![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
what i'm reading wednesday 9/4/2025
Been super busy with other things, so I haven't read much lately. But I did finish two books in the last two weeks:
What I finished:
+ How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question by Michael Schur. Schur is the creator of Parks and Recreation and, more relevantly, The Good Place. To write TGP, he did a massive amount of research into moral philosophy, and he decided to use all that knowledge to write a book for laypeople (with a little bit of help from an actual moral philosopher).
And it is so delightful! I listened to the audiobook, which was absolutely the right choice. He has the stars of TGP make little cameos reading certain things, and it is so delightful to guess who he'll have pop up when (obsessed with how he has Jameela Jamil read all the most British things and Marc Evan Jackson whenever he wants to emphasize the dryness of a certain quote). Also, Schur has a great style of reading which is conversational without being too conversational. If you can do audiobooks at all, listen to this instead of reading the book.
Basically it's an overview of different strands of moral philosophy by way of lots and lots of dad jokes. Schur is a deeply dorky guy (complimentary)--if you've seen his shows, you know what I'm talking about. But he also cares so much about being a better person and making the right decisions. I particularly loved that he introduced us to various streams of (mostly but not entirely Western) thought (deontology, virtue ethics, utilitarianism, existentialism, ubuntu, etc.) and treats them like a toolbox-- his take is that some are more appropriate at one moment than another, and sticking to just one is probably a bad idea (agreed!). Some things come easier to some people, but if you work hard, you can get better in all areas. He's gentle and forgiving of human frailty, understands that a lot of this is difficult, and really wants his readers to connect with these ideas and build a better life with them.
His whole ~thing~ is trying to be better today than you were yesterday, which reads as super Jewish to me even though this book is not from a religious perspective at all.
I enjoyed this book from start to finish and recommend it to all!
+ Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists: The Truth about Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All by Laura Bates.
YIKES. This book is excellent and readable but also probably the most harrowing non-war book I've ever read. It does what it says on the tin.
Bates dives into different (mostly online) subcultures that are made up of men who really hate women in different ways and with different philosophies of how to react but with similar results (violence, basically). I don't know that there's anything new here, but the service this book provides is uniting a bunch of disparate cultural strands, understanding misogyny as one of the most powerful forces in 21st century society, and helping you see that the effects of it all on our culture. Bates really hammers home the differences in how we treat terrorists who are Muslim (or even explicitly white supremacist) vs. how we treat terrorists who hate women. I don't think I'd realized just how many of the mass killers of the past decade or so are more motivated by hatred of women than by even white supremacy (though that usually goes hand-in-hand).
Bates has a lot of compassion for boys and very young men who stumble into these ideas--there's a chapter about how the internet, particularly YouTube, funnels them in this direction whether they want to go there or not. If she was writing now, she'd probably add TikTok and podcasts to this, but either way, I came away convinced that even though it's almost certainly not the intention of the designers of these platforms to push boys and young men towards extremism, it's happening as a function of the way the platforms work.
Bates very much focuses on Anglophone culture, but there are similar dynamics from Brazil to France to South Korea. The book is a couple of years old, and honestly I felt really conscious of how much worse it's gotten since it was published, the way that people influenced by these ideas are in power now through the current administration's merry band of sexual abusers, and how misogyny has become an explicitly political force. I have been increasingly concerned about the divergence in political views of young women and young women, and while those particular statistics aren't outlined here (probably because they hadn't been gathered when she was writing the book), they were there in my mind the entire time I was reading it.
The last chapter is a "what can we do?" chapter, because there's always one of those. I have mixed feelings about how effective I think her propositions are, but I do think she's right that this is a problem that men have to fix themselves. The blackpilled men are simply not going to listen to women, no matter how sympathetic or right we are. Men have to come up with different models for masculinity. Bates honors the men who are doing this work...but I myself am not particularly optimistic that there are enough of them to turn back this tide. I hope I'm wrong. I really, really hope I'm wrong.
Honestly, it was probably a good thing I read this right after Mike Schur's book because I needed to hold onto the reminder that there are lots of men out there who are doing their best to be good people. Obviously I already knew that, but it helped to be able to say, "But there are lots of Mike Schurs in the world too!" to myself as I was reading.
What I'm currently reading:
I was starting Babylonia and feel unsure about whether I could put up with the style to read a book that will no doubt be very interesting, but I immediately dropped it when I got an alert on Libby yesterday. I thought I'd have to wait a couple more weeks for A Drop of Corruption, but some lovely person returned the ebook early so it came through yesterday! Yay! Obviously that is my first priority!
