Book Review // Asking For It by Louise O'Neill
This book is so, so important. I want everyone to read it and learn from it. I want no-one to read it and save them the sheer soul-crushing sadness. I want to slap it’s pages across all the secondary schools in the UK. I want to curl up and cry, I want to stand up and fight … But most of all I want this book to be the start of a change, a big change.
Asking For It follows a young woman called Emma, just turned 18 in a small Irish town.
18…
The age when you think you know everything, when you think that wearing make-up and stylish clothes and having boys want you means that you’re finally an adult. An age when cat-calls make you feel uncomfortable but it’s drilled into you that it’s a compliment so you just cringe and laugh it off. An age when most girls have read a 100 ways to bring boys who leave bruises with their fumbling hands to climax yet have no idea how to satisfy themselves, or wouldn’t dream of admitting if they did. An age when you tell little white lies to build the temperamental egos of someone who can making you socially worthless with a few snarling words about a couple of minutes of being thrusted into. An age when you think sexy is short skirts, black eyeliner, push up bras and glossy lips. 18… An age you couldn’t pay me to be again.
We all know/knew an Emma. That girl, that beautiful girl who seemed to sail through school without even trying. Who had half the boys drooling after her, the other half claiming they’d had her. Who was smugly quiet until she snapped sharp, horrid words making everyone else laugh at her victims expense. A girl who knew how look good, how to been subtly centre attention at her friends expense and how to get what or who she wanted. A girl so cripplingly insecure that her entire life revolves around being the only thing she knows how to do, be the Queen Bee.
Emma is not particularly likable. But that doesn’t matter, what matters is the truth, the response and the fallout. One morning she wakes up after a very drunken, drug fueled night on her doorstep. She doesn’t remember much; she knows that she slept with someone she shouldn’t have, that it wasn’t really enjoyable but she must have been good because he wanted to have her number. She remembers that she was dressed to kill, that she’d had too much to drink and that she’d had an unexpectedly emotional moment with someone she’d written off.
It’s only when she’s at school does she realise that something has happened, something big… Something big enough to change her life for ever.
Now, without going into detail, the response and the fallout is nothing short of harrowing. It’s gritty, it doesn’t hold it’s punches and it forces you to see the disgusting reality of rape culture in on social media and consequently in everyday lives. Rape Culture is not just a term associated with Robin Thicke and his Blurred Lines or revenge porn. It’s something that has infiltrated our society, that’s dictating how men and women are seen, how they act and in turn how they’re treat.
Asking For It shows Rape Culture at work, how perceptions of a woman’s body and their control over their own being and sexuality is frequently used against them, the isolation and despair that follows sexual violence and the slow, creeping build-up of doubt and guilt … That surely, if a woman was dressed provocatively, if she was flirting, if she was drinking passed the point of sensible judgement… That woman was asking for it, she shouldn’t complain, she wasn’t raped she was getting what she deserved, what she asked for. The men involved are innocent parties, for such a woman like that must surely be the most tempting creature and that they were only doing what they were made to do.
The fact that that train of thought is an actual thing… an actual argument in society is astounding. Louise O’Neill brings this perfectly to light, Asking For It is a not a nice book, it’s not one you’ll read on the beach, a book you’ll reach for on a cold winters night or what to happily recommend to your mum. No.
Asking For It is a revolution in 352 pages.
And it’s about bloody time.
Book Review // Asking For It by Louise O’Neill was originally published on Meelichar
