Book No. 26 of 2021
This was a very validating but also very infuriating read. (It’s probably for the best that it’s short—clocked in at under an hour.) Cho masterfully encapsulates the helpless rage that I realize most women feel at having to exist day-by-day in a patriarchal system, with their needs minimized and their labor exploited, with the constant rationalizing and bargaining (as well as the mental health ramifications and having to seek therapy, which does not fix the root cause of the problem). Cho is also pretty direct about the fact that even supportive, self-aware men have so many blind spots and unknowingly reinforce the systemic bias that makes life for their sisters, wives, and daughters so difficult.
Even though it’s hyper-specific to modern Korean culture, the parallels with more or less identical problems in the US make it feel unfortunately universal, and it honestly does not remotely read like an account of life “somewhere else” for its painful familiarity. The dry, clinical writing backed up with statistics (the reason for which is revealed at the end) also works brilliantly to demonstrate the brutal effect of casual and structural misogyny, as well as reveal just how utterly ridiculous our societal values are when you describe them realistically.
I definitely have a mental category of “books with which I would like to smack people upside the head” and this is now one of them.
Similar Reads
Some parallels with Frances Cha’s If I Had Your Face.
Several fed-up women voice ideas that remind me of various feminist manifestos: Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Beard’s Women and Power.
I also thought of the economic exploitation of women’s labor explained in Stephanie Coontz’s Marriage, a History.