Living Dolls: The Return Of Sexism (2008) - Plot & Excerpts
Living Dolls could easily be split apart into 2 different books. While I was captivated by the second half of the book the first half was so hard to read, I had to force myself to go on. As a 17 year old I don't feel like the hypersexual culture that Walter described is in any way as prevalent as she thinks. In a way, it's worse, women are expected to have sex and at the same time be virgins, the smart not hot and hot not smart dichotomy still exists. Walter noticed a small part of culture that she didn't morally agree with and thought that it was spreading everywhere but it isn't. The world is not as sexist or biased towards hyper-sexualisation to any extent described by the book.However, I still maintain that the second half of the book was the interesting part and better half of the novel. Unfortunately, Walter only seems to reference a book called "Brain Sex" to support the social part and mainly focuses on Baron-Cohen's research on the biological explanation. Therefore, Walter, once again fails to look at the holistic picture of psychological research. If I was to recommend anything from this book it would be the second part of the book but I would never go to a store and buy a book to only read half of it so I wouldn't recommend buying any of it. It's a pretty pessimistic book, quite frightening for the future and even the last chapter which is supposed to give readers a silver lining didn't manage to lift my mood. I don't think people from my generation will learn anything new (born in the 80s) about how women are expected to behave, or how our society is shaping us to be. Rather, It's nice to see you're not the only one who thinks there's a serious problem with the image of women in our society... yet I can hardly see what we can do about it and the book fails to give any real solution to this growing problem hence the 4 stars.
What do You think about Living Dolls: The Return Of Sexism (2008)?
