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The Shore of Women Spectra Pamela Sargent 9780553268546 Books

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The Shore of Women Spectra Pamela Sargent 9780553268546 Books

I wanted to love it, for the first third it seemed to have potential, but then it kind of fell apart.

But first order of business, the synopsis gets the plot kinda wrong! Birana doesn't get exiled for questioning society, she gets exiled because she witnessed her mother attempting to kill another woman and didn't stop her- this is explained in the first couple pages. Laissa is the one who does a lot of questioning of society from inside the city.

Anyway, one of the main things I didn't like was the pacing. The first third of the book alternates between Laissa and Arvil's point of views. This is the part I liked the most by far because it showed a lot of exploration of ideas through Laissa's research and investigations. She doesn't really find answers in this part, it mostly just sets up the questions and concepts. The second part, which covers about 60% of the book, alternates between Birana and Arvil's points of view and it's really slow. They travel from point A to point B and run into various setbacks that are rather repetitive and boring. At least after a while it stops going over the same events from both perspectives. Meanwhile Birana explains the birds and the bees to Arvil except in a very drawn out way. He doesn't even react in funny ways, he's just outraged that everything was a secret. Finally, the last chapter is all from Laissa's point of view, but it does a quick summary of the years that passed while the story was focused on Birana and Arvil, so we don't get to actually see her learning process or her development as a person, which was frustrating because she was my favorite of the main characters.

I did appreciate that the book provided a lot of stuff to analyze even if I was often analyzing why I disagreed with it or found it implausible. Like, it doesn't directly state an opinion on whether or not male violence is innate. It shows men being violent, it shows some ways that cultural upbringing might make the men violent, but it doesn't conclusively argue any particular view on this. I saw one review that says the book is gender essentialist, but I think you can read it either way. (Unless you're under the popular misconception that it's gender essentialist to use the words "man" and "woman" to refer to biological sexes rather than identities. That's a matter of semantics though.)

Another thing that really frustrated me was how various relationships worked out. One thing that I think is an absolute must in a book calling itself "feminist" is to not have any abusive relationships or abusive relationship dynamics that aren't acknowledged as such. Arvil actually hits Birana at one point! That isn't a spoiler because it has no impact on the course of their relationship! He does all kinds of manipulative things to get her to let him touch her, have sex with her, etc. and he flies into rages quite a bit. Given that Birana was raised in a homo-normative society and has a history of being attracted to women, it seems unlikely that she'd change her perception of her sexual orientation for such a jerk. I've put a few potentially spoilery complaints about their relationship in a footnote at the bottom of this review. But you get the point. There are also multiple times when characters experiencing unrequited love do bad vengeful things and the character who didn't requite the love blames themself for not loving the other person rather than properly identifying the other person's inability to accept rejection as the problem.

I'm also really skeptical of this salvation by het romance. I mean, the men have sex with each other but it's definitely seen as something they fall back on in the absence of women. It's not clear how a truly gay man would fit in given how their goddess worship works. The women in the city are perfectly fine with their lesbian relationships at least, but Birana, the only woman with an opportunity to fall in love with a man, finds him preferable. Intercourse is portrayed as the ultimate sex that no other kind of sex can compare to. If het romance was really the key to sex/gender equality then I'm pretty sure we would be equal by now.

There are a bunch of random things that seemed unbelievable or contradictory. At one point Birana and Arvil get on a boat they suddenly have even though a couple pages ago they had sent people away on the only boat around. Birana blushes over her period when she spent her whole life in a society of only women- period shaming couldn't last in the environment. Laissa and Arvil are twins and the story often treats them like identical twins, but they can't be identical twins if they're different sexes, they have to be fraternal twins. I'm really skeptical of how women in the cities aren't into innovation or art. They clearly aren't struggling to survive, so what are they doing in their free time then?

And this is really minor, but, so, the chapters are named for the character whose first person narration it is. Pretty much every other chapter is "Arvil." But for some reason, on the "Go to..." page of the kindle edition it says "Avril" instead. This is not about early 2000s Punk!

SPOILER FOOTNOTE (maybe)
It's pretty predictable that Arvil and Birana have sex eventually but I'm putting it in the spoilers anyway. She capitulates rather than really wanting it. It does the whole breaking the hymen and there's blood thing even though she's supposedly really turned on and she's been riding horses a lot. Arvil does better performing cunnilingus and fingering Birana for the first time than the actual women she had had sex with before- seems unlikely. And this is the most minor of complaints, but I facepalmed through the whole sex scene because some parts of genitalia are referred to as "my nub," "my folds," and "his organ."


