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bisexualwentworth 's review for:
Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays
by Jill Gutowitz
Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC of this book. All opinions are my own.
The idea of this book immediately intrigued me. The cover is fun and sapphic. It's a collection of essays about the intersection between sapphic identity and pop culture (or at least that's what it claimed to be). I thought it would be right up my alley. Unfortunately, my issues with this book ended up filling a very long document in my phone's notes app.
There were a few things I enjoyed. The essay on Orange Is the New Black was solid and interesting and just personal enough. If the whole book had been that caliber, I think I might have actually enjoyed it. Some of the musings on fame were interesting, and I definitely connected to a lot of the discussions of misogyny. I give credit where it's due to Jill Gutowitz for those parts of the book that I actually found interesting or valuable.
Now, my first issue with this book isn't a critique so much as an observation: the marketing indicates that I am the target audience. I am not. Unless you are a white cis femme lesbian who is obsessed with pop culture and has fairly poor media literacy skills, this book is not for you. I am only one and a half of those things, so a lot of it simply did not resonate with me. This is fine. Books don't have to resonate with everyone. Unfortunately, I also had a lot of actual issues with the writing and the content.
The writing was pretty poor and definitely not as funny as it was trying to be. The author also definitely thinks that she's much more famous than she is (I'd encountered her name maybe once before reading this book), and her overinflated sense of her own fame (which I'm sure this book deal added to) made her writing unpleasant to read at times.
The use of queer terminology was messy and confusing. The author used the terms "lesbian," "sapphic," and "queer woman" pretty much interchangeably throughout the book. This included referring to famously bisexual or pansexual celebrities like Janelle Monáe, Tessa Thompson, and Kristen Stewart as lesbians or "celesbians" as well as claiming that certain things were universal sapphic experiences when they were definitely specific to lesbians and should be discussed as such (I'm thinking specifically here about a discussion of lack of attraction to men, which is really important to discuss as a specifically lesbian experience).
The author seemed to know almost nothing about the history of sapphic media or sapphic pop culture for someone who wrote a whole book about these topics. She divides the entirety of sapphic media history into four eras. The first one includes everything from the dawn of time up till the 1980s. You're really telling me that you think it makes sense to put Sappho of Lesbos in the same category as Josephine Baker? (Not that the author mentioned either of those people.) She claimed that sapphic visibility in the media started in the 90s, which completely ignores the entirety of sapphic Old Hollywood, every culture where sapphic relationships have ever been normalized, and of course every sapphic book ever written. I'm not sure the author has ever read a novel. On top of that, the chronology of the sapphic media that she DID discuss was laid out in a messy and confusing way, and if I didn't already know of all of the films, shows, and artists she talked about, it would have been much worse. It is next to impossible to learn anything about sapphic media history from this book.
Maybe the most infuriating part of this book for me was the essay titled "One Day, You'll All Be Gay." In this essay, Gutowitz spends several pages discussing Perez Hilton and the harm he did to the queer community in the early 2000s with his agenda of outing celebrities. And then she uses all of this to talk about Taylor Swift and to argue that it's actually fine to speculate about Taylor Swift's sexuality and that this is in no way similar to what Perez Hilton did and also totally not taking attention away from all of the visibly sapphic musicians out there who deserve the attention that this author and her ilk give to Taylor Swift.
Other miscellaneous thoughts I wrote down while reading:
The idea of this book immediately intrigued me. The cover is fun and sapphic. It's a collection of essays about the intersection between sapphic identity and pop culture (or at least that's what it claimed to be). I thought it would be right up my alley. Unfortunately, my issues with this book ended up filling a very long document in my phone's notes app.
There were a few things I enjoyed. The essay on Orange Is the New Black was solid and interesting and just personal enough. If the whole book had been that caliber, I think I might have actually enjoyed it. Some of the musings on fame were interesting, and I definitely connected to a lot of the discussions of misogyny. I give credit where it's due to Jill Gutowitz for those parts of the book that I actually found interesting or valuable.
