feminist blogs

Spoiler Alert: This is less a review than an analysis, so if you haven't read the book, I wouldn't read this post.

I was truly intrigued when a couple of feminist buddies emailed and asked if I'd read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a book I'd also seen on both my mom and dad's nightstands over the holidays. They all claimed that one of the characters was a feminist heroines of sorts, and that the book, overall, had a surprisingly feminist bent.

I just finished this 600 page whopper and I feel conflicted. On the one hand, I can totally see how Lisbeth Salander--detective, hacker, and general badass--is basically a feminist avenger. She has so much power--tracking down information that other people can't get, punishing sexual predators and misogynists in unexpected and vicious ways, and not giving a shit about conventional femininity.

On the other hand--at least in this first book in the series--she doesn't seek very capable of getting her own emotional needs met or being authentic in relationships. She's obviously been through some real shit, so she's in a place of figuring out how to feel safe in the world, which leads to some seriously violent and escapist behavior. I don't blame her for this. It makes sense as a first step toward transformation, but I think her full realization as a feminist heroine would look different--less scared, less reactive, more emotionally courageous.

I also thought that it was interesting that the book has gotten so popular despite it's truly gruesome content. Altogether, the trilogy had sold more than 12 million copies worldwide. It was disturbing, and while I understand that it's a novel, and as such is technically imaginary, the horrific crimes described are the kinds of things that happen to women throughout the world. It's not a classic detective novel, in this way. There's obviously an underlying political and sociological analysis on the part of author Stieg Larsson, who died in 2004, but fought racism and right wing extremism throughout his life.

I'm going to Miami, Florida on my spring break today. The most important thing to pack for a beach vacation (besides my huge pink straw hat, of course) is reading matter. There should be enough variety in it for all kinds of moods, weather conditions, and activities. On top of my regular subscriptions to newspapers and magazines that I get on my Kindle, here are the books I will be taking with me:

1. I got this book as a free gift from the New Left Review.  Zizek is one of the most important philosophers living today, and I absolutely adore his writings. In case you've missed these posts, I wrote about him here and here. Some conservative journalist (whose name I don't remember right now) referred to Zizek as "the most dangerous contemporary philosopher." So you can imagine how fantastic Zizek's writings must be.

I couldn't wait to start this new book and began reading it yesterday. Zizek's writing is clear and incisive, as always. For now, I'm loving First As Tragedy, Then As Farce. Of course, I will write a review of the book, as soon as I finish it.











2.                                      









Since Spanish mystery novels are my new research interest, I feel completely justified in reading as many of them as I can. So I'm bringing these three to the beach with me.

I love my profession. :-)











3. I just discovered that Louise Penny has a whole series of mystery novels set in Quebec. How amazing is that?? I miss Quebec dearly and will love reading about it during my vacations.

I can even kind of justify reading this novel from a scholarly point of view. I do need to familiarize myself with mystery writing in all languages in order  proceed with my research into Spanish detective fiction.

Hopefully, the university will pay for all these books when our money gets unfrozen.

Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls edited by Melinda Tankard Reist is a collection of essays/charges against the world-wide phenomena of the pornification of childhood thru advertising, marketing and pop culture.

This was a great book to read as the authors are Australian and sometimes I wonder how much of our collective reaction to porn and adult images going mainstream is a reflection of our country's Puritanical leanings. For the contributors to Getting Real, the problem is embedded in not just faux-feminism, but a twisting of feminism by marketers and others to make women believe that if they are "in charge" of their sexuality, then there isn't anything wrong with stripping, making out with other women to turn on men and so forth.


About half way thru the book I came across a few statements that made me think, "Wait a minute...This isn't a feminist book!" So I did some investigating of Reist and found that she is part of a women's think tank. Hmmm...Upon further digging, I came to the conclusion that the Women's Forum Australia seems to be what one might get if NOW and the Independent Women's Fourm had a lefty baby. If anyone has more info on them, I'd love for you to leave it in the comments. There's just a tinge of anti-sex sentiment in some essays.

While there are some essays that wade into slut-shaming such as calling out strippers and sex workers, I think on the whole it's a pretty good book. It's definitely a quick read. The essays are well cited, but avoid a lot of academic jargon. There's an eye-opening essay on street billboards and how it is illegal for people to have porn at the workplace, but we have to walk thru porn infested streets on a daily basis.