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The Shore of Women Spectra Pamela Sargent 9780553268546 Books Reviews

I'm giving this book 5 stars because it is so thought-provoking. I first read it about 18 years ago and have been thinking about it quite a few times. I just couldn't remember the name of the author or the title, it was a book that had been loaned to me. I am not usually one who likes to reread books but that book had left a lingering taste in my mouth. So about a month ago, I did some Internet surfing and found it again.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading it again. The idea of a world where the sexes live completely separate lives is unimaginable and yet Pamela Sargent makes it seem quite believable. There are lots of holes in the story as to how it is possible but hey it's fiction. And even though sometimes women might say "wouldn't life be great without men" or vice versa, we all know it's not desirable and Sargent demonstrate it very well. The book is full of thought-provoking ideas and contradictions. For example, women have casted the men out of the cities because they are too violent and caused the end of the world, but they themselves are proving to be as cruel by destroying entire villages full of innocent men to protect their way of life. It is also a good example of what selfless love is about.
I don't understand why some people say that this is a feminist book, I feel that the women in this book do not have nice or enviable characters. It points to flaws in both men and women.
Well worth reading and would make an excellent book for a club book.
In this highly absorbing and thought-provoking novel, the author creates a future world in which women have taken sole control of technology after some kind of nuclear catastrophe which almost destroyed the world. They live in fortified cities and enclaves while men are condemned to wander outside the walls in small bands hunting and gathering, no longer privy to any kind of technology or knowledge beyond that of the stone age. The lives of women are long, safe and unthreatened; those of men are nasty, brutish and short. Any attempt by the males to move forward, by for example, developing rudimentary agriculture, is ruthlessly stamped out by the women who send airships to destroy and kill all those who dared to try to move forward to make their lives for secure. Men are only safe, the women say, when they are kept at the level of harmless savages armed with bows and arrows.

Men have been brainwashed to regard women as gods; they pay visits to shrines devoted to different female goddesses where they don some kind of brainwave machines and experience virtual sexual encounters. Thus women are also eroticized as well as all-powerful. Occasionally men are summoned to closed rooms within the female enclaves where they are placed in a trance and their sperm is harvested. The only reason women allow men to exist is to preserve biological diversity for their offspring. Men therefore regard women as impossible objects of desire and devotion. Women regard men with disgust and revulsion as little better than animals.

Inside the city, a superior caste of women have access to higher knowledge. They also bear the burden of giving birth to male children who are kept with them, although cruelly treated, until the age of five or six and then handed over to one of the bands of men outside. Some wonder why it's worth keeping men around at all, after all their stores of sperm are large enough to sustain female civilization indefinitely. Women could easily survive without men. Men without women will quickly become extinct.

The only problem in this female utopia is that comfort and lack of conflict has stifled creativity. There have been no scientific advances for centuries; no great art is created. Everything is stable and unchanging, safe, secure but stagnant.

The plot revolves around a woman, Birana, who has been expelled from the city with her mother for the sin of violence. The mother soon dies and Birana is not expected to survive long - but she falls in with Arvil, a young male of unusual intelligence and sensitivity. The plot slowly turns into a love story between these two. Can Birana, who has been taught to despise and abhor men, possibly give herself to one of these disgusting beasts?

This book led me to think about male-female history -- and history in general. Birana and Arvil are a sympathetic pair caught in a brutal world which has no place for them. The author's critique of men is deep and withering but it turns out that Arvil is very much the hero. He's strong, brave, loyal, bright, insightful, compassionate and gentle all at the same time. This is the model, the author seems to be saying, of what men need to become in order to be fit for the company of women and if the planet is to survive. And heaven knows, we are a long way from that as a gender. But men also bring something to the world that women need. Without them, the cities of women are drifting. And the matriarchy is the book is depicted as just as cruel and ruthless as any totalitarian regime, fully capable of mass murder without even thinking twice about it. The cruelty of women is not glossed over.

Don't expect a conventional "and they all lived happily ever after" kind of ending. Do expect an enthralling tale and a lot to chew on after you're done.
I wanted to love it, for the first third it seemed to have potential, but then it kind of fell apart.

