The other type were brutes, mercenaries under a hag's employ with free will that ran errands, roughed up assigned targets, patrolled unimportant areas and otherwise attended to laborious tasks beneath the hag's personal attention. [2] [13] Though hags were known to employ ogres, the term brute was generally misleading since hags preferred employees willing and capable of cunning cruelty as opposed to strong but stupid bumblers. These could be other kinds of evil giants, lycanthropes, dark fey, sneaky creatures like bugbears, kenku, and doppelgangers, or other strange monsters like ettercaps, gargoyles, [2] [4] and aberrations. [13] Then it dawned on me that at 61, I don’t actually belong to the “middle-aged” cohort who are the focus of Hags – Generation X-ers now in their 40s and 50s who, like Smith, came of age “just as feminism’s second wave had crashed and burned”. Smith writes of “the spite that arises when men deem us to have served our purpose and wonder why we are still here”. As someone “becoming invisible” due to my age, I agree with some of the discussions about beauty standards and fertility. I thought the chapters on sexual violence and rape culture were well considered too and horrifying! I have some teenage memories of the 90s culture that the author discusses and her experiences of them made me reflect on my own experiences too. Completely agree about using Karen as a term to belittle the views of women when we do t have an alternative for equally racist and entitled men.

Psychologists call this pattern of thought “splitting”: situating exaggerated good or bad traits in one individual or group to avoid confronting them elsewhere, a form of compartmentalisation that allows us to maintain a comfortably familiar view of the world and our place in it. This splitting by young women is mirrored by splitting on the level of the whole of society. Smith argues that the middle-aged woman “becomes a repository of sorts”, representing and thus containing many of our fears about the inevitability of dependency, infirmity and death. Given their nature as an all-female race, hags had to find other ways to reproduce beyond the conventional methods. There were many tales of the bizarre means through which hags came into the world; some stories reported that they spawned from animals, like cows with venomous milk or snake eggs kissed by virgins, while other processes were more artificial, like being incubated in the coffins of the unhallowed or being poured out from cauldrons of boiling blood. [8] One of the most widely told tales of hag reproduction had to be that of the changeling. [7] [10] Changeling [ ] This is especially possible in an age where, as Smith points out, we tend to see our bodies as customisable meat suits that are meant to reflect our true selves, and “few people think their true self looks like a middle-aged woman”. Around twenty years ago, I remember observing with horror my mother’s elbows; they were dry and wrinkly, like those of most adults, and in contrast to my own perfectly smooth child-limbs. My elbows will never be like that, I thought. My logic, I think, went something like this: I would hate for my elbows to look like that, so how could they, when I would hate it so much? Similarly, we can tell ourselves that we couldn’t bear to be seen as ugly, stupid and irrelevant, and so we surely won’t be. By extension, then, if older women are seen that way, then it must be that they can bear it, perhaps because it is an accurate assessment. Like me, Smith is in her 40s and came of age in the 1990s, when notions of female equality and empowerment were watered-down, commodified and draped in irony. It took until the early 2010s for high-profile women to be able to publicly embrace feminism without being derided as killjoys, misandrists, or both. But, in recent years, our view of feminism, what it means, who it is for and how it should conduct itself has become fractured and, as Smith tells it, battle lines have been drawn: on one side, Gen X women who say their sex is inextricably connected to their biology, who want to preserve single-sex spaces and who find themselves denigrated as Terfs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists); on the other, the younger smashers of the gender binary who believe a person’s sex is unimportant and who, Smith maintains, cannot accept that one day they will be middle-aged and have to deal with this crap too.If you are an older woman, this book will certainly make you laugh, cry and recognise the truths of female existence which Smith identifies with insightful clarity and gallows-humour edged compassion.

I also don’t have strong views on jk Rowling as a person but don’t like her actions. I liked Harry Potter and I liked the strike tv series. I’ve watched them all when they came on uktvplay! Lots of authors and famous people in history have had abhorrent views and we can still like their work (looking at you roald Dahl and David Bowie). But in repeatedly defending jk in the way she does, the author does diminish what she has actually done and why this isn’t ok. Jk is entitled to her own views regardless of whether anyone agrees but she then doubled down and started using her platform to voice quite a lot of very negative views about trans people over a prolonged period of time. Regardless of said personal views, using your platform in this way is problematic for more reasons that I have thoughts at this time of night. This argument does stray into a whole other topic of cancel culture and even how this differs for women and men that isn’t covered in the book and is far bigger than this tiny review. Mike Mearls, Greg Bilsland and Robert J. Schwalb (June 15, 2010). Monster Manual 3 4th edition. ( Wizards of the Coast), pp. 108–109. ISBN 0786954902.So, wisely sidestepping outrage porn, she chooses the higher ground: it's framed in terms of existing feminist rhetoric. "Misogyny" comes up a lot as a worse-sounding synonym for sexism, even though actual misogyny is pretty rare in society.