On the Flip-side

I am extremely disappointed in my city's library. I stopped in yesterday to get some CD's to amp up my Broadway collection and find some Alan Rickman movies (of which there were none, but that is not the point of this post, though that is an extremely disappointing fact). I decided to see if the library had Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters by Jessica Valenti, because I had just finished and thoroughly enjoyed her other book, He's a Stud, She's a Slut, and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know. My search in the library catalogue yielded troubling results: they did not have the book I was searching for and they had very few alternatives. There did however seem to be an abundance of anti-feminist publications, such as The Flipside of Feminism: What Conservative Women Know - and Men Can't Say and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex, and Feminism.

These books spout the same call to women to get our asses back into the kitchen and out of the work force so that we can truly be happy, because the only way for a woman to be happy with her life is to get married and have babies, don't you know? It's that simple. "Women in America CAN have everything they want out of life, but they must first break free from feminist assumptions and distortions."

Since when is a "traditional" family life a guarantee for happiness? Kids really serve to put a strain on relationships. It's a big responsibility, so couples need to have a solid relationship to begin with for everything to work out. That's why it's a stupid idea to try to fix a relationship with a baby. And what if I don't want kids? There's no need to chastise people for not wanting children, or to assume that it's just a phase that they'll grow out of. Of course the latter is usually directed towards women, because apparently it's natural for men to not want kids, but every woman wants a baby. That's not to say that wanting children is bad. Children are our future, and some women really are happy to make caring for their children their full time jobs. There are fathers taking on that role as well. Kudos guys. Don't let anyone criticize you for doing what makes you happy. Can we all just agree that there isn't one path in life that would make everybody happy? I'm pretty sure that's a fundamental lesson we learned in kindergarten: everyone is different and we should accept them for who they are.


Luckily, upon searching through the library catalogue that includes all of the branches, many more feminist friendly books showed themselves, but I guess they don't get to live at the main branch.