The story, as I read it, is that a jerkoff acted like a jerkoff and this happens more often than it should.
The most compelling piece of the story, to me, goes like this: One time, my ex-boyfriendâs uncle told us this story about this thing he saw through the window that happened with his neighbor and his wife. And it was the WAY he told it that made it so awful
The path this story takes is from the issue at the academic party, to a story told by an ex-boyfriendâs uncle about his neighborâs wife, to the difficulty of restraining orders and the murder of pregnant women, back to Aspen, then to another instance where a man explained something to Solnit in an academic-ish setting.
Thereâs a leap in there. Itâs a leap Iâll take, but youâve gotta give me more reason to believe that Iâm going to land somewhere of value. I wanna hold your hand and take that leap, but I donât want to hold the hand of your ex-boyfriendâs uncleâs neighborâs wife.
Oh, well. Hereâs hoping essay 2 is better.
Essay 2:
And hereâs as far as I got into the second essay:
âViolence doesnât have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.â
I donât know for sure whether this is just supposed to be a bold statement in the realm of âIâm colorblindâ meaning that a person isnât racist. But itâs completely inaccurate.
Doesnât have a race?
âNative Americans are victims of rape or sexual assault at more than double the rate of other racial groupsâ¦Black females experienced intimate partner violence at a rate 35% higher than that of white femalesâ¦37% of the [Cambodian] respondents know a man who is being beaten by his partner.â
Doesnât have a class?
ââ¦women who resided in households that earned less than $10,000 annually had a 4-times-greater risk of experiencing violence than women in wealthier”