I'm Afraid of Men
Books | Social Science / Gender Studies
4
(88)
Vivek Shraya
Named a Best Book by: The Globe and Mail, Indigo, Out Magazine, Audible, CBC, Apple, Quill & Quire, Kirkus Reviews, Brooklyn Public Library, Writers’ Trust of Canada, Autostraddle, Bitch, and BookRiot.Finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award, Transgender NonfictionNominated for the 2019 Forest of Reading Evergreen AwardWinner of the 2018 Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design – Prose Non-Fiction"Cultural rocket fuel." --Vanity Fair"Emotional and painful but also layered with humour, I'm Afraid of Men will widen your lens on gender and challenge you to do better. This challenge is a necessary one--one we must all take up. It is a gift to dive into Vivek's heart and mind." --Rupi Kaur, bestselling author of The Sun and Her Flowers and Milk and HoneyA trans artist explores how masculinity was imposed on her as a boy and continues to haunt her as a girl--and how we might reimagine gender for the twenty-first century.Vivek Shraya has reason to be afraid. Throughout her life she's endured acts of cruelty and aggression for being too feminine as a boy and not feminine enough as a girl. In order to survive childhood, she had to learn to convincingly perform masculinity. As an adult, she makes daily compromises to steel herself against everything from verbal attacks to heartbreak.Now, with raw honesty, Shraya delivers an important record of the cumulative damage caused by misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia, releasing trauma from a body that has always refused to assimilate. I'm Afraid of Men is a journey from camouflage to a riot of colour and a blueprint for how we might cherish all that makes us different and conquer all that makes us afraid.
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Author
Vivek Shraya
Pages
112
Publisher
Penguin
Published Date
2018-08-28
ISBN
0735235945 9780735235946
Community ReviewsSee all
"i like how the author uses the second person to recount her experiences with misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia. it gives the sensation that you (the reader) could exhibit the same behavior, that you too are capable of that prejudice. it's very real because it's true; we all have implicit biases to unlearn."
catherine!!
"2.5 stars — the first half of this really hit me and had me in tears because damn I’m afraid of men too. But the second half of this in parts just felt like prematurely published. It felt to me like a string of tweets or a diary entry that was just about getting some thoughts on the page but then didn’t get enough time to be thought through and then edited before being published into a book.<br/><br/>The second half also had some things that just didn’t sit right with me, but mostly it was stuff that felt very true to Vivek—like it was very much a personal thought that only applies to her, especially the bit about her relationship—but because it was written as if it was meant to have this larger societal meaning since it was posed alongside large sweeping statements and questions, it just didn’t seem finished—fully fleshed out. It felt like a rough draft or again a tweet thread. It’s not quite a memoir, not quite an essay.<br/><br/>For me, I think that’s why some of the other reviews pointing out stuff that came across as an issue hit them that way. It hit me that way too, but it wasn’t because I found something inherently wrong or problematic about what was said, it’s more that too much was left unexplained. This balance of personal memoir and general statements about society at large just didn’t connect enough. It would have been less disjointed if it were one or the other or if it was simply long enough to have the space needed to make those two aspects connect."
Reading into the Void
"This book is beyond sad. Talking about the trauma trans women endure from men and women alike. The Author is a survivor and I am happy that she is still here to tell her story. And I can’t wait to read her new book."
Finn Hughes