I can't emphasize this point enough, but the antagonists, the shitty racist, misogynistic men, in this book are very very real. I saw a review saying that the men felt like 'cardboard cutouts' almost like satire; and that they were 'ridiculously over the top'.

They're not :)

Here are some real life snippets from my life that emphasize how realistic these yt men are. ⭐A high school friend reached out to me to tell me that our middle school band conductor, who is now a wrinkly old disgusting mess, wouldn't stop talking to her (a Filipina woman) about how he would go to the Philippines to meet women and rape them "and he went into gross detail about it." ⭐I started dating a boy who was a soft boy feminist who told me, straight-up, he only liked Asian women and he "dated a white girl once but didn't like it" ⭐When I talked to the father of an ex for the first time over video chat, he was so excited to find out that I lived in the Philippines. He said he learned some Filipino while he was there (you guessed it, Military!) and then, in Filipino told me, "your pus** stinks" and some other expletives- I'm pretty sure he also snuck in a "that's not my baby." ⭐Another soft boy was so upset that I posted an article about white supremacists having a thing for Asian women with the caption 'this is why I can't trust yt boys'. He was personally very offended, felt attacked(????) and asked if it was worth it for him to still be friends with me because it didn't seem like I "respected him." ⭐I had a man ask me directly, "aren't you people supposed to be more submissive?" ...etc etc.

I also did my masters on the online sexual exploitation of children in the Philippines. It's all horrifying. It's all very very real- from the blatantly disgusting older men, to the soft boys who know all the buzzwords but really aren't so different.

Side note: the eyeball thing makes sense from Asian culture of eating eyeballs. Which is why that was brought up a lot in the first few chapters. But I'm just gonna let my grandma have it because I won't be able to not throw up a little in my mouth after this book.

ANYWAY SPEAKING OF SAID BOOK. I am not a fan of horror and I am not a fan of gore. This book is not much of the first, but very heavy on the second. I admittedly sped past some of the more gory parts because I am squeamish and I didn't really want to know lol. The book is the story of a young woman's spiral into madness and her feminine rage. Her mom starts dating this asshole and another asshole starts trying to befriend her at school. I felt a lot of disgust but also the ending was admittedly satisfying.

I have no idea what else to say because my mind blanks so we'll just end that here.

UPDATE: I can't get this book out of my BRAIN. HELP

Do you have opinions about the Panama canal but you know nothing about it???? WELL DO I HAVE THE BOOK FOR YOU!

TLDR (a poor summary of everything that went down in this book); French company fails at building the Panama Canal. A bunch of wall street bankers started to buy up all the shares from poor French people for dirt cheap. When they had enough to control the company- they pushed the US government to buy it for $$$$$$$$$$$ a LOT more. The US gov't was like ehhhhh we were kinda already gonna do it in Nicaragua, mate. Deals been signed. And the bankers responded by pushing more and more throwing around some more money, saying 'do Panamaaaaaa'. Columbia was like wtf, that's our property, you'd better pay US for it?? And the bankers said NO and instead they paid for the Panamanians to start a revolution under the assumption that they had the US military backing it (they did not), anyway some things happen and they succeed and no one really knows where all the money went that the US spent to 'buy' the Panama canal for 40 million. Probably in the pockets of J.P. Morgan and Cromwell and other white men (and a smaller percentage to notable Panamanian figures who are still rich to this day).

Read the whole thing though, because it's well written and engaging enough to keep you reading. The downside is all the names started to confuse me- but there's a handy dandy character sheet in the beginning of the book to keep you on track!

This book was such a disappointment. I came into this with high expectations, fully expecting to love it and post a raving review in opposition to salty men who did not like the title. But to summarize my critique: If white feminism had a fictional theme, it would be this book.

Where to even start? Firstly, it is unfortunate, that this book was written prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and released in a time when most people have a better understanding of pandemics and epidemiology. There are many parts of it which I find hard to believe. Let's start with the start of this pandemic.

