Asking For It, by Louise O'Neill

It’s not every day you receive a copy of a YA book with a letter in it that explicitly says, don’t recommend this book to younger readers because of its content. In fact, it’s the first time this has ever happened. Asking For It is surely one of the bravest, most confrontational books to be written for teenagers in, well, ever. The title alone raises a multitude of important questions and issues, and it is so important to keep saying them, and saying them louder.

Emma is the epitome of the popular girl. She is thin and perfect and beautiful, and everyone wants to be her. She has a solid group of friends, she knows how to socialize, and she likes getting a response from boys; in fact, she will behave in certain ways just to get those responses. At the latest party, she has set her sights on Jack Dineen, local football star, but when he picks someone else, she figures Paul O’Brien, football captain, might make him jealous. But then it all goes wrong: she is raped; she is filmed; the film is posted online.

‘How could you behave like that?’ people ask her in the following days, ‘Why would you do that?’ And, ‘You’re disgusting,’ they say. It never occurs to anybody that she didn’t allow it to happen. She doesn’t want to admit she doesn’t really remember any of it at all; she doesn’t want to call it that word. And when it finally is called ‘that word’ it definitely doesn’t make anything better. Days and weeks and months of turmoil and trouble and arguments and hate and questioning follow. Will there ever be an end? Will her friends ever talk to her again? Will anyone ever really believe her?

This is a very difficult book to write about, not just because of the content, but I think because of what the content means. Emma herself is actually quite hard to like, she’s so focused on everyone else’s perceptions of her. And she’s difficult to understand sometimes too, but I think this is because she’s real. She’s not two-dimensional, and this allows her to have ideals and wants that conflict with one another, something that I think is perhaps not what I’m used to seeing in fictional characters, and that, ironically, makes her harder to understand or relate to directly. She doesn’t want to rock the boat but she wants to stand out – but for being pretty, not for making a fuss, whilst she hates her mother’s constant commenting on what she needs to do to be pretty and popular. Her parents, too, are contradictory, and impossible to like. They support her; they don’t support her; they refuse to understand her and only see what they choose to see.

Louise O’Neill touches upon all of the many, varied aspects of sexual culture, rape, feminism, consent in this book, bringing it to the foreground and shoving it in our faces. And when I say ‘shoving’ it, I mean it in a ‘waving the obvious, the facts’ at the world way, a ‘how can people ignore this’ way. There is the language used to describe girls who have sex (or, equally, if they refuse sex); the ‘banter’ that invades everyday conversation that’s anywhere from mildly to majorly derogative, offensive or invasive; the manner in which social media escalates things; and, of course, the concept that when someone is raped it is somehow their fault, that they brought it on, and has nothing to do with the rapist committing a criminal act, their ability to decide what is right and wrong, what is acceptable behavior and what isn’t.

I like O’Neill’s style of adding Emma’s sideways thoughts into the text, using brackets that give the impression of the thoughts being extra-curricular, barging in unwanted, the things you don’t want to think about but can’t help doing so. It’s very effective and makes Emma even more real, even more conflicted. And boy is O’Neill is an excellent writer. Here she touches on some of the themes from her debut, Only Ever Yours, but it’s a disturbing book in a different way to Only Ever Yours, which picks up the concept of perfection and the woman’s “place” and takes it to an extreme level to demonstrate how disturbing it is; Asking For It is disturbing because it doesn’t need to create a dystopian world to make its point – what happens today is horrid enough in its own right.

This is probably not a book to read if you are a person who has been raped; it doesn’t strike me as one of those stories that, if you see yourself in the characters, you will find solidarity and peace from a relatable experience. This is because it’s a book based on real life, a book based on what happens to the majority of people who are raped and abused – in other words, this is probably not a book that will give you the courage to stand up and say, I was raped, these people attacked me, I didn’t ask for it. What Asking For It does do is highlight the perverse and frankly disgusting attitude much of our society has to cases of rape, that the victim must essentially prove their innocence rather than prove their attacker’s guilt. That the process essentially forces this person to be raped all over again.

Needless to say, Asking For It is not really a book to be 'enjoyed', but it is absolutely a book to be appreciated, and it’s a book that I hope will be read widely by boys and girls, men and women, and everyone in between. While it might not be a book to help those who’ve suffered through similar, I hope it will make people stop and think about what consent is and what consent means and how they might be behaving, and if it makes even one person stop and think about their actions, about the things they say, about whether its nice to ‘rate’ a photo of someone, then good.

I could talk a LOT about the things that take place in this novel, and how they’re represented in the media and the world, and what it’s doing and I am certainly tempted to do so – consent, rape culture, the whole idea behind those three little words, ‘asking for it’ – but I think the better thing to do is for you to read the book yourself, because it lays things out pretty well on its own. So go do that – and then find lots of other people and start a discussion with them about it.


P.S. You should also go read this excellent article from Louise, My Journey to Feminism.

Everyday Sexism, by Laura Bates

Everybody should read this book. It’s like Laura Bates has taken my muddled and raging thoughts, pieced the pieces together and, amazingly, created constructive sentences from them.

Everyday Sexism is shocking, yet unsurprising. There are things recounted in here that make me furious and are just so innately wrong on every level imaginable, but which I know exist and take place every day; things which by many people are considered to be both normal and acceptable. Before reading Everyday Sexism, I was under no illusions about the sexist world we live in, but by laying it out before us in all it’s terrible detail, Laura Bates succeeds in making what is often invisible, visible, and in making me question the world around me, my reactions to it, and my place within it even more greatly.