There was also one paragraph that turned the issue back onto me. The idea that many of us are Flickr'ing and YouTube'ing our children's lives that we are teaching them to perform their lives on camera. What's to stop them...are we teaching them the difference between that and performing sexually on camera? 

The best part of the book was a new term: corporate paedophilia. "Sexualising products being sold specifically for children, and children themselves being presented in images or directed to act in advertisements in ways modelled on adult sexual behaviour. (pg 42)" This goes far beyond the dress-up of our youth to performance on a daily basis. "The task for today's teenagers is to win back their freedom from the adults who run the advertising agencies and girls magazines and the 'sex-positive' media academics who insist that 'bad girls' are powerful girls. (page 93)"

There is also a discussion about the medicalization of girls' bodies. From HPV vaccines to plastic surgery, it's all there to ponder. As I said, the book is feminist, but with a dash of moderate/conservative feminism thrown in. But this topic does bring together some usually opposing forces. Thus it's always a good discussion.

Grab a copy for yourself at an indie bookstore or Powells.com.

Disclaimer: The only payment I received was the copy of the book after the publishers contacted me. And yes, when I cite passages, I kept the spelling the same, thus all the u's.

Euripides' Medea has defined the modern perception of her. Some time age, the Teatro Instabile Di Aosta presented, in Delhi, a contemporary revisiting of Euripides' Medea in a play based on the texts of Euripides and Pasolini revolving around “discriminations and forbearance, power and revenge, and the meeting of two extremely different worlds; the one that is logical and rational, and the other one that grapples with the possible reality of mythology and ritual,” as the brochure said. The performance was meant to portray the universality and power floating in the story culminating in the “terrible decision that Medea comes to as a result of her painful suffering.”

Her “painful suffering” was the suffering which her husband Jason inflicted on her by being unfaithful to her and marrying Glauce, a princess to further his political ambitions. He justified himself by saying that he could not pass up the opportunity to wed a princess, and Medea was, after all, a barbarian woman, never mind that she was a barbarian woman who'd given up family, home, and homeland for him. He ultimately, apparently, planned to "unite" the two families -- his family with Medea, and with Glauce -- and turn Medea into his mistress.

Medea's "terrible decision" was the plan she decided to execute to revenge herself on Jason -- she killed Glauce (and, Glauce's father, Creon) using a poisoned dress, and killed the two children she had had with Jason in order to spite Jason and cause him as much pain as possible, or so one interpretation runs. Whether or not she should have been held accountable is debatable though.

Jason had supposedly remarried so that he could have children with Glauce. And when Glauce and her father-in-law were murdered by Medea, he apparently rushed to find the children he had had with Medea so that they would not be subjected to revenge because of their mother's act. It could well be argued that one of Medea's aims in killing her children was to spare them death at the hands of her enemies.

Then again, by killing the children, she effectively killed a part of Jason. And perhaps that was the ultimate revenge: Jason wanted children, and she not only deprived him of the possibility of having children with Glauce but also killed the children he had already had with her. To kill the children for a reason that was anything but altruistic would involve viewing the children not so much as individuals in themselves but as extensions of their father, which perhaps could be understood given that contemporary Greek society was intensely patriarchal, and viewed women mainly as breeders and chattel.

Contemporary Athenian law also allowed a man to marry and have children by a citizen woman while keeping a foreign woman who was not a citizen, in this case, Medea, as a concubine. And as far as divorce was concerned, all a man had to do was formally repudiate his wife, and send her back to her father or other male guardian with her dowry. There were two reasons who this did not apply to Jason and Medea though: firstly, Medea had contracted her own marriage, and as such, she had no one she could be "returned to". Secondly, Jason had sworn to be wed to Medea before Zeus and Hera, and as such, by divorcing her, he had in fact, broken an oath to the Gods.

Whether on not Medea is, or should be, criminally culpable is an open question though lying on thoroughly ambiguous moral ground. Medea was obviously distraught at the time she developed her plan for revenge. The murders were premeditated to the extent that she did not commit them on the spur of the moment. However, she developed the plan at a time when she was quite obviously not emotionally stable. And the duration of the time from when she first conceived of the plan to the time when she executed it was short.

