This graphic novel let me know I overrated “The Trouble With Women.” It takes the same concept of examining the destructive idiocy of men at understanding women through the ages and ratchets up the outrage, social criticism, and intimate details such as the history of representations of the vulva. Some insights:
• The actual size and design of a major human body part was not discovered until 1998 — the clitoris. She asks us to think how ridiculous this oversight in the study of human anatomy would be if it were a part shared with men, such as the pancreas. And then she cites a 2006 college human anatomy text book that still gets the size of the clitoris wrong.
• Stromquist highlights men obsessed with women’s genitals through the ages, such as priests who demanded to examine women to see if they had a “teat like” bit of flesh between their legs, which was a sign of being a witch. And then there were the men obsessed with Saartjie Baartman, a woman from South Africa who was a slave put on display throughout Europe in the 1800s for her “enormous buttocks.” I’d known her sad story as the “Hottentot Venus” but not about Dr. George Cuvier, who upon hearing of her death, raced to the scene to dissect her vulva and preserve it in alcohol. He wrote a 16-page autopsy with nine of them devoted to her vulva, which he used to spread his racist “scientific” analysis that it was a sign of black women's “animal sexuality” that white women didn’t have.
• I especially liked her analysis of how men for centuries enforced the “inferiority” of women by pointing out that God said so. But when scientific reasoning became vogue in the 1800s, they had to come up with scientific reasons, like that menstruation takes blood from the brain and causes women to be flighty. She cites a doctor named Azel Ames, who argued that women should not be allowed to work in industry because of menstruation. “Oddly enough, I haven’t found one researcher or doctor in history who has concluded … that women’s dangerous mood swings make them unfit to care for children. No one has written a scholarly paper about how women with PMS yell at their kids too much and therefore men should stay home with the kids while women go out into the workforce. Why not? Discuss in small groups.”
Grade: A
P.S. The negative review from "Anna Reader" saying the book is ugly and not funny at all and will turn people off of feminism inspired me to buy the book. The tone in the review felt like someone who didn't actually read it but glanced at a few pages and was offended. Not sure if that's true, but I can see how glancing at the preview or flipping through a few pages in a store might cause one to come away with the impression that it's crass. It is anything but. It is smart, sharp AND funny.
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