Powerful and succinct. I think this works very well as an audiobook, as it’s narrated well and such a personal experience.

Having just finished Nishga by Jordan Abel, this ties in well. It is unacceptable, and yet disturbingly necessary that everyone marginalized have to first perform their pain to be seen as human; otherwise subjected to incessant acts of dehumanization by people within the same room as them. But also in literature in general, and even more acutely in Canadian Literature, writ large.

This short examination of the damaging way men are socialized shouldn’t be anything new. It should be terrifying to every man, and I think everyone has had an experience as disturbing as the author, in which their default state is to assert their own agency over someone else’s. How did we learn this? Where did we see this? The answer, in my opinion, is literally everywhere, all the time. Men should be afraid of men. As should everyone else.

Internalized misogyny is a problem for everyone, but the people most in need of it being dismantled require the help of the people who society is built for. The only other threat I can think of is climate change. And I think it is just as—if not more than—dire a problem to confront; entangled in it. Solving this problem is as intersectional as it gets in humanity.