It’s my second time participating in Reading Ireland Month, run each March by Cathy of 746 Books and Niall of Raging Fluff. For this week’s nonfiction theme, I’ve put together reviews of two hard-hitting feminist books I happen to have read recently.
Vagina: A Re-education by Lynn Enright (2019)
Sex education is poor and lacking in many parts of the world, Enright argues, including the Ireland she grew up in in the 1980s. We need better knowledge about gender, anatomy (including the range of what’s ‘normal’) and issues of consent, she insists. To that end, she sets out to bust myths about the hymen, clitoris, female orgasm, menstruation, gynecological problems, infertility, pregnancy and menopause. Her just-the-facts approach is especially helpful in her rundown of the female anatomy. She also encourages women not to take no for an answer from doctors who try to deny or minimize their pain.
This is a confident book sometimes marred by TMI (all in the name of openness and honesty, but still…) and repetitive writing. For me, there was too much overlap with other books I’ve read over the last five years or so: Vagina: A New Biography by Naomi Wolf, The Wonder Down Under: A user’s guide to the vagina by two female Norwegian medical students, Gross Anatomy by Mara Altman (waxing), Notes to Self by Emilie Pine (see below! rape, menstruation and infertility) and the upcoming Constellations by Sinéad Gleeson (women’s pain). Thus, after about page 50 I just skimmed this one. If you haven’t read anything like Vagina before, though, it would serve as a wonderfully comprehensive introduction.
Some favorite lines:
“With vaginas, it seems, we doubt what we know. With vaginas, we listen to the lies, more than we listen to the truth. … We perpetuate the unsureness with our silences – and with our acceptance of lies.”
“Pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage and birth are common but extraordinary – each story is unique. Women benefit when those stories are told – and listened to.”
My rating: 
With thanks to Allen & Unwin for the free copy for review.
Notes to Self: Essays by Emilie Pine (2018)
Originally released by Ireland’s Tramp Press, this won the An Post Irish Book Award and has now been re-released by Penguin and other major publishers. You expect the average essay collection to contain 10 or 12 pieces, so the fact that there are only six here accounts for why they drag at a certain point. While I think most could be made snappier, they remain bold, accessible feminist takes on the body and expectations for women’s lives.
I especially liked “Notes on Intemperance,” the first essay, about her alcoholic father’s health crisis and the poor chances of him getting adequate treatment on Corfu, where he lived. She had to beg his nurses to wear gloves. When she learned that staff had to buy such disposables out of their own salaries, she understood – but was still appalled. Just being there was a miracle given there was no love lost between father and daughter.
Other essays are about infertility, the early breakdown of their parents’ marriage, menstruation and body hair, her wild teenage years and being raped, and the working woman’s constant struggle to be ambitious yet vulnerable without coming across as bitchy or oversensitive. The writing style is not flashy, but it doesn’t need to be. This is relatable straight talk, like you might get if you were to sit down with girlfriends of various backgrounds and experiences and actually discuss things that matter.
A favorite passage:
“It is hard to love an addict. Not only practically difficult, in the picking up after them and the handling of those aspects of life they’re not able [to] for themselves, but metaphysically hard. It feels like bashing yourself against a wall, not just your head, but your whole self. It makes your heart hard. … It took years of refusing him empathy before I realised that the only person I was hurting was myself.”
My rating: 
I read an e-copy via NetGalley.
I’ve also started a travel classic by Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle (1965), but travel books are such slow reads for me that I’ll likely be working on this one for months. Where I’ve got to now, she’s between Tehran and Afghanistan and nursing a bad sunburn. Already she’s eternally grateful that she brought a gun with her: she’s used it once to fend off wolves, once to deter a would-be rapist, and once to prevent bike thieves. Exciting stuff!
For Gibb, a university lecturer, biographer and novelist, the childless state was involuntary, a result of severe endometriosis that led to infertility and early menopause. Although this has been a source of sadness for her and her husband, she knows that she has it easy compared to women in other parts of the world. Through her research and Skype interviews, she hears horrific stories about infertile women who meet with domestic violence and social ostracism and are sometimes driven to suicide. In Ghana childless women can be branded as witches and exiled. Meanwhile, some are never given the chance to have the children they might long for: Gibb cites China’s one-child policy, female genital mutilation, and enforced sterilization programs like those of the Roma in Yugoslavia and the Quechua in Peru.
By coincidence, I’ve recently read another book on the same topic: Do You Have Kids? Life when the Answer Is No, by Kate Kaufmann (coming out in America next month). Gibb primarily traces the many different reasons for childlessness; Kaufmann mostly addresses the question of “now what?” – how women without children approach careers, wider family life, housing options, spirituality and the notion of leaving a legacy. Gibb’s approach is international and comparative, while Kaufmann’s is largely specific to the USA. Though the two authors are childless due to endometriosis and infertility, they feel sisterhood with women who never became mothers for whatever reason. I’d say these two books are complementary rather than rivals, and reveal valuable perspectives that can sometimes be overlooked.
A decade ago, Barbara Ehrenreich discovered a startling paradox through a Scientific American article: the immune system assists the growth and spread of tumors, including in breast cancer, which she had in 2000. It was an epiphany for her, confirming that no matter how hard we try with diet, exercise and early diagnosis, there’s only so much we can do to preserve our health; “not everything is potentially within our control, not even our own bodies and minds.” I love Ehrenreich’s Smile or Die (alternate title: Bright-Sided), which is what I call an anti-self-help book refuting the supposed health benefits of positive thinking. In that book I felt like her skeptical approach was fully warranted, and I could sympathize with her frustration – nay, outrage – when people tried to suggest she’d attracted her cancer and limited her chances of survival through her pessimism.
Lents is a biology professor at John Jay College, City University of New York, and in this, his second book, he explores the ways in which the human body is flawed. These errors come in three categories: adaptations to the way the world was for early humans (to take advantage of once-scarce nutrients, we gain weight quickly – but lose it only with difficulty); incomplete adaptations (our knees are still not fit for upright walking); and the basic limitations of our evolution (inefficient systems such as the throat handling both breath and food, and the recurrent laryngeal nerve being three times longer than necessary because it loops around the aorta). Consider that myopia rates are 30% or higher, the retina faces backward, sinuses drain upwards, there are 100+ autoimmune diseases, we have redundant bones in our wrist and ankle, and we can’t produce most of the vitamins we need. Put simply, we’re not a designer’s ideal. And yet this all makes a lot of sense for an evolved species.
This time around I found Yejide a more sympathetic character. The words that open this review are cruel ones spoken by her mother-in-law. Her desperation to become and stay a mother drives her to extreme measures that also give a window onto indigenous religion in Nigeria: ‘breastfeeding’ a goat on the Mountain of Jaw-Dropping Miracles, and allowing an act of ritual scarification to prevent the return of an abiku, or spirit child (I’ve heard that one narrates Ben Okri’s Booker Prize-winning 1991 novel, The Famished Road).
