{"id":1162,"date":"2003-01-31T08:19:00","date_gmt":"2003-01-31T08:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/2003\/01\/better-than-balls.html"},"modified":"2003-01-31T08:19:00","modified_gmt":"2003-01-31T08:19:00","slug":"better-than-balls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/2003\/01\/better-than-balls.html","title":{"rendered":"Better than Balls"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last night Hannah, from work, and I went to a reading at BU’s bookstore (are all college bookstores run by Barnes and Nobles<\/a> these days? BU’s is. Harvard’s is. University of Washington’s bookstore<\/a>, though, remains steadfastly independent. Yeah, U-Dub!) for a book called That Takes Ovaries!: Bold Females and Their Brazen Acts<\/i><\/a>. It’s a collection of very short essays of bold things women have done, everything from attacking back when being attacked to demanding equal playground rights in elementary school. They’re written by women of all ages. Over all the stories are great, but I do think there are too many of them of women doing brazen acts that fall under the realm of questionable (sometimes it’s better to just escape an attacker than to try and hurt him especially if you don’t know if he has a gun or a knife). But over all, the book seems good (when I’m done reading it, I’ll give it full critique). The reading, though, brought me back to my younger days in New York, when I’d hang out a women’s bookstores, go to hear people such as Andrea Dworkin<\/a> speak, and spend my time going to pro-choice rallies. When did I stop doing those things? When did I become a suburban frau? Actually, I stopped doing those things long before I married. Is it a phase young women go through and then grow out of? I mean, the editor of this book was easily my age or older–she never grew out of it. I think there came a point where I didn’t feel I was making a difference as a single voice among many. I think I’ve done more by just leading the life I’ve wanted, by not letting my gender interfere with doing what I want (I still remember how freaked my mom was when I decided to take my three-month solo cross-country trip. Would she have been as frightened if I had been a boy? If I remember her panicked night-before-I-left note correctly, it said something to the effect of, “You could get raped. You could get murdered. You could get raped and murdered by some cop on a Texas highway.” I’m sure that’s not an exact quote, but you get the drift). As one of the authors put in her essay, Is just living a political act? Maybe it is. Maybe just leading your life they way you see best is enough of a statement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night Hannah, from work, and I went to a reading at BU’s bookstore (are all college bookstores run by Barnes and Nobles these days? BU’s is. Harvard’s is. University of Washington’s bookstore, though, remains steadfastly independent. Yeah, U-Dub!) for a book called That Takes Ovaries!: Bold Females and Their Brazen Acts. It’s a collection […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1162\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}