Woke: A Guide to Social Justice

Holy smokes. I knew it was important to learn identification techniques of transnormative intersectional and subconscious bigotry, but Titania slowed it all down for me and helped me realize that if you’re white...if you’re a male...then you suck. It really, truly is as simple as that! I had no idea how much I didn’t know until I turned my life over to identity politics and, of course, read “Woke”. Seriously...this is the best, funnest, most enjoyable book of 2019. I’d buy a dozen copies and hand them out to some of my woke-aspiring progressive friends, but they’d just end up gumming the pages into a soft pulp to use as a dipping sauce at their next ANTIFA brainstorming session. This book would literally make their eyes bleed and heads explode because...let’s face it, they’d end up taking it way too seriously. Protests would undoubtedly ensue and they’d all get fired from their NetFlix jobs after calling in sick from drinking too much at their failed protests the day before. Thank you, Titania. You are brilliant and you know it.

I cannot believe this woman didn’t hit my radar until today! Tatiana McGrath’s writing is deliciously clever and painfully witty! She tersely but thoroughly destroys political correctness, hoisting the perpetrators on their own petards. I feel a bit guilty at the schadenfreude I’m experiencing just imagining the discomfort the author’s writing is undoubtedly causing! May God use this work to transform people from wokefulness to wakefulness!! Bravo, Tatiana!

The most important question about satire is whether it’s funny, and Woke comfortably clears that bar. McGrath, a creation of satirist Andrew Doyle, is hilariously self-obsessed, and Doyle is familiar enough with the social justice patois to be able to lend the character with a veneer of credibility. The density of the jokes is particularly impressive; there’s a lot more guffaws per paragraph here than you’ll find most anywhere else. Make no mistake, this material is heavy-handed, and deliberately so. McGrath is not intended—or in any event does not succeed—as a parody of a mass-median woke progressive. She’s a raving reductio ad absurdum, turning every worst tendency of the social justice movement up to 11. The character carries a lot of cache as a Twitter parody specifically because that venue amplifies extreme viewpoints. Sheila Jeffreys, Laurie Penny and their ilk do not exercise a lot of influence outside of very narrow academic circles, but social media can make it seem like they do; hence, it’s nice to have McGrath around to remind us how far the extremes of the movement depart from reality--how far down the rabbit hole the quest for progressive purity can take us, and how fundamentally the movement’s ideology is infested with, and the product of, economic privilege. Dragged out of the social media fever swamp, though, McGrath loses a bit of her edge. Doyle in general succeeds in grounding McGrath’s extremism in real-world references—here’s somebody who genuinely believes men are walking dildoes! Here’s people who actually refer to a vagina as a “front hole!”—but the targets of the satire are so marginalized, politically, that it’s difficult to be energized about seeing them taken down a peg. Granted, in some cases, figures like these can be situationally powerful, and in closed communities their insistence on ideological uniformity can do real damage. For this reason, I thought the section on comedy was among the book’s strongest; Doyle makes a pretty compelling case that the inmates have taken over at least a wing of that asylum, so the parody becomes more meaningful. I’m glad Titania McGrath exists and I have a good time reading her. I think she’s most valuable when presented in a context where extreme wokeness exercises meaningful influence. For that reason, this book feels more amusing than necessary. If it ever does become truly necessary, God help us all.

Don’t miss out on this important work from genius/poet Titania McGrath. Finally, someone has the courage to speak out against the tyranny of the current U.S. administration after the fawning treatment it has received from the media and Hollywood celebrities. As Tim Robbins famously once said, “a chill wind is blowing.” McGrath’s poetry hearkens one back to the powerful “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg and Steve Martin's signature work, “Pointy Birds." McGrath's writing demonstrates the erudition of AOC coupled with the interpersonal skills of HRC. Please, while there is still time, download this book, keep it by your bedside or other safe space, and adhere to its abiding call to wokeness. It's brilliant.

Undercover satire? A textbook for professor worshipers? A lie about the truth? The truth about lies? After having followed Titania McGrath's Twitter feed for a while now, I've come to understand how each of her tweets can ignite in the comments section a brawl as chaotic as a crowded bar fight: SJWs punching conservatives, SJWs smashing chairs on fellow SJWs, conservatives breaking bottles over the skulls of conservatives and many, in the end, not really sure if they've comprehended what they think they read. With skillfully scattered drops of irony, Titania skewers an identity ideology which is in constant conflict with itself. "Her" book expands on and compiles the tweets from a Twitter account that has infuriated fools, fooled the already infuriated and mercilessly confused a lot of the unsuspecting interlopers who stumble into the fray through retweets. If Titania makes you angry, then you need to step back and ask yourself why. Are you angry at her? Are you angry at what she's lashing out at? Do you agree with her unassailable logic? Are you feeling sorry for an over-educated ignoramus? The answers to those questions will reveal quite a bit about you. Now, if Titania's "Woke" makes you laugh, there is hope for us all.

Very unsophisticated humor. The topic is great. Making fun of woke people is always a good idea and needed to survive in this dystopian world. But this book starts well and then descends to catastrophe.

I always knew I was, what some of my friends called "an uncultured swine", but after reading Titania McGrath's short book 'Woke: A Guide to Social Justice', I now understand that we live in a heteronormative patriarchy. Everything is offensive. This is one small step towards achieving wokeness. Now I know after reading this book, that I cannot give an honest review because I do not meet the qualifications to do so. I do however highly recommend reading Woke. It will be worth your time.

Hilarious and a bullseye hit to today’s insanity on the far left. For a classical liberal like myself, this was delicious and irreverent!