Quickie Plot: A book about how some men are trash and women have to deal with them

Actual Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

First of all, thank you, Netgalley, for providing me an ARC for Commute.

“The yes or no of consent is not what separates mutual desire from predation. The game is rigged; all the power is concentrated on the other side. We are groomed for compliance.”

Things I loved and other thoughts:
* Upon seeing the cover and reading the blurb, I kind of had an idea this was going to be a difficult read for me. Not because it was badly written or poorly illustrated. It was because of how relatable and how hard it hit home for me.
* I love the simple, yet abstractly accurate illustrations that go with her words.
* This is not something I throw out there because I’m still dealing with the aftermath: I’ve had my unfair share of sexual harassments and molestation, from strangers and from my own relatives. These resulted in years-long of various, and often, detrimental coping mechanisms and battling my inner antagonist. I felt disgusting, ashamed, at fault, and unwanted. I thought (and sometimes still do) that because of what happened to me, I’m no longer clean, that no one would want to see nor touch my naked self. That they’ll look at me and only see what happened to me. I let this one childhood thing and how people perceive and look at me to DEFINE ME and MOLD ME into this insecure woman I am today. Thankfully, I have someone who loves and accepts everything that I am, flaws and all. Someone who will assure me and hug me in the middle of the night when everything seems to be out of place.
* As Erin said it on one page of her book: “I’m still working on forgiveness. It’s slow work.” I’m also in the process of fully accepting myself, physically and mentally. My transgressors are alive and just thinking about them makes me palpitate and sweat with anxiety, but I’m on the road to finally forgive them.
* A LOT of women are raped, harassed, objectified, and ogled at every single day. It’s NEVER because of what we wear, how we speak, nor how we look. It’s because predators, harassers, and rapists exist.
* I love how Erin made me feel like this battle is not hers nor mine alone, but as every woman who fell down but stood up, who was pushed but didn’t back down, who was silenced but only grew louder.

What could’ve been improved:
* The only thing I wished for the book to have is some sort of trigger warning though.

Random amazing snippets from the book:
* “A man in a blue suit and sneakers looks at me four times while I wait for the train. It’s important that I keep you here, on this commute. I want you to understand what it’s like to be constantly reminded of what you are: Desirable + Visible or Undesirable + Invisible. With the first comes a constant + vague sense of threat. With the second comes loneliness. This is what it means to be a woman in public.”
* “There are half-naked women everywhere on the street. This is how we’ve decided items should be sold.”
* “Shame is an instrument of oppression.”

Review posted here: https://pamwhocriedbooks.wordpress.com/2019/07/04/arc-book-review-commute-by-erin-williams/
Goodreads review post: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2881097212

Read this for a fatphobic White Feminist take on the male gaze.

Let's start with a positive: I quite enjoyed the art work in this graphic novel. It's simple and mostly done in sketch lines, and I loved the layout, with lots of empty space.

I really didnt' like this novel though. The first quarter of the book seems to be focused on the main character getting ready for work in the morning, and this is described in so much detail that I quickly lost interest. I really don't need to read about someone's make-up routine or what she does and doesn't like to drink, yet a full page was centered around either of those things. The same goes for a full page centering her peeing dog (?!). This all just seemed irrelevant and completely uninteresting to me, and it had me impatient for the book to actually start.

Don't get me wrong: I fully understand this as an attempt to provide insight in the smaller and bigger types of oppression women face in their day to day life. The detailed descriptions of her own life seem to be a way for the author to humanize herself to the reader. I just didn't think this had the intended effect.

I mainly just disagree with some of the views the author shares. For instance, she says that women in public are either seen as desirable (and as such, are visible), which comes with a constant vage sense of threat. This is a good point. But she also says the other side of that medal, so to speak, is to be seen as undesirable and invisible, and this causes loneliness. I don't agree with this at all. Of course everyone has a different experience, and I understand the point the author is trying to make, but I think she missed the main issue with this. It's not undesirability in itself that's harmful because god forbid not being noticed by strangers will make you feel lonely. It's people thinking women's right to be respected is tied to how desirable the world finds them.

I think what I mostly didn't appreciate was the sort of internalized misogyny/fatphobia/whatever the fuck it was, that made the author constantly emphasize how important it is to her to feel desirable, and making several assumptions about every other woman also wanting to feel desirable (which just felt really aphobic to me, because no thanks, desire feels so gross to me). She even talked about "risking fatness" at one point. This is such a judgy and exclusionary vies, and it should be challenged more. Women's worth as people does NOT come from their thinness or desirability, and if even books that are promoted for being feminist buy into the notion that it does, then the bar is just way too low. She keeps going on describing fatness as synonymous to undesirability throughout the rest of the novel.

And to make matters worse, "I don't read books by men" is one of the biggest White Feminist takes I've seen in a while. Like, you don't read books by men AT ALL? Sure, don't read white allocishet men if you want, but what about marginalized men? Ugh. This was made even worse when she said something about finding anal sex "violent and violating", which is such a homophobic thing to say?

CWs: rape, sexual abuse, misogyny, homophobia (not challenged), aphobia (not challenged), fatphobia (not challenged), alcoholism

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher I was able to read this book in exchange for an honest review.
***
Commute is a powerful memoir where Erin Williams accounts of her trip on the subway and in between flashbacks to powerful moments in her life and how those moments have shaped her, touched her, affected her. She is straight forward and doesn’t hide her addictions, the decisions she made and the men who were part of her life and the things they did to her. She covers all points of being a woman, and contends what consent is and the things that go with it shame, guilt, that need to be pretty but also want to be invisible and hide from male eyes.
The art style is pretty minamalistic. She gets the point she wants across with her images and the page doesn’t have to be filled with beautiful flowing lines (what I usually prefer to see) to do it. The story is both powerful and quite tough to read. Kudos to Erin for sharing her story and being so brave.