- Australian Journalist David Leser has written a very detailed and comprehensive analysis of the key movement of our times - the slow but sure demolition of the patriarchy.
- It's full of facts, statistics, history and theology, and is clearly written and told.
- He trawls through both popular and academic literature, sometimes skimming the scholarly works and cherry picking the quotes, which makes it a bit too breezy at times. But it gets far better as it progresses.
- It traverses old ground, and we're all familiar with the #MeToo narrative and its cast of characters by now, but nevertheless he tells the story well and in detail.
- Leser surprises at times with his insight into male-female relationships and the challenges of interacting these days. He becomes very personal, recounting, for example, his conversation on a French train with ‘a beautiful woman’ who sat next to him. They talked for 90 minutes and he was tempted to invite her out when next in Paris. ‘It’s not the try-on that’s wrong, I’d argue; it’s the way the try-on happens’.
- The chapter Augustine Confessions is superb, particularly the section on the failure of his marriage. ‘My needs counted more. My projects counted more. My interests counted more’.
- He examines in detail the difficult terrain of the ‘grey zone’ where things aren’t so black and white and where career damaging accusations are frequently out of kilter with the gravity of the possible offence.
- Unlike Weinstein, with the Aziz Ansari story ‘we enter the nightlands of doubt and ambiguity’. Leser learns so much from his two daughters, now in their twenties, and as a result his commentary is so much more finely attuned than it could have been.
- He has lunch with an old friend Helen Garner and they talk though the issues, including the fierce reaction to her book The First Stone. Garner remains sceptical: 'I'm always attuned when a whiny note appears in these stories and a note of entitlement’.
- He also walks us through the enormously celebrated short story Cat Person, published in the New Yorker in December 2017, by Kristen Roupenian. ‘Boofheadedness’ met ‘gracelessness’. That's a great summary of the story.
- I was impressed by his assessment of new campus and corporate policies and protocols around sexual interactions that rarely get the balance right. ‘We need to live in a world of moral proportion and, right now, we don’t’.
- The chapter on India is enlightening. Its disastrous, primitive and cruel misogyny is very slowly being transformed.
- One quality shines through Leser's long narrative. After what must have been an arduous journey through the mire he can still talk with astuteness and sensitivity about ‘feminine qualities...which centuries of masculine culture have repressed or removed'.
- This is a superb book, well worth your time.
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