Eileen's Reviews > Cunt: A Declaration of Independence

I found the original 1998 edition at the bag sale portion of the library book sale, and I had some space in my bag, so it came home with me. I am a little surprised that I liked it so much. I'm thinking I may have been operating under the more standard social expectations generated by living in a male-dominant society. That seems likely.

It's dated a bit, which is no surprise considering it's 15 years old. The menstrual section talks about several alternatives to the standard give-the-man-your-money-every-month-forever tampons and pads, but cups are never mentioned, even though the keeper at least has been around since the 70s. The rape section concentrates entirely on violent attacks by strangers, although now it's well-known that most rape is perpetrated by someone the victim knows. Way to make this super-distant through phrasing, me. Hey, how about this? When I was raped, the rapist was my current boyfriend. That's a lot clearer, right? And I would be totally unsurprised to hear that other people's rape experiences were very much like mine. Confirmation bias? Maybe. But maybe it's just that it's socially unacceptable to talk about your own rape. It's Not Done. So no one really knows exactly how many people are raped, and by whom, and in what circumstance, because we're all conditioned not to talk about it at all, except perhaps to our most intimate friends and partners, and maybe not even then. So the main type of rape in the discourse in 1998 was the violent stranger type, possibly because news coverage of violent crime was practically the only place you ever heard about actual occurrences of rape.

Hey, how about that breaking the silence thing? That.

It's nice to actually have some evidence that perception of/knowledge about rape has changed in the past 15 years, right? Especially considering the utter shit that has been coming to light re rape over the past year or so.

Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised. I don't agree with everything in the book, of course, but that's ok. It's important just to bring up all the questions and question the assumptions and actually discuss what is not normally discussed. It's important to actually speak.

The recommended reading list is pretty great. I've read a decent chunk of it already, but there's plenty more to go. In fact, the whole resources of all types section must have been amazing in 1998. The main thing is that 15 years on we can find so much of this info on the internet, so we don't have to write away for things so much as to search for them. The resources themselves are still good though.