Athena, Holding Your Hair, Whispering In Your Ear

For me a few are enough, one is enough, none is enough. This is not for the many, but for you. We are audience enough for each other.

🟊🟊🟊

Cleverly written and deeply felt, this is a solid long essay about high heels as cultural symbol, and how they relate to the performance of femininity. The author is deft, and capable of evoking both laughs and horror. She also made me rethink a few things I'd thought I'd settled for myself and prompted some self-reflection about the performance of gender.

This would be a four star book, were it not for the fact that the author is kind of careless with facts. I found about a dozen false or misleading factual statements (plus some bonus typos or errors). A few representative examples:

1. She states that "[w]ithin the last decade, the United States has instituted a new legal definition of rape," and suggests the changeover happened in 2011 (no source cited). This was in a section about cultural attitudes towards sex crimes and underreporting of those crimes. The issue is that there's no national law of rape in the U.S., it's state by state. There are federal sex crimes, but those only apply in narrow circumstances, and no federal sex crime corresponded to the language she described. After much digging, she appears to be referring to a change in the way rape is defined solely for data collection purposes as part of the DOJ/FBI annual crime statistics roll up. So the statement as written is clearly false: the legal definition of rape has not changed (or if it has changed in some number of states, it hasn't changed in the way she described). What's frustrating is that, had she described it accurately, it would have better supported some of her arguments. Because the federal data collection definition was narrower than the legal definition of rape in most states, states were not reporting data on crimes they had charged as rape, but that didn't meet the federal data collection definition, which artificially suppressed the reported national crime rate (statistically erasing victims of rape).
2. She states (no source cited) that the phrase "rape culture" was coined in 2012, but every source I've seen suggests a coinage years or (more likely) decades earlier.
3. She describes an old campaign to ban high heels on the grounds that they caused "mayhem and mutilation" of women, but seems oblivious that the word mayhem has the additional sense of "maiming" or "crippling", and makes a joke about the prospect of high heels causing "mayhem."
4. These should probably be lain at her editor's feet, but there are a fair number of typos (extra or missing words, etc.) and howling malapropisms ("imminent" for "eminent"; "slayed" for "slain"; etc.)

In short (or in long) the author is not great on details. She is an elegant writer who has some well-expressed, lyrical, and pointed (pun intended) insights about high heels and modernity. Her broader points are excellent and well-observed; just make sure to look up any odd sounding details.