Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults
by Laurie Penny
Bloomsbury
London journalist Laurie Penny reports on radical politics, protest, digital culture and feminism from around the world and was the youngest person to be shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for political writing on her blog Penny Red. Her collection of essays is about gender, power and violence, and about the world beyond them which is scarier still.
Penny believes that the toxic patriarchal right is gaining strength all over the world. Even though the ways we talk about sex, gender are changing rapidly, there is a backlash with fascists “mustering on the edges of politics to dominate the mainstream”.
As Madonna says, “Sometimes you have to bitch to get things done” and Bitch Doctrine is intended to start conversations, not finish them. Penny acknowledges that resistance is exhausting but she encourages readers to hang on to their sense of what is right and just and necessary.
Defining herself as a poylamorous gender queer woman and a feminist, Penny is passionate in her desire to contest injustice. She relates her journey as a troubled gender queer teenager and also writes about her experience of being raped as well as the slowly changing awareness and solidarity against sexual discrimination and violence.
Penny has 160,000 followers on Twitter and in her eight years of feminist blogging she has covered a huge range of issues – far too many to summarise. There is a year’s worth of bedside reading on today’s social issues to provoke conversations and action.
Penny succeeds in her goal to inform, inspire and infect and she has an incredible way with words – describing Donald Trump as “that lying sack of personality disorders” and “a man who is the very personification of a wilting erection in a suit, leaking drivel everywhere in an attempt to grab America by the pussy”.
A brilliant read. “If you can imagine spaceships, if you can imagine time-travel, if you can conjure entire languages and alien races out of the wet space behind your eyes, you shouldn’t have a problem imagining a society beyond patriarchy.”
Lezly Herbert
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