In addition to this, there is the question of provocation. In law, if a person commits a crime in consequence of being provoked, their criminal liability could be diminished to the point of being non-existent. It isn't clear whether Jason's conduct would be viewed as "adequate provocation" to cause Medea to commit multiple murders -- presumably, it was not unheard of conduct at the time the play was written -- although it would be difficult to argue that Medea's committing the murders had nothing to do with her being cast off, and banished. She lived in a society in which she seems to have had no recourse to any form of justice, as a "barbarian" woman she was especially disadvantaged, and being exiled would have left her in an entirely hopeless position.

Medea states in the play that she knows her own mind, and that she knows that what she is doing is wrong. However, given that the act which seems to have spurred her to commit the murders is her banishment with immediate effect by Creon, Glauce's father, it is unlikely that she did actually know her own mind.

She managed (by being manipulative) to get a twenty-four hour grace period from Creon, during which time she both planned and executed the murders. Jason arrived to meet her after Creon left her, and insulted her. It was in these twenty-four hours that she planned and committed the murders. In the play, she is simply not decisive with regard to murdering her children until the last possible moment.

Medea unequivocally states in the play that she is an autonomous individual -- an assertion which in itself would have been questionable especially given that women were subject to the rule of men in a very literal sense with little autonomy of their own. Perhaps in the way that Glauce seems to have been little beyond a pawn in the schemes of her father and Jason, and who died because of those schemes.

Medea, however, managed to thoroughly subvert Jason's schemes, and escape the consequences of her actions. At the end of the play, she is shown escaping in a chariot provided by the Gods -- leaving no doubt of whom they supported. She speaks in a voice which is reminiscent of that used by the Gods, cold and distant. Driven to murder by Jason, she is ultimately far removed from emotion itself, it would seem.

Image: Medea by Sandys from WikiCommons

I haven't had a chance to read Marisa Meltzer's awesome sounding new book, Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music, but you know shit is promising when Viva la Feminista's six-year-old daughter is trying to catch a sneak peek. She wrote:

What I found most intriguing about the book was how Meltzer outlines how a group of feminists grabbed guitars, drums and the mic and launched a very real music revolution and then how that revolution was so successful that it is quickly evolved into what we typically think of as "Girl Power" music...Girl Power also made me stop and consider how do we want girls to discover feminism. Or more to the point, how do we think we can get them to discover feminism? My daughter has taken a liking to this book solely due to the title. The kid has asked me how I have liked the book, what it's about and tried to read over my shoulder.

92Y Tribeca is hosting a killer launch for the book on Wednesday, March 3rd, that includes a slide show, a dramatic reading from Courtney Love's diaries and performance by the band Supercute!. The panel features Sean Fennessey, the Director of Merchandising for eMusic.com and former Music Editor of VIBE, Emily Gould, of much blogger fame, Elizabeth Spiridakis, of White Lightning, and Marissa herself. If you're in the NYC-area, check it out. The complete deets.

by Pam Spaulding

Let’s start with the good news before going right to the crazy.

Benjamin Todd Jealous, the president and CEO of the NAACP has named Van Jones as a recipient of the civil rights organization’s highest NAACP Image Award for 2010—The President’s Award.

Van Jones is an American treasure.

He is quite simply one of the few Americans in recent years to have generated powerful new ideas that are creating more jobs here.
He wrote the national bestseller, “The Green Collar Economy,” which provided the definitive blueprint for retooling American industry to create pathways out of poverty and generate a national economic recovery. He was a driving force behind passage of the 2007 Green Jobs Act. In fact, Van’s ideas have helped lead to the creation of tens of thousands of jobs across the industrial Midwest and throughout the nation’s decaying urban and rural areas.

Van Jones also may be the most misunderstood man in America.

He resigned from the White House last year after some sought to discredit him for missteps, such as political statements made years ago. However, we can never afford to forget that a defining trait of our country is our collective capacity to practice forgiveness and celebrate redemption. This is a nation built on second chances.

His appointment as President Obama’s “green jobs” czar occurred early on—and his tenure experienced a death by a thousand right wing cuts and resigned/was tossed under the bus (you make the call), for a controversial past. The smear machine worked.

Jones, who joined the administration in March as special adviser for green jobs at the CEQ, had issued two public apologies in recent days, one for signing a petition in 2004 from the group 911Truth.org that questioned whether Bush administration officials “may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war” and the other for using a crude term to describe Republicans in a speech he gave before joining the administration.

