I highly recommend Florence Given's 'Women Don't Owe You Pretty'. I've never read a feminist book in my life, and it has beautiful illustrations. A sequence of insightful points:
- "If the content you consume is exclusively delivered to you by people you find palatable...change your bland taste buds"
- "To begin unpacking your own desirability bias and 'preferences' you can start by listening to, learning from and respecting people you're not attracted to." Preferences are constructed.
- You are the love of your own life. Make your own cake.
Eating with our eyes affects our tastes; therefore eat differently. Seeing a finite range of any spectrum is unhealthy and you have to educate yourself. Someone once told me that they wouldn't pick up a book 'because that's not me'. bull shit. excuse my language. Long has it been argued that tastes are cultivated, and we all need to learn.
"Fatally complacent and wilfully deluded", is the phrase David Wallace-Wells used in his Uninhabitable Earth, a battery of climate change stories which is pretty heavy going. I've never read anything like it because it's draining. DW states that climate change is a concept so large, so complex that it cannot be comprehended. So it is ignored, and this 'convenient cognitive bargain' lets humans live like ostriches. But there won't be a shire, Pippin.
The lack of biodiversity in our lives is dangerous
End notes
- Women Don't OUP is £9.15 online.
- Locke, taste and habituation, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/226519 ; https://www.academia.edu/37794026/Habituation_and_the_Association_of_Ideas_in_Lockes_Developmental_Psychology
- An article on consumption and pictures, "Eating with our eyes: From visual hunger to digital satiation". https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278262615300178
- 5 things which can be done to protect biodiversity, https://medium.com/@WWF/5-ways-to-protect-biodiversity-5def3447e103