I was just checking out the Barnes & Noble website, browsing books and decided to check out what was under the category "gender studies." First off, it took me until the very end of the first page to identify anything I would call as feminist. More disturbingly, however, I found titles such as For Women Only: What You Need to Know About the Inner Lives of Men and Becoming the Woman of His Dreams: Seven Qualities Every Man Longs For.
What. The. Hell.
Since when did gender studies become cosmo? So when women (or men) want to look for gender studies, this is what they'll find. A bunch of self-help books that supposedly teach women how to mold themselves into an "ideal" for some man. This is really disheartening. Books like these not only damage women by telling them to behave in certain ways to get a man, but it also shortchanges the men who would have loved these women as themselves. It also sets up a woman's primary concern to be finding a man- not even love- but a man. As if catching a man equates happiness. Not to mention the extreme heteronormativity of the whole thing.
I have to admit, I have never opened one of these books (and, quite frankly, never plan to) because I a) have no desire to be exposed to such crap b) have no desire to contribute to the market for such crap but I do have a pretty good feeling that any book entitled Becoming the Woman of His Dreams is not going to be particularly enlightened. I am just enraged that anyone who would go out of their way to look for gender studies is going to be told that this qualifies as gender studies. I think I'm going to send a nasty email to B&N...
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