My first book review is in the Washington Post !
Stormy Daniels’s memoir: Funny, vulgar, brash and believable
Stormy Daniels would like to set the record straight, and the first thing she wants you to know is that she didn’t want to be here. She hates public speaking. She kept the bad sex she had with Donald Trump a secret, even from her husband, and even after some of the people she loves most in the world begged her to come forward to save the republic. She’s not a gold digger or an attention seeker or a bimbo looking for her 15 minutes. And she’s definitely not a liar.
She is ambitious and bright, and that comes through — she doesn’t just show us, she tells us, repeatedly mentioning that she graduated from a magnet high school, that she has a photographic memory and that she’s smarter than you think.
It is her autobiography, after all, and unlike Trump, she doesn’t puff up her life story or pretend to be anything she’s not. She is simply a woman who doesn’t play by the feminine rulebook of crediting others, even when it’s not deserved, and shying away from anything that might resemble ambition, pride or self-promotion. Narcissism is unappealing no matter who it comes from, and it is potentially dangerous when a pathological narcissist has significant power over others as, say, the president of the United States.
Women like Daniels are rarely heroes, least of all when they take on powerful men. It is deep-seated, this assumption of deceitfulness and greed in women who are sexually forthcoming. Good women don’t do that, so the ones who do must be bad. Strippers pretend to like you, prostitutes pretend to enjoy sleeping with you, porn stars pretend that what they do on film is like the sex real people have. Never mind that they’re all being paid to uphold men’s fantasies; there is disgust wrapped up with the desire, a sense in which men feel free to use their money to incentivize female behavior that pleases them, and then deem that same behavior inauthentic and the women who engage in it greedy liars. (If they’ll do that, what won’t they do?)
That Daniels is taking on a man who ascended to power on the fumes of conspiracy theories and who lies with a depth and frequency heretofore unseen in a president complicates this narrative. It forces all of us to take a look at the judgments we level at certain types of women whether they’re too sexy or too competitive or too ambitious. Daniels is one vehicle through which women are seeing in sharper focus just how much expectations of female deference still shape our paths and the possibilities for our lives.
She is all the things women are not supposed to be. And yet you like her — not in spite of her rule-breaking but for it. Perhaps more important, when you read her story, you believe her.
https://wapo.st/2NpBg5M?tid=ss_tw-amp
Read my book:
Full Disclosure
By Stormy Daniels
October 2nd from
St. Martin’s Press
Here’s my email:
[email protected]