1. It was ignored because the doctor who called attn. to the situation was a woman. Okay sure, but this doesn't explain how the gov't continued to be incompetent about a plague that only affected men. Knowing what we do know about the medical field being mainly established for men, taking men more seriously when it comes to pain, having medicines and medical devices being developed and with establish dosage levels for men, etc. I find it hard to believe that this wasn't freaked out about by the "men-in-charge".
2. The lack of logic when it came to the response. No one wore masks. No one understood social distancing. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, everyone stayed home, sprayed their groceries with alcohol after coming home, etc. And somehow we're expected to believe that this men-affecting only flu lead to people crowding at airports so tightly and yelling to the point of riot was the result? Because I think basic knowledge of germs would've had people staying away from crowds. That beings said..
3. The slowness of the spread. This disease didn't spread as fast as it should have, especially if women are non-symptomatic carriers, and if people were "escaping" to other countries.
4. The slowness of the science. I was appalled that 2 months after the virus was discovered, they hadn't even mapped the virus and didn't even have a test for detection. It wasn't until month 9 that they could test if someone was a carrier. And then it took them 3 years to make a vaccine?? Meanwhile, scientists in China took 40 hours to genetically map the COVID-19 virus, and it took Moderna 2 days to map out the vaccine. Development and testing etc. is another story.

Now the intersectionality and international relations critique. I'd like to start off by pointing out that the US recently hit 1,000,000 COVID-19 cases in one day, (Jan 3, 2022) while China has had 131,000 cases from Jan 3, 2020-2022. The US had ten times more cases in ONE DAY, than China has had in TWO YEARS. Sweeney-Baird should have stuck with telling the story of the plague from a white woman's perspective in a white country and not tried to talk about other countries without asking someone from that country their perspective. Her knowledge of non-white countries is shallow at best, and absolutely horrid and solely based off of stereotypes at worst. She could have at least done more research on international relations or the history of the countries she mentions- rather than basing her fiction off of her surface knowledge level that she only knows because of the western media she consumes. She clearly doesn't know what she is talking about when it comes to China, Singapore, the Philippines, or the SWANA region (South West Asia, North Africa). Beijing declaring independence when it's literally the capital makes as much sense as Washington D.C declaring independence from the U.S. because of the Jan 6 capital riots. And surprise surprise, democracy isn't the dream of every person in the world- especially those who are well read and well versed in various forms of governance and theories. I just looooveee how governments literally implement communist policies in her book and she explicitly had to add a sentence to be like "it's not communism" and then shits on communism. Bestie, having work drafts is literally how some countries did communism. Communism is not a bad word!! It's so disappointing that she talks about Asia and SWANA, before even talking about racial inequities in her own country. How was that impacted by her fictional virus? How about that the people who work most 'public / essential services' are POC and are more at risk for contracting the virus? But then again she also completely ignores Africa and Latin America. Then, she goes on to promote vaccine apartheid and the intellectual property of vaccines with a WW from Canada who just wants to get rich off of her creation and the capitalist excuse of "we don't trust other countries to develop the vaccine for safety reasons." OK Bill Gates (he said the same thing FYI). And somehow we're expected to believe that low income countries get access to these expensive AF vaccines and the whole world is over 90% vaccinated and with a "vaccine partnership" that's just rich countries that have over 99.7% vaccination rates?

Ah yes, the way she handled LGTBQA+? Shit. Garbage. The whole, oh women just changed sexuality magically and married each other? OK. lol. That is not how that works. Now that the world is majority women, she just copies the book, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez, steals the statistics and makes it seem like a big deal- talking about car crash statistics and all that without crediting real-world data: it's disingenuous.

Finally, I was just so annoyed by the voice of Catherine. She was the most boring character and she kept getting 'screen time' if you will. I couldn't keep track of who was who the rest of the time. How could you have so many characters and have all of them be middle aged, middle class, white women is beyond me.