How to Be a Woman

I may give this one more chapter, but honestly, even though I wanted to like it, I could not get past the section where as a music critic, she asserted that women had made no good music in the 80s (or done anything ever, really) thanks to living under the oppressive thumb of male culture. While many of the observations she makes are both trenchant and true, this struck me as absurd and jarring in an otherwise interesting book.

Part of what makes the idea of feminism compelling is the notion that women have done so much despite serious societal and cultural disadvantages. I feel like I hear about a different unknown woman every week who blazed a trail in some way, and I think Annie Lennox, Chrissie Hynde, Aimee Mann and Debbie Harry would all say that music in the 80s was pretty great thanks to women.