This is a reading list we have compiled to speak to the onset of dread and loathing as we enter a new year, and consequently closer towards an emboldened era for pedestaled misogyny. These anxieties about the worsening state of the world and the vilified condition of women only increasingly threaten to suffocate. These books speak to some of these issues, feelings, and the lived experience of womanhood amidst them all.

1.) Ejaculate Responsibly, Gabrielle Blair

This manifesto is a must-read in a world without the protections of Roe v. Wade. Blair provides the educational ammunition needed to combat the evisceration of safeguards for female and reproductive health, as well as the torrent of misinformation and forced birth being thrust upon us.

2.) The Woman Destroyed, Simone De Beauvoir

Through her explorations into three women in crisis, De Beauvoir shifts the perspective from a vague third person into the tangible first person of a mother, wife, and human being.. Pieces like this are timelessly important, as women are not often so eloquently humanized and justified, especially not those older than 50, which this text discusses at length. I found this shockingly absorbing and readable for the notorious philosopher, and the three separate narratives kept me thoroughly engaged. 

3.) This Sex Which is Not One, Luce Irigaray

I love this book because it is not a cover to cover read, you can skip around for what you need. This text offered me a means to feel positive about my anatomy when Irigaray’s speciality, psychoanalysis, has almost exclusively negative things to say about it. As more and more men are trying to convince us that women are receptacles to be used and controlled, this text offers unique theory and language to combat these ideas.

4.) My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh

Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel speaks eloquently to the current state of the female condition in a world that increasingly presents with trauma and misogynistic malice. As we are ushered towards a redefinition and subsequent death of the modern woman, women are trapped in the purgatorial limbo of purification and suffering without foreseeable end. The novel deals with many antagonistic issues posed to the contemporary woman, such as the search for purpose and meaning, depression, alienation and loneliness, all of which have been amplified and existentialized by recent events. Moshfesh’s protagonist elects to halt her life for one year, as she opts to cope with distressing events and emotions via medicated slumber.

As a woman who is avoidantly preparing to face the music on the cultural shift our nation is about to take, the notion of sleeping through the horror is quite appealing, as “nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.”

5.) The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

If you haven’t read this yet, read it. From an era when women had so few options, and such little margin for error, this novel bravely explores what it means to be a mentally ill, and more directly, a woman who does not feel involved in her own world. The isolation of being a woman, the pressure to do something, anything, and the erosive anguish that accompanies.