His one-time involvement with the Bay Area radical group Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), which had Marxist roots, had also become an issue. And on Saturday his advocacy on behalf of death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted of shooting a Philadelphia police officer in 1981, threatened to develop into a fresh point of controversy.

But what has earned Jones the NAACP President’s Award is is present contributions to society, not what he has already apologized for in the past:

Through Green for All, and others organizations, Van Jones continues to work for an American economy that can thrive again—a nation whose prosperity reaches beyond Wall Street to Main Street and back streets. A country where jobs in installation, manufacturing and construction flourish again—to upgrade our homes to conserve energy, create solar panels, build electric cars, and manufacture wind turbines and smart batteries.

Furthermore, Van is working to make sure that our country does not lose out to India, China or Germany in the green industrial race. His vision gives us a fighting chance to reclaim something we lost years ago, back when steel was king. In those days, blue-collar workers could support their families with their wages, and our nation was not the world’s leading debtor. Van’s vision, in short, is a vision for America restored to its place as the definitive world economic leader.

***

With that in mind, it was interesting to see this tripe land in my inbox from Coral Ridge Ministries pimping its outlandish TV show that includes Van Jones in a less-than-celebratory, fact-based manner.  Unleash the crazy below the fold…

Radical Nature of Obama’s White House “Czars” Exposed in Nationwide TV Special to Air Sun., Feb. 28

FORT LAUDERDALE, FL (February 23, 2010)

Obama’s appointees are “bent on socialist policies; there’s really no other way to describe it,” stated Robert Knight, Coral Ridge Ministries’ Washington, D.C., Correspondent and author of the explosive new book, Radical Rulers: The White House Elites Who Are Pushing America Toward Socialism.

The roster of White House radicals profiled on the TV special include:

* Carol Browner, the President’s “Climate change czar,” found to be a member of the Socialist International.

* Van Jones, formerly the President’s “Green Jobs Czar,” responsible for finding ways people could be employed through alternative energy development. Jones resigned after revelations that he was a self-avowed Communist.

* Kevin Jennings, the founder of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, appointed “Safe Schools Czar” in the Department of Education. Jennings advocates a radical homosexual agenda that includes instructing public school students to accept homosexuality.

“Barack Obama has surrounded himself with probably the most radical group of advisors of any previous administration in American history,” said Dr. Gary Cass, President of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission, on the broadcast.

The TV special looks at other radicals commissioned by the current administration to bring “change” to America—individuals like Chai Feldblum, a law professor, lesbian activist, and advocate of polygamous marriage, nominated to serve as an Equal Employment Opportunity Commissioner.

Feldblum announced at a 2004 seminar a “strategic plan” to bring about the gay agenda in the workplace this way: “It requires the statement that ‘gay sex is morally good.’… The idea is we want to change the American workplace and we want to revolutionize social norms.”

“The real disaster with President Obama is the fact that the public has absolutely no say- so in what’s happening [with appointees]. This is completely unprecedented,” said Janice Shaw Crouse, executive director of The Beverly LaHaye Institute and a guest on the TV special. Obama’s czars “require no Senate confirmation, and nobody knows who is being appointed. They are appointed under the radar.”

Program host Dr. Jerry Newcombe asks Knight on the broadcast if he believed Americans had any idea about Obama’s radical agenda, now evident in the nature of his appointees.

“Surveys show that Americans have changed their views of Obama,” Knight said. “The people who once believed that he was a centrist, a moderate, a bargainer who could bring parties together, now believe that he’s a divisive, leftist, big government, big spending President, and they don’t like what he’s doing.”

Knight’s brand new book, Radical Rulers, is available at http://www.radicalrulers.org.

###

INTERVIEW REQUESTS

Coral Ridge Ministries is a Christian media outreach founded by the late Dr. D. James Kennedy. Its programming reaches a national television, radio, and Internet audience at

I always read half a dozen books at the same time. There are books for all kinds of moods and purposes among them. This is what I'm reading right now and why:


1.  Almudena Grandes, a well-known Spanish writer once wrote a hugely famous pornographic novel The Ages of Lulu. Since then, she has been trying very hard to show that she can do something other than pornography. (I do not recommend The Ages of Lulu as pornographic reading because it's really unappetizing kind of pornography. Although there is no accounting for tastes. I analyzed the novel in my doctoral dissertation and feel beyond fed up with its inept porn scenes.)


