She is also not blind to the societal norms of the ancient world that kept women more closeted than is the case for western societies these days but it is a USA-centric approach (that is not to say that there are not elements of it in other western societies but it seems to be less desperate).
The author, Donna Zuckerberg, younger sister of Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is a classicist and well-read in the literature that she discusses. The premise of the book is that the Alt-Right, the TRP (The Red Pill, named for the choice between red and blue pills in The Matrix) and sundry other groups that seem to be united by a resentment against women, people of colour and the liberal élite, have hijacked (and misrepresented in part) classical literature to give a gravitas to their ideas. While I was reading it, the Republican National Conference was being reported from the States, ‘Mrs America’ was being advertised on UK television and there were reports of women calling for one-vote households where the man of the house had the final say, ‘if it were a godly household’. It is an interesting book and very apt for its time, coming, as it does, in the age of Trump, The Handmaid's Tale and Black Lives Matter, but there are so many acronyms to cope with and an overwhelming feeling of the desperate inadequacy felt by the major players in the ‘manosphere’. I found this quite a difficult book to read not because of its complexity, though in a way it was, but because of the sometimes difficult subject matter.
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