Sex Object: A Memoir by Jessica Valenti

Nonfiction, 2016

When girls tell me that a book I wrote made them a feminist and they want to hug me, I let them, but I also hate myself a little bit because the feeling that I am feeling most is that if they really knew me they would never say that. But I say, Thanks, thank you, that means a lot to hear, thank you. It starts to feel like nothing, which is fucking horrible, because when someone calls you a cunt it sticks. It’s everything else that feels like the fluke.

Jessica Valenti’s Sex Object is a complicated, messy mix of memoir and cultural commentary. Valenti is a vital chronicler of the modern pushback against the broader movement towards very basic social equity, especially in regards to the dubious jurisprudence that eradicated abortion rights protections that were settled law for half a century and all the heinous right-wing fuckery that followed the high court’s decision. When Valenti’s remembrances of toxic male attention and past misadventures are interlocked with examination of how prevailing norms fortified the worst of what she experiences, the book has a jarring power. The aggressive hectoring bleated out by broken men on the internet doesn’t happen in a void, for example. It’s egged on by powerful forces that thrive on misdirected hatred.

A lot of Sex Object, though, is a mere cataloging of Valenti’s own crooked path in finding her way to a more actualized self. Sometimes the books comes across like a series of essays that don’t quite connect. Valenti still writes with force and candor through these passages and the accumulation of experiences does give greater weight to her shifts towards real self-actualization, but I kept wishing for her shrewd, analytic side to assert itself more overtly. She’s so good at connecting dots that it’s a shame to leave so many stranded freckles across these pages.

A Rift in the Earth: Art, Memory, and the Fight for a Vietnam War Memorial by James Reston, Jr.

Nonfiction, 2017

Dr. Silver did not choose sides between Lin and Hart but applauded both for their value to the tormented Vietnam generation. Lin’s design was effective in eliciting these buried feelings, not only for his PTSD patients but for all Vietnam veterans as well as the dissenters, precisely because the wall did not interpose an image on the viewer. And Hart’s soldiers were important for those veterans in need of “specificity.”

However, something he wrote beforehand to the Memorial Fund was far more memorable than his psychologizing. He proposed a Constitutional amendment that would read: “Before any President may commit American forces to combat, and before any member of Congress may vote on a declaration of war, said President or member is required to read aloud the names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.”

I think there’s now not much dispute about the tremendous, often overwhelming power of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial that was designed by Maya Lin. One of the main services of this history of the landmark’s genesis, development, and implementation is to offer the reminder that Lin’s stark, striking concept was buffeted by controversy at the time of its introduction, almost entirely from the same brand of regressively conservative buffoons who have been abjectly, embarrassingly wrong about everything for decades and still are given far too much credence in current discourse. Reading about all the reactionary nonsense heaved at the design — including a hearty helping of chauvinism and bigotry directed right at Lin — and about the way the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund committee was able to ultimately push past it, it’s only logical to conclude that the nation would have been denied its greatest tribute to fallen soldier if Fox News and social media miscreants had been around in the early nineteen-eighties to amplify the naysayers.

James Reston, Jr. writes about this history deftly and with economy. Importantly, he is also blunt and straightforward in his evaluations of various actions by the many impassioned people who populate the story. When politicians are being bullheaded and cruel, Reston makes that plain, and he’s evenhanded enough to acknowledge when Lin’s largely admirable uncompromising stance lapses over into counterproductive petulance. A Rift in the Earth is a tight, taut history lesson, including about the ways regressive power structures endlessly strive to rewrite the past to wash away the taint of bad decisions that emanated from them.