The main reason why I decided to read this author's El Corazon Helado/ The Frozen Heart is that it is 1200 pages long. I love endlessly long novels. Even though it's a mild form of exercise to keep this volume in your hands. (saly, it's not available on Kindle yet).


This novel about the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath turned out to be pretty good. It even made me cry twice. And I'm only on page 537.


2.  This is my mystery novel du jour. I picked it up because the main character is a psychoanalyst who is being pursued by a deranged former patient. Or a deranged child of a deranged former patient.

I have to say this is the weirdest mystery novel I have read for a while (and I read detective novels all the time.) Not only does the psychoanalyst have a pretty poor command of the English language, he is also a pretty freaky individual. You go into therapy with somebody this weird, you'll come out a lot more messed up.

I've been reading this book in bits and snatches for the past week and it always puts me to sleep in ten minutes or less. So I feel very rested.

It isn't a really bad book or anything. It's just very weird.

3. This book by a Canadian professor is brilliant. It discusses many of the important issues that the higher education system faces today in North America.

As somebody who was worked both for Ivy league schools and a public university, I can appreciate the truth of what Giroux is saying.

How can we talk of a higher education if the system is under the growing control of corporate entities? Should the purpose of higher education be to create obedient zombi-like robots, willing to sacrifice their lives in the service of their employers? Or should we remember that the purpose of higher education is to educate students as thinking individuals, capable of being responsible citizens, aware of the world around them?

Great book, even though it is sadly unavailable on Kindle.

4. Howard Zinn died recently and among the flurry of obituaries dedicated to him, I suddenly realized that - to my great shame - I never read any of his books. So I bought this one.

I only just started reading it, so my impressions for now are minimal. At this point, I can say that even though he is not as good as Eric Hobsbawm  (my favorite historian), his writing style is clear and precise.

I will share my impressions when I'm done.







5. This is another detective novel I'm reading. But this one is actually work-related.
I am preparing a talk based on this novel for a conference in my field. I really wanted to attend this conference for personal reasons (it will take place in Montreal, my home and my favorite city in the world!). There were no sessions of even remote interest to me, though, except a session on detective novel in Spain.

So I thought that since I spend so much time (and money) reading (and buying) detective novels, I could put all this effort to good use by turning the detective genre into my new research. And then the university will pay for the mystery novels I buy.

This novel is really good. It is written so well and the language is so delicious that you even forget to care who the killer is. And that is no easy feat to accomplish for a mystery author.

Hi all! Remember, if you ever have something you'd like to see in the Sunday reading column, either your work or someone else's, send a link to rosiered23 (at) sparecandy (dot) com. And if you have a question for me, ask away at formspring. On to this week's suggestions:

I want to point you to something that simply warmed my heart (and apparently many others', judging by the comments). Have you ever heard of Tavi Gevinson? She is a teen (13 or 14 years old, I'm not sure) who writes the blog Style Rookie. It is a fashion blog in a way that no other fashion blog is. She lives Fashion, which is not something I'm so much interested in (I can't even get into fashion, to be honest). But the way she writes is delightful. Much more "mature" than most teens her age, I would say, but with enough "teen" to make it apparent she is a teen. I adore her writing style. Recently, she read and wrote about the book "Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music", which is about women in rock from the '90s to today. Please do yourself a favor and read her blog post about it. You can't miss things like this: "Never before had I felt that feminism was something I could be so much a part of."

And speaking of fashion-related-sort-of stuff, did you see Christine Hendricks on the cover of New York Magazine? I love it, so much that I'm including the image in this post! (Article here.) Also, Esquire's article about Roger Ebert is a must-read. Truly incredible, his story is. (Ebert's blog itself is must-read material for me these days.)

In other news:

• BBC is running a series of stories about women in the military. This is good stuff. The link is to the first article, and you can access the others with the tabs helpfully placed on the page.

• At Shiny New Coin: "Half the population can't be a niche market." So, so true.

• The Washington Post (column by Jessica Valenti): "For women in America, equality is still an illusion."

• At Change.org: "Boycott American Apparel and its Best Butt Contest." I. Do. Not. Like. American Apparel.