Men: this is not a book that rages against you; it is not about some existential feminist ideal, it is about the fact that everyone, male, female or trans, has the right to be treated with respect, care and equality.

Let me be straight: sexism is far from dead. Sexism is bad for men AND women. And sexism begins when we are tiny, tiny children. There are many different forms of sexism, from the seemingly innocent childhood stereotyping that teaches us that girls like pink and boys like blue, to the very serious, such as rape. All forms of sexism are abusive and demeaning, and can result in emotional and mental damage: the “innocent” forms forcing men and women into boxes that are not only completely absurd, but can be emotionally damaging; the serious ones, criminal.

If you don’t think sexism exists, read this book and hopefully you will understand why it does and what we are all fighting against.

Two years ago, Laura Bates reached breaking point. Sick of not being able to walk down the street without being whistled at – among other things – she started the ‘Everyday Sexism’ project, a simple website for people to tell their experiences of sexism, whether minor or more serious. She was shocked at the responses. Thousands upon thousands of them, from everyday derogatory comments to workplace discrimination, to rape victims being ignored. The sheer volume of response highlighted beyond doubt the endemic nature of the problem, in Britain and around the world.

Chapter by chapter, Bates brings to the fore the nature of the problem, from the way that girls are treated in primary school, secondary school and further education, the media abuse and media portrayal of women (or how women are "supposed" to be), assumptions made about women in the workplace, assumptions made about “woman’s natural/expected role” (i.e. motherhood), assumptions made about women as they walk down the street. It’s all pretty shocking, though the proliference of pornography and rape "jokes" in our children’s schools is, I think, particularly disturbing.

And the other biggest thing that Everyday Sexism shows? For me, the answer to this question is the hypocrisy of it all. Newspapers, T.V. and magazines all picture women baring skin and flaunting their femininity. But when we dress similarly in real life we are yelled at on the street, leered at, treated in a demeaning manner and then – if we complain about such behavior - we’re told we’re asking for it by dressing like that. But if we don’t dress like it we’re abused for not being feminine enough. When we are propositioned, whether we accept or not, we are branded a slag or a slut. If we have multiple partners, the same. But men? No. If men have multiple partners they are praised for it. This is not equality.

And it is high time we challenged the status quo. The little everyday things may seem small, but: (a) they create a level of acceptability of sexism that is not actually acceptable, and (b) they provide a basis for more extreme sexist behaviours to occur. We have to draw the line somewhere, right? No: there should be no line; the line should be at the bottom; none of it should be deemed acceptable. None of it. Not even the delivery driver calling me “love” – it’s demeaning and implies that I’m soft or worth less than a man. I am neither. As Bates points out, “Allowing those ‘minor’ transgressions gives licence to the more serious ones, and eventually all-out abuse.” He wouldn’t call a man “love” would he? Then don’t use the term for me, please. And there’s the key: if you’re not sure whether sexism is happening to you, ask yourself, “Would this be happening if I was a man?”

Does this make me a feminist? My dictionary says that feminism is:

“A belief or movement advocating the cause of women’s rights and opportunities, particularly equal rights with men, by challenging inequalities between the sexes in society.”

So, yes, I guess I would consider myself a feminist. But sexism is not just about feminism: I am for equality of all the sexes (and yes, there are more than two). Feminism for me means that girls are allowed to like pink – and that it should be acceptable for boys to like pink too. I am reminded of shopping with my cousin and her son, when he was about three years old, and we went into a toy shop that had some dressing up clothes. He, completely of his own volition, chose a pink “princess” hat. His mum said he could have a hat, but bought him the purple wizard hat because the one he had chosen was “for girls”. He was perfectly happy with the wizard hat, but I was appalled: he chose the “princess” hat. Why not buy him that one? It’s fine for boys to not like pink; it’s fine for boys to like pink. Whatever. The choice should be theirs and there shouldn’t be any greater meaning behind their choice. It’s just a colour, for goodness’ sake.

Which brings me to my favourite quote from Everyday Sexism:

“My gender is not an insult.”

Which, in turn, brings me to my one small quibble: on the back cover of Everyday Sexism, in capital letters, the publishers have printed this book’s categorization: “Feminist Theory”. This is kind of sexist in and of itself: sexism is not a ‘feminist’ issue, it’s an ‘everybody’ issue. So why not simply categorise it as sociology? Sexism is bad for men as well as women, boys as well as girls, and all women, not just feminists. You don’t have to be a feminist to be sexually harassed or sexually assaulted.

Please don’t ignore what Laura Bates has to say – and besides, Everyday Sexism is not filled just with what she has to say. Far from it: Bates’ writing is populated with facts, statistics and research carried about by a multitude of respectable organisations and agencies. It’s overflowing with testimony, too: from the Everyday Sexism project, from interviews, from the media. And it’s filled with evidence that cannot be ignored: the movies we watch, the music we listen to, the sayings we use – all of which attest to the endemic, everyday sexism in our world.

Men: sexism is not about women or feminists, it’s about everyone. Sexism puts you in a box too.

Women: read this book and know that you are not alone; know that it is not your fault when bad things happen to you – it is not your responsibility to dress a certain way or take a certain route to work to avoid being harassed; you shouldn’t have to change your ways: the other party/s needs to take responsibility for their own actions and not blame you.