This week I finished:

Inspire: The Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Others, by Adam Galinsky: Adam teaches leadership at Columbia Business School, where I learned there were classes in leadership and took them. In them, I learned that I could learn social and emotional skills. I eventually wrote a book on leadership, Leadership Step by Step, with a chapter called Inspire. I also recently met Adam in person at an event with a bunch of people from his department.

How could I not read this book?

Adam is a social psychologist. This book is engaging and compelling because it has a lot of stories, including many from his personal life, despite being mostly about research and how to act on it. He did a lot of that research and is connected to many of the people who did other research.

The goal of this book is to enable you to behave and communicate in ways that inspire more people. He gives a model of what attributes make people inspiring and the lack of which make them infuriating.

Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It, by Richard Reeves: I had Warren Farrell on the podcast because his work influenced me so much. I consider him a leader in an area that took courage to enter, like sustainability leadership. Also like sustainability leadership, people’s preconceptions dominate their views on helping boys and men.

Tragically, nearly every part of this book has to reassure the reader that helping boys and men doesn’t mean increasing misogyny. Part of Reeves’s appeal is his understanding that that reassurance is a critical part of how he delivers his message. If he doesn’t say it, he’ll be called antifeminist or something like that, with the implication that misogyny results from something like “men just inherently want to put women down” so if you empower men, you empower putting women down.

I’m starting to realize that the principle that began my understanding racism embodied in what Eric Williams wrote in his book Capitalism and Slavery, “Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery” applies here. I have to start researching it, but I think suspect a parallel like “Male domination was not born of sexism: rather, sexism was the consequence of male domination” applies here. I’m treating it as a working hypothesis.

Barbie, Directed by Greta Gerwig: When I visited the library for other reasons, this DVD was on display and I knew it made a lot of money, so I decided to watch it. That’s one thing libraries are for, right? To try things you might not have tried if it weren’t free.

Through most of the movie I asked myself, “what am I watching?” I couldn’t see the point. It didn’t seem funny, though the song and dance parts were intriguing. As best I could tell, it was trying to be subversive and satirical about consumerism, sexism, and traditional gender roles. I think the style was supposed to be like Wizard of Oz and Truman Show.

I saw the opposite of subversion. I saw no nuance, empathy, or insight. I was glad to find many reviews in IMDB that took the movie to task giving it 6/10 stars because the professional reviews seemed glowing, which made no sense to me. I wouldn’t give it even 6/10 stars.

I think the threshold for reviewers must be lower than I thought. Regarding the issues of consumerism, sexism, and traditional gender roles, the movie didn’t say anything meaningful or new. I think the professional reviewers count simply addressing an issue as enough, not whether it says anything meaningful. It certainly raised those topics. It just didn’t add anything. It promoted consumerism, sexism, and traditional gender roles by making them just part of culture, not things we can change.

That this movie was so successful and garnered such positive reviews says something sad about our culture. I started to find an image to put here like the book covers, but all the images looked like advertisements promoting a movie and franchise that promotes more advertising. It’s not subversive. It’s co-opting and normalizing.

I don’t begrudge the price the library charges to watch it: free.

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