• On The Frisky: "Conservatives To Whack A Nancy Pelosi Pinata At Conference." There's a Harry Reid punching bag, too. Stay classy, GOP/Tea Partiers! Continuing that theme, Talking Points Memo writes: "Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell Rolls Back Non-Discrimination Protections For Gay State Workers." Such a disgrace. And one more, from Think Progress: "Kansas lawmaker compares rape to auto theft." Seriously?? OK, just one more, from New York magazine: "GOP Tries to Win Over Young Voters by Mocking Feminism, Gays." As I said on Twitter, maybe this guy doesn't realize it, but the people you would win over with such nonsense are ALREADY ON YOUR SIDE.

• From the New York Times: "Judge Sylvia Pressler, Who Opened Little League to Girls, Dies at 75."

• On Broadsheet: "Guys, get ready for Spanx." That's right, the "shaping" garment is being made for men.

• I really enjoyed "Stay-at-home Saboteurs" from Lunch Box Mom. The post is a few months old, but I just came across it a few days ago.

• On Frannie's Room: "Average Joe Fails To See Rape Culture, Doesn't Like "Tone" of Women Who Do." Such an infuriating topic, but it can't be written about enough. 

I've tried to limit the amount of reproduction rights/abortion news this week, because sometimes (OK, many times) it dominates the Sunday reading column, but I can't ignore these stories: 

• The Jacksonville Observer: "Abortion bill filed in legislature." The bill would criminalize most abortions now allowed under state and federal law." It's a direct challenge to Roe.
• CBS: "Planned Parenthood Video Sting: Was Clinic Allowing Secret Abortions?" Not good, at all.
• The Washington Post: "Anti-abortion activists say Robertson was right about Haiti."
• RH Reality Check: "Utah bill criminalizes miscarriage."
• RH Reality Check: "Oklahoma Supreme Court strikes down Statistical Reporting of Abortions Act as unconstitutional." Yay!!!

Not old as in an old issue! The new issue's theme is "old." 

On page 11 you'll find a short an interview I did with Rana Husseini, whose memoir, Murder in the Name of Honor [indie or Powells], about her leadership to bring awareness to so-called honor killings in her homeland of Jordan and around the world. We chat about how Western feminists should handle these crimes in the USA and other countries. I also asked her how Western feminists can support her work better.

If you're not a subscriber (become one today!), head on out to your local bookstore and grab a copy!

Also don't miss my friend, Keidra's review of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture on page 60!

In every book you read, there's almost always that one line buried somewhere deep in the text of the book which will strike you.

Reading Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen, for me, that line was: "Nobody can tell me different," in a conversation between a mother-in-law and her daughter-in-law who had been subjected to domestic violence by her son:

"I want to ask you something," I had said that day to Ann Benedetto. "What was your husband like?"
"What kind of question is that?"
I didn't know what kind of question it was. It was maybe the first direct one I'd asked Bobby's mother, but I was emboldened by the tenderness in my elbow where I'd hit one of the dining room chairs after he shoved me, after I said I wanted to stay home Sundays, not go to Ocean Avenue.
"Was he good to you?"
"He was my husband."
"Did he ever hit you?"
She narrowed her eyes to look at me, and her dislike was an atmosphere, too, as thick as the isolation the two of in that clean, clean room, our distance from each other and from the man outside, calling to his son.
"My son is a good man," she said. "Nobody can tell me different."
Her face was hard then, and it was hard when opened the door to find me standing on her concrete steps, clean the way steps are when someone sweeps them everyday.

The book not only describes the violence in detail but also the woman's falling in love at the age of 19, the way her husband acclimatised her to his violence and tested how far her could go, the emotional upheaval, the effect of the violence at home on their son, her fleeing from her husband with their son, her new life without her husband in which she always had to keep looking over her shoulder, her falling in love again with a non-abusive man, her husband's eventually finding her and their son, his leaving her for dead (after assaulting her) and taking the child away, her inability to use the law to claim custody of her child, her husband's cutting her off from their son by remaining constantly on the move and not staying near anyone including his own mother, her son's trying to get back in touch with her without any success.

All of that, and the one line which I distinctly remember is: "Nobody can tell me different." A mother refusing to acknowledge that her son could be abusive. A mother-in-law effectively blaming her daughter-in-law for what had happened. A woman refusing to support another woman in crisis. Two mothers both cut off from their their sons because one of them was abusive.