Small Town Wren

I first picked up The Beauty Myth three years ago. I was writing a paper for a class, for The Anthropology of Gender & Sexuality taught by Nia Parson. It was a great class, and the first time where I was inspired enough to engorge myself on outside sources for a final paper.  I ended up writing a treatise on intersection, third wave feminism, and abortion rights. It was a great paper. I shared it with the group of shamans I was observing later in the year when they started getting grumpy about the right to choose.

The only problem is I never finished it.

Some books have that problem with me: I just can’t get them read. American Gods is a book I’ve started at least a dozen times and as much as I love reading the first 100 pages, something always comes up and I can’t finish it.  With The Beauty Myth, life happened. A series of catastrophic events in early 2008 left me unable to do much else but cry and feel sorry for myself.  I had read what I needed for the paper with the intention to finish it at my leisure during the following semester. It has languished on my shelf ever since.

No more. While generally I would say I have never bought into the monolithic beauty myth, I think I am at a point in my life where I need to read it again (and actually finish it). It’s an important text and it will be good for me and the goals I am working toward right now. The whole strong woman thing.  And, in general, I need some non-textbook reading to happen in my life.

Tags: abortion, anthropology, books, depression, feminism, NYU, reading

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 7th, 2009 at 1:51 am and is filed under feminism, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.