A really interesting collection of essays!

Thank you to the publisher for letting me read and review!

Laurie Penny's latest collection of essays is an unsettling work. Reading it in today's world, when the fights described have escalated and the rights threatened have eroded there are segments which feel not like social commentary but something from fiction. A collection of snippets calling out warnings of complacency from a time before The Disaster struck.

It's nonsense of course. The world is a darker place than when some of these essays were written, and the need for a fight is greater than ever, but that doesn't mean the change is insurmountable.

Cutting, honest, and engaging; Bitch Doctrine has no interest in holding your hand and strolling through feminism and socialism 101. The assumption is absolutely made that you're here to support women and resist structural inequality, and the book is stronger for it. Instead of having to work through a journey to "woke", the essays are personal, honest and enlightening.

This book is not light reading. It challenged me, dared me to question my preconceptions, and refused to pull punches about depression, anxiety, eating disorders, sex work and sexual assault. Penny is also able to understand where her voice is limited; able to recognise the need for, and recommend, alternative writers on race and trans experience.

I'd not recommend it to someone looking for their first step into social commentary, but once they've broken the seal, it should only be a matter of time before it takes a much deserved place on their shelf. Plus one of the chapter quotes is from my favourite Grimes song, so that's good.

NB: I was provided with a free review copy by the publishers.

This was a weird book to read on honeymoon I guess, but that’s how I roll. Laurie Penny is a brilliant writer, and while I don’t always completely agree with her I love how her white hot passion for equality and her humour jump off the page. This is not a boring treatise, or a dry feminist tract, this is a collection of writing on a variety of subjects ranging from reactions to the US Presidential Campaign in 2016 to transgender rights to online bullying that reads like a page turner.

“When you’re used to privilege, equality feels like prejudice.”

It will come a surprise to no one that I consider myself a feminist, and I have read a lot of books on the subject. As a result, I can’t say that I learned much I didn’t know from this book – but many people would, and I can highly recommend it on that basis. For readers like myself, to whom the content may not be news per se, I can assure you it is still a brilliantly engaging read that will remind you why you think the way you do. Penny is eminently quotable. Seriously I highlighted so much of the book it would have been easier to highlight what I didn’t like. This is the best form of polemical writing – thoughtful yet action orientated, engaging, and darkly humorous. Read it!

Laurie Penny has been writing feminist polemic and reporting from the frontline of the battle against capitalism and neo-liberalism for much of the past decade; her earlier essays about the Occupy protests and the Athens uprising are essential reading for anyone interested in what, in a pre-Trump world, was the key area of mass activism. The Bitch Doctrine is a collection of more recent essays focusing on eight overarching themes, from Love to Violence via a US election diary (which, with the benefit of hindsight, makes depressing reading. Because the essays are pulled from a variety of sources, the book does at times lack the coherence of her brilliant Unspeakable Things - for me, one of the best feminist texts of recent years - but there is plenty to enjoy and be inspired by here. For me, Love was the highlight, a savagely honest take on relationships with - mostly - cishet men and the benefits to women of being single (my new husband certainly looked suitable nervous when read choice snippets). And while there's not much here that will be new to people well-versed in gender activism, it makes a fantastic introduction to some of the key feminist issues of our age.

This book collects, edited versions of, Laura Penny’s online writing. Essay after essay brilliantly dissecting the patriarchy.

It will come as a surprise to absolutely no-one that I consider myself a feminist; academically, personally, and politically. As such I have read an awful lot of feminist writing, both for my degrees and in my free time - which is why there really wasn't all that many new things for me to discover in this essay collection. This doesn't mean it isn't a great starting point or not worth reading, it just means that I found myself skimming parts of the book.

Laurie Penny writes about many things important to me; and I agree on a whole lot of topics. She is angry and rightfully so; it is an absolute shame that the world isn't fairer and better because it could be and it should be. I am fine with a feminism that is angry because why the hell are we still arguing about whether equality is fair?! Many things make me angry and I think it is important to use that anger to change the world in whatever way we can - and if it is only in changing how we act and react and treat people.

One of her major points is about how it is unfair that women writers are always meant to speak for all women - as if that was at all possible to achieve. However, she then quite often seems to speak for all women (giving us such weird phrases like "we as women of colour" [she is not a woman of colour]). For me that was a incongruity that I could not quite deal with. Paradoxically the book works both best and least when Laurie Penny uses her own experience as a baseline to discuss things. When she uses her own experience to underscore the more academic and political points she makes it works great and gives her work a more immediate urgency. But then she seems to sometimes think her experience to be more universal than it maybe is and then it detracted from her points.

I never quite warmed to the way she structures her essays; I often found the endings to be not quite thought-out or very abrupt. Additionally, there were some sentences that for me flowed weird and took me right out my reading flow. I think the best pieces for those that sounded more conversationally - I think because those were the ones where she was the angriest, and she does angry extremely well.

My personal essay inspired by this book was published by The Nopebook: http://www.thenopebook.com/entertainment/uppity-me-laurie-penny-bitch-doctrine-self-worth/

I strongly disliked this book at the beginning as I thought that it was one long, unoriginal rant that was massively overwritten with the assistance of a thesaurus. However, after the initial 20% of the book, I started to find it really interesting and I'm glad I pushed myself through the initial part. As a feminist and a person with a degree in politics, I did find that a lot of this material was not new to me, but there was some things that I had never really considered or been told about. This book is very current and up to date and covers a wide range of topic areas from Donald Trump to male attitudes to women on the Internet. I found the personal stories to be a worthwhile addition to this book as well. On the whole I would strongly recommend this book, especially to someone who has some pre-existing knowledge on this subject.