What I finished:
+ How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question by Michael Schur. Schur is the creator of Parks and Recreation and, more relevantly, The Good Place. To write TGP, he did a massive amount of research into moral philosophy, and he decided to use all that knowledge to write a book for laypeople (with a little bit of help from an actual moral philosopher).
And it is so delightful! I listened to the audiobook, which was absolutely the right choice. He has the stars of TGP make little cameos reading certain things, and it is so delightful to guess who he'll have pop up when (obsessed with how he has Jameela Jamil read all the most British things and Marc Evan Jackson whenever he wants to emphasize the dryness of a certain quote). Also, Schur has a great style of reading which is conversational without being too conversational. If you can do audiobooks at all, listen to this instead of reading the book.
Basically it's an overview of different strands of moral philosophy by way of lots and lots of dad jokes. Schur is a deeply dorky guy (complimentary)--if you've seen his shows, you know what I'm talking about. But he also cares so much about being a better person and making the right decisions. I particularly loved that he introduced us to various streams of (mostly but not entirely Western) thought (deontology, virtue ethics, utilitarianism, existentialism, ubuntu, etc.) and treats them like a toolbox-- his take is that some are more appropriate at one moment than another, and sticking to just one is probably a bad idea (agreed!). Some things come easier to some people, but if you work hard, you can get better in all areas. He's gentle and forgiving of human frailty, understands that a lot of this is difficult, and really wants his readers to connect with these ideas and build a better life with them.
His whole ~thing~ is trying to be better today than you were yesterday, which reads as super Jewish to me even though this book is not from a religious perspective at all.
I enjoyed this book from start to finish and recommend it to all!
+ Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists: The Truth about Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All by Laura Bates.
YIKES. This book is excellent and readable but also probably the most harrowing non-war book I've ever read. It does what it says on the tin.
Bates dives into different (mostly online) subcultures that are made up of men who really hate women in different ways and with different philosophies of how to react but with similar results (violence, basically). I don't know that there's anything new here, but the service this book provides is uniting a bunch of disparate cultural strands, understanding misogyny as one of the most powerful forces in 21st century society, and helping you see that the effects of it all on our culture. Bates really hammers home the differences in how we treat terrorists who are Muslim (or even explicitly white supremacist) vs. how we treat terrorists who hate women. I don't think I'd realized just how many of the mass killers of the past decade or so are more motivated by hatred of women than by even white supremacy (though that usually goes hand-in-hand).
Bates has a lot of compassion for boys and very young men who stumble into these ideas--there's a chapter about how the internet, particularly YouTube, funnels them in this direction whether they want to go there or not. If she was writing now, she'd probably add TikTok and podcasts to this, but either way, I came away convinced that even though it's almost certainly not the intention of the designers of these platforms to push boys and young men towards extremism, it's happening as a function of the way the platforms work.
Bates very much focuses on Anglophone culture, but there are similar dynamics from Brazil to France to South Korea. The book is a couple of years old, and honestly I felt really conscious of how much worse it's gotten since it was published, the way that people influenced by these ideas are in power now through the current administration's merry band of sexual abusers, and how misogyny has become an explicitly political force. I have been increasingly concerned about the divergence in political views of young women and young women, and while those particular statistics aren't outlined here (probably because they hadn't been gathered when she was writing the book), they were there in my mind the entire time I was reading it.
The last chapter is a "what can we do?" chapter, because there's always one of those. I have mixed feelings about how effective I think her propositions are, but I do think she's right that this is a problem that men have to fix themselves. The blackpilled men are simply not going to listen to women, no matter how sympathetic or right we are. Men have to come up with different models for masculinity. Bates honors the men who are doing this work...but I myself am not particularly optimistic that there are enough of them to turn back this tide. I hope I'm wrong. I really, really hope I'm wrong.
Honestly, it was probably a good thing I read this right after Mike Schur's book because I needed to hold onto the reminder that there are lots of men out there who are doing their best to be good people. Obviously I already knew that, but it helped to be able to say, "But there are lots of Mike Schurs in the world too!" to myself as I was reading.
What I'm currently reading:
I was starting Babylonia and feel unsure about whether I could put up with the style to read a book that will no doubt be very interesting, but I immediately dropped it when I got an alert on Libby yesterday. I thought I'd have to wait a couple more weeks for A Drop of Corruption, but some lovely person returned the ebook early so it came through yesterday! Yay! Obviously that is my first priority!
no subject
The second one ……. Oof. 😞😞😞
no subject
Yeah...
no subject