Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism, By Laurie Penny
Does pop culture come at too high a cost?
Reviewed by Abby O'Reilly
Sunday, 24 April 2011
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/meat-market-female-flesh-under-capitalism-by-laurie-penny-2273989.html (http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/meat-market-female-flesh-under-capitalism-by-laurie-penny-2273989.html)
At just 24, the talented journalist and student activist Laurie Penny is already a respected commentator.
Meat Market, her debut feminist polemic, offers a brutal materialist critique of popular culture to expose the tyranny of "the patriarchal capitalist machine" that perpetually denies the true value of female potential.
[...]
Her discussion of transsexualism, a divisive issue in feminist circles, forms the most perceptive chapter. She confidently dissects notions posited by Julie Bindel and Germaine Greer to argue that trans women are not proponents of gender stereotyping, but subject to restrictive definitions of "male" and "female" modes of behaviour, forced "to fight at every turn for the constrained right to consumer femininity."