Now, my first issue with this book isn't a critique so much as an observation: the marketing indicates that I am the target audience. I am not. Unless you are a white cis femme lesbian who is obsessed with pop culture and has fairly poor media literacy skills, this book is not for you. I am only one and a half of those things, so a lot of it simply did not resonate with me. This is fine. Books don't have to resonate with everyone. Unfortunately, I also had a lot of actual issues with the writing and the content.
The writing was pretty poor and definitely not as funny as it was trying to be. The author also definitely thinks that she's much more famous than she is (I'd encountered her name maybe once before reading this book), and her overinflated sense of her own fame (which I'm sure this book deal added to) made her writing unpleasant to read at times.
The use of queer terminology was messy and confusing. The author used the terms "lesbian," "sapphic," and "queer woman" pretty much interchangeably throughout the book. This included referring to famously bisexual or pansexual celebrities like Janelle Monáe, Tessa Thompson, and Kristen Stewart as lesbians or "celesbians" as well as claiming that certain things were universal sapphic experiences when they were definitely specific to lesbians and should be discussed as such (I'm thinking specifically here about a discussion of lack of attraction to men, which is really important to discuss as a specifically lesbian experience).
The author seemed to know almost nothing about the history of sapphic media or sapphic pop culture for someone who wrote a whole book about these topics. She divides the entirety of sapphic media history into four eras. The first one includes everything from the dawn of time up till the 1980s. You're really telling me that you think it makes sense to put Sappho of Lesbos in the same category as Josephine Baker? (Not that the author mentioned either of those people.) She claimed that sapphic visibility in the media started in the 90s, which completely ignores the entirety of sapphic Old Hollywood, every culture where sapphic relationships have ever been normalized, and of course every sapphic book ever written. I'm not sure the author has ever read a novel. On top of that, the chronology of the sapphic media that she DID discuss was laid out in a messy and confusing way, and if I didn't already know of all of the films, shows, and artists she talked about, it would have been much worse. It is next to impossible to learn anything about sapphic media history from this book.
Maybe the most infuriating part of this book for me was the essay titled "One Day, You'll All Be Gay." In this essay, Gutowitz spends several pages discussing Perez Hilton and the harm he did to the queer community in the early 2000s with his agenda of outing celebrities. And then she uses all of this to talk about Taylor Swift and to argue that it's actually fine to speculate about Taylor Swift's sexuality and that this is in no way similar to what Perez Hilton did and also totally not taking attention away from all of the visibly sapphic musicians out there who deserve the attention that this author and her ilk give to Taylor Swift.
Other miscellaneous thoughts I wrote down while reading:
- Acknowledging that you're an obnoxious white person isn't actually helpful. Maybe you could just do better instead.
- So we're really going to ignore Harvey Milk when talking about out politicians? Yikes.
- Oh, so now we're equating womanhood with femininity and saying that it's uniformly bad to identify with masculinity or feel like a man? That's definitely not limiting or transphobic in any way! (sarcasm)
- Does she know that "Popular Song" by Ariana Grande and Mika is essentially a cover/remix of "Popular" from Wicked?
- She says that forbidden straight love doesn't exist as though interracial marriage wasn't illegal in this country for CENTURIES.
- The mommy stuff makes me deeply uncomfortable. I don't think that calling random women "mommy" without their consent is okay no matter who does it, actually!
- The 2020 Emma. is not a remake of anything. It is an adaptation of Jane Austen's 1816 novel. Please use the correct words for things. This is just foolish.
Overall, while there were individual passages and one full essay that I genuinely enjoyed, I found Girls Can Kiss Now to be confusing, reductionist, and generally unhelpful. I feel true sympathy and compassion for what the author had to endure as a queer person growing up in the early 2000s. I value and honor all of the harrowing personal experiences that she put into this book. I acknowledge that the book was a deeply personal labor of love. But I didn't like it. I wouldn't recommend it. I hope the author goes back to writing inane commentary about popular TV shows because she's probably better at that.
Content warnings: this book contains intense descriptions and discussions of rape and sexual violence, as well as multiple mentions of misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and toxic and abusive relationships. Oh, and there are some Harry Potter references as well.