Books of Sad Realities
Girls and Sex
by Peggy Orenstein
Trigger warnings: Eating disorders, domestic violence, issues relating to sex.
In today’s day and age, many people claim to be progressive, yet sex is still something of a taboo. Sex is never to be discussed even in supposed “safe spaces.” And while this may seem normal, this lack of open discussion and conversation with young women and girls about sex has some devastating consequences.
Peggy Orenstein interviewed over 70 young girls and college-aged women. What she found was shocking. The overall theme is parents need to have more open and honest discussions with girls and young women about sex. To begin, due to the fact that many parents don’t talk to their daughters about sex, said children get their ideas about sex and their “sexual identity” from the media. The media, as in songs, television, and books, mainly discusses sex from the male perspective. This can lead to low self-esteem, hinder academic achievement, and in some cases, can lead to eating disorders.
Another aspect Orenstien covered was that many women find themselves pressured to have sexual relations with their partners and even friends. This is because they fear that they may look like a prude. Many women and girls have difficulty trying to not be a prude but trying not to be labeled a “slut” either. It’s a slippery slope that they feel their whole identity as a human being revolves around. Furthermore, many women, despite having negative sexual experiences, continued to have sex with the same people. This is due to the fact that they didn’t know sex is supposed to feel good for women.
Furthermore, because women only got their ideas about romance from the media, they were more tolerant of and more susceptible to getting involved in abusive relationships and unhappy marriages. Orenstein says this is because we still have this idea that women live to please and serve men. Therefore women do not recongize that they have their own needs both physical and emotional, which should and can be met. I do think this is a very important read, especially for women in college.
Maid
by Stephanie Land
If you enjoyed the Netflix show Maid, you will surely enjoy the book it was based off of. Maid is a memoir by Stephanie Land. She tells her story about how a fling in college ruined her life. She became pregnant with the child of a man who abused her: physically, emotionally, and financially. This resulted in Land making a run for it with her then three-year-old daughter.
Land wrote about her experience working as a cleaning service worker. This book, while being entertaining, opens up some themes about class dynamics. While Land struggled to survive and working herself to the bone, her clients treated her poorly. Either she was completely invisible to them, or some of her clients openly insulted and even physically abused her.
Another aspect was that Land was able to discover a lot about the personal lives of her clients simply by cleaning their houses. This was because she was able to look at their items. For example, she concluded that one of her client’s husbands was cheating on his partner as she discovered lingerie around the house that was much smaller than the client’s size. Furthermore, she recognized that said client was dealing with the infidelity by losing herself in romantic fantasy novels and smoking marajuana and cigarettes.
Another lesson that Land learned as a maid was that money did not buy happiness. Many of her clients lived sad and unfulfilling lives. Overall it is a very good book. Not only does it manage to shed light on the difficulty that poverty brings, yet it also paints a beautiful picture of what really matters in life.
—Jalaine Olks, Books Editor
Six of Crows
by Leigh Bardugo
TW: Death, drug use, violence
Six of Crows is the story of six teenagers: Kaz Brekker the demon, Inej Ghafa the wraith, Jesper Fahey the gun slinger, Nina Zenick the heart render, Matthias Helvar the Fjerdian, and Wylan Van Eck the demolitions expert in the fictional city of Ketterdam. These six teenagers live in a life of crime, and each have their own reasons for it, their traumas ranging from death, slavery, war, prison, abuse, the list goes on. In this book, they have been hired to find a dangerous drug that has been killing the Grisha, individuals with powers, and destroy it. The only problem is it’s in the land of Fjerda, the country that kills Grisha. This book is full of action, mystery, sadness, and dramatics and well worth the read.
—Kelsey Vanderpool