But first order of business, the synopsis gets the plot kinda wrong! Birana doesn't get exiled for questioning society, she gets exiled because she witnessed her mother attempting to kill another woman and didn't stop her- this is explained in the first couple pages. Laissa is the one who does a lot of questioning of society from inside the city.

Anyway, one of the main things I didn't like was the pacing. The first third of the book alternates between Laissa and Arvil's point of views. This is the part I liked the most by far because it showed a lot of exploration of ideas through Laissa's research and investigations. She doesn't really find answers in this part, it mostly just sets up the questions and concepts. The second part, which covers about 60% of the book, alternates between Birana and Arvil's points of view and it's really slow. They travel from point A to point B and run into various setbacks that are rather repetitive and boring. At least after a while it stops going over the same events from both perspectives. Meanwhile Birana explains the birds and the bees to Arvil except in a very drawn out way. He doesn't even react in funny ways, he's just outraged that everything was a secret. Finally, the last chapter is all from Laissa's point of view, but it does a quick summary of the years that passed while the story was focused on Birana and Arvil, so we don't get to actually see her learning process or her development as a person, which was frustrating because she was my favorite of the main characters.

I did appreciate that the book provided a lot of stuff to analyze even if I was often analyzing why I disagreed with it or found it implausible. Like, it doesn't directly state an opinion on whether or not male violence is innate. It shows men being violent, it shows some ways that cultural upbringing might make the men violent, but it doesn't conclusively argue any particular view on this. I saw one review that says the book is gender essentialist, but I think you can read it either way. (Unless you're under the popular misconception that it's gender essentialist to use the words "man" and "woman" to refer to biological sexes rather than identities. That's a matter of semantics though.)

Another thing that really frustrated me was how various relationships worked out. One thing that I think is an absolute must in a book calling itself "feminist" is to not have any abusive relationships or abusive relationship dynamics that aren't acknowledged as such. Arvil actually hits Birana at one point! That isn't a spoiler because it has no impact on the course of their relationship! He does all kinds of manipulative things to get her to let him touch her, have sex with her, etc. and he flies into rages quite a bit. Given that Birana was raised in a homo-normative society and has a history of being attracted to women, it seems unlikely that she'd change her perception of her sexual orientation for such a jerk. I've put a few potentially spoilery complaints about their relationship in a footnote at the bottom of this review. But you get the point. There are also multiple times when characters experiencing unrequited love do bad vengeful things and the character who didn't requite the love blames themself for not loving the other person rather than properly identifying the other person's inability to accept rejection as the problem.

I'm also really skeptical of this salvation by het romance. I mean, the men have sex with each other but it's definitely seen as something they fall back on in the absence of women. It's not clear how a truly gay man would fit in given how their goddess worship works. The women in the city are perfectly fine with their lesbian relationships at least, but Birana, the only woman with an opportunity to fall in love with a man, finds him preferable. Intercourse is portrayed as the ultimate sex that no other kind of sex can compare to. If het romance was really the key to sex/gender equality then I'm pretty sure we would be equal by now.

There are a bunch of random things that seemed unbelievable or contradictory. At one point Birana and Arvil get on a boat they suddenly have even though a couple pages ago they had sent people away on the only boat around. Birana blushes over her period when she spent her whole life in a society of only women- period shaming couldn't last in the environment. Laissa and Arvil are twins and the story often treats them like identical twins, but they can't be identical twins if they're different sexes, they have to be fraternal twins. I'm really skeptical of how women in the cities aren't into innovation or art. They clearly aren't struggling to survive, so what are they doing in their free time then?

And this is really minor, but, so, the chapters are named for the character whose first person narration it is. Pretty much every other chapter is "Arvil." But for some reason, on the "Go to..." page of the kindle edition it says "Avril" instead. This is not about early 2000s Punk!

SPOILER FOOTNOTE (maybe)
It's pretty predictable that Arvil and Birana have sex eventually but I'm putting it in the spoilers anyway. She capitulates rather than really wanting it. It does the whole breaking the hymen and there's blood thing even though she's supposedly really turned on and she's been riding horses a lot. Arvil does better performing cunnilingus and fingering Birana for the first time than the actual women she had had sex with before- seems unlikely. And this is the most minor of complaints, but I facepalmed through the whole sex scene because some parts of genitalia are referred to as "my nub," "my folds," and "his organ."