About Hillary Clinton’s New [Burn] Book

You’re not alone, Hillary. I couldn’t believe what happened on Election Night. Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr. Some rights reserved.

This is a couple of days late, but I wanted to weigh in on What Happened, a new book that dropped on September 12. Well, after looking at a number of reviews and find a buttload of quotes, I would call this a burn book because it contains a series of essays where Hillary Clinton unloads on a bunch of people including James Comey, Jill Stein, Vladimir Putin, The Bohemian Professor, and The Sad Bambino.

The Reception of this book was mixed (even before the official release), which is to be expected of the offering of such a polarizing figure.

The have been a number of memes where Twitter users shared photoshopped images of the book.

pic.twitter.com/o1x6X2qQdM

— Trumpism 9.0™ (@Team_Trump45) September 3, 2017

There was even a controversy with Amazon reviews.

But the book tour has been selling out in blue states and sales of the book itself have already set 2017 records.

Now what do I think of the book? Well, I haven’t read it. However, I have found some in-depth reviews and I have found quite a few quotes from the book to boot.

Based on the limited information I have, this is a non-review. But it looks like the book is covering everything Clinton has already said about this past election ad I do have thoughts on those areas.

Here goes.

Sexism in Naruto: It’s Not about Feminism

As you can see, there pretty much are some sexist undertones in this story. It’s not malicious on Kishimoto’s part, but the undertones are still there. While there is somewhat of an understanding that there are no specific policies ruling the Narutoverse based on gender — and females are generally treated with respect by their peers and subordinates — they are not always treated as equal to a man by virtue of the dialogue and  by their perceptions of women. This is ultimately a reflection on the mangaka.

This is not to say that anyone and everyone complaining wanted the girls/women to overpower ALL the males, let alone surpass Naruto and Sasuke. That is a strawman. It was always understood that Naruto, at the very least, would be among the strongest characters in the end. As Naruto’s rival, the same was true for Sasuke. That was not the issue.

Sexism in Naruto: Weighing the Differences in Treatment

Before I dig into this part, I would just like to make the following points. This issue is complicated.

To be quite honest, I am comforted when readers have nice things to say about Kishimoto’s female characters. It shows he did something right in their creation and development in order for a number of people to be interested in them in the first place — and it is often their characterization that sticks out the most. Kishimoto in particular did enough for people to build interest in characters like Hinata, Temari, and Tsunade, for example. Personally speaking, I was already hooked to Naruto’s story by episodes of the Land of Waves Arc in the anime, but Tsunade’s introductory arc sealed the deal for me. Kishimoto made a number of his females sympathetic, and for that he deserves a tremendous amount of credit.

Another positive thing to say is how he largely shied away from using females as fanservice. Tsunade may be the outlier here, as she had abnormally large breasts and there was in-manga commentary on them by male characters. And while she and some other ladies in Naruto can be described by their beauty, I don’t believe it was the mangaka’s intention to reduce all the females to their sexuality.

Sexism in Naruto: From Kishimoto’s Lips

Before I delve in, I should note that this section was admittedly the hardest for me to do. There was a lot of material to sift through and it needed to be given proper context. Also, I had read past interviews or heard the details of them, but some of that information wasn’t readily available.

While I had already had knowledge of or read several old interviews from Kishimoto beforehand, I needed to reread these and go over some material I had not yet seen. On top of that, I needed to vet this information and only stick to confirmed sources. Unfortunately, some trolls have put out fake interviews over the years and I will of course refrain from using the information from them.

Now, on the surface, I would understand if anyone who reads or has read the information in this post will argue against the words of Kishimoto being overtly or inherently sexist. Of course, I would disagree, most notably in the case of Sakura.

Sexism in Naruto: What Do the Characters Say?

When you have a story where men and woman work closely together, they will inevitably mention gender. It’s true in real life, so of course this will be reflected in fiction. As one can rib another and make harmless jokes based on appearances, voices, opinions, and performances, men and women will make jokes about each other. Although many comments people make about each other are mean-spirited, other statements made can be relatively harmless.

As it pertains to Naruto, I think the in-manga statements about gender are quite troublesome. While many of the quotes one can find in this group may be harmless on the surface, I feel there were clearly times when Kishimoto inserted lines and references about gender that really had no place in the story. Of course, Shikamaru is the worst offender, and I feel that most if not all of his quotes were out of place.

I have made this list of the various examples I could think of and find from various chapters. This encompasses what was said and done to put things into context. However, it should be noted that I have left out some pages where Tsunade and Chiyo were call old hags. Take a look.

Sexism in Naruto: About Tsunade & Sakura

I put these two characters together because their write-ups are the longest and they are more connected than some readers like to admit.

Of course, as one of the Sakura’s mentors the only real mentor Sakura had, Tsunade is inextricably linked to Sakura. There was also the parallel between the Sannin and Team 7. Much like Sakura was to her peers, Tsunade was far behind her teammates in terms of abilities. And much like Sakura, Tsunade had plenty of focus in the manga, relatively speaking.

Sakura’s write-up is long because as the “heroine” of the series, she subsequently garnered more attention than many other characters. Sadly, that attention was overwhelmingly negative.

Tsunade

Sexism in Naruto: About the Females (Minus Tsunade & Sakura)

Upon writing this section, I realized that it ran pretty long, so this will be broken up into two parts. (I can still go over 10,000 characters! I can’t do that on NF.)

Like the males, I will write a rundown of each female character I think was shafted in some way. I will start with Hinata in this post.

Hinata

Sexism in Naruto

Certainly, this topic has been done to death in the Naruto fandom, but I feel I have to leave my thoughts on the subject matter here in this blog as part of a complete analysis of the manga. This is a tough issue but a real one, no matter how many people have tried to deny it or verbally attack those who even ask the question.

Many who have read Naruto agree that there are elements of sexism in Kishimoto Masashi’s writing. Whether or not that was influenced by outside factors is not the focus but how it showed up in the story is.

Now, many more will also argue that most males in Naruto were treated poorly, as well. I cannot disagree, especially when discussing the main character’s peers. However, I see a chief difference in the poor treatment of a male character as opposed to some of the poor treatment a female character received.

For these posts, I want to re-share old thoughts while adding new ones. The posts about the males will be all-new while I will take a deeper look at pairings, especially in terms of the females. I’ll admit when I post on NF and elsewhere, I do not have the guts to really broach the subject of pairings, but I’ll let it all hang out here.