Woke: A Guide to Social Justice Hardcover – September 3, 2019

Smart, insightful, and quite humorous.

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.

Absolutely laugh out loud funny. Titania is the activist who we didn’t need or ask for but here she is. So witty & thought provoking and helps unveil the hypocrisies and inconsistencies in logic of leftist socialist woke thinking. A must read.

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.

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 love Woke. I even bought a big cup with "Woke up" on it for when I drink my morning coffee. Love my fellow Celts. Thanks for the book. In the richest country in the world, and why not, I meet these Woke folk who invade my space, relentlessly. They are everywhere. Now to join them and become more Woke than them. I got the tee shirt, "Morerer Woke than you."

OK, I admit it. This was a total indulgence, an act of unrepentant pointless intellectual masturbation. But after being introduced to the brilliant Titania McGrath, I had to read his/her/its book if nothing more than to pay Titania homage by forking over $8.99 for the Kindle version.If you like you satire rapid fire, if you want to chortle away a couple of misspent hours, if tears of laughter rolling down your cheeks is the only alternative you can think of to drowning yourself in stiff martinis as you mourn the destruction of Western Civilization by the pinheads Titania is lampooning, this book is for you.

I just read the first chapter in a vegan soy cafe in Soho and just had to write a review, to confirm my opinions to the world. This book is a game changer for our struggle OMG I'm shaking. We now have documented evidence we can literally throw in the face of all cis normative men. It's a very heavy book for me.

If you don't know Titania McGrath already, I must first disapoint you by telling you she doesn't exist. This book is a satire written by Doctor Andrew Doyle. He created Titania on Twitter to parody the sort of “woke” activists that may be found there in abundance.I am going to refer to Titania McGrath as the author most of the time, rather than Andrew Doyle. It is just easier than having to explain that it is Titania that is speaking rather Doyle himself. I have no idea what Doyle’s actual beliefs are, but I think that we can assume that he doesn’t share them with Titania, otherwise the book wouldn’t be a satire, it would just be a sad commentary on 21st century “woke” politics.At the heart of “woke” philosophy is that everyone can claim victim status, based mainly on their “identity”, except for white males, and white females who aren’t also feminist activists. Even some actual feminists are excluded from the “woke” club because of their views on some issues of social justice. Germain Greer managed to get herself banned from the club because she wasn’t supportive enough of trans women or, as Titanaia would have it, trans womxn.The book takes us through chapter after chapter of Titania’s views on social injustice in all its forms with the exception of genuine social injustice. Poverty and poor housing, for example, are mentioned only in passing and then only in terms of the way they intersect with other identity politics. Yes, this is all about identity. If you identify as something then you are that thing, regardless of whether or not you really are. Titania, for example, isn’t a privileged, wealthy, white, middle class, heterosexual woman because she identifies with all the minority groups she writes about. She is one of them, without having to go through the inconvenience of being one of them.Titania is also very concerned with “intersectionality”. This is something I had to look up, because Titania doesn’t explain it until quite late in the book. Intersectionality is the way that one minority group intersects with another minority group to create a new minority group. I would compare it to a sort of social justice bingo.For example, if you are a feminist you can tick the feminist box. If you are also from an ethnic minority you get to put a tick in that box as well. If you are transgender then you get to tick that box and so on. If you manage to tick all the boxes, you win the jackpot of social injustice and get an arts centre named after you at a university no-one has ever heard of.Of course, one of the main jokes in the book is that while Titania describes herself as a social justice activist, she doesn’t actually do anything, except send a few Tweets to prove she is an activist. She quotes a lot of writers on the subjects she writes about, but has never read any of their books, she only regurgitates the quotes that every other “woke” person is regurgitating.The inherent irony of this book is that there would be no “woke” ideology if it wasn’t for the fact that there is genuine social injustice in the world.Titania represents the sort of “woke” that is the virtue signalling world of saying a lot and doing nothing. Something I have said as a joke many times is “Spiritually I’m a vegan. It’s just that I eat meat”. It is exactly the sort of thing that Titania might say, but she wouldn't be joking.Interspersed between the chapters are examples of Titania’s “Slam” poetry. It is truly execrable and it could only be written by someone who has a very good understanding of poetry. Fortunately Andrew Doyle has a Phd in the subject. William McGonigal was a bad poet, but Titania plummets to new depths with her efforts. If you want to know what “slam” poetry is, i'm afarid you're going to have to Google the term.Why only 3 stars? In the end, the book is based on a single joke, which is only slightly varied in each chapter. I’m afraid that after a while reading the book was like watching the TV channel Dave for 7 consecutive days – you end up hearing the same joke time after time so it loses its humorous value and becomes irritating. I think the best way to enjoy Titania McGrath is in her 280 character works of “wisdom” on Twitter. A full-length book (actually it’s only 160 pages) just doesn’t support the humour that well.It was funny, but not that funny.

I work in a library with my daughter. She spends her days rearranging and bringing to the fore books on feminism and tampon taxes while I enjoy de-platforming her as she uses the step-ladder. She's been following Titania since 30,000 followers.Anyway, she got me this and now my relationship with her is better than ever. How much better? She is buying me a Gillette razor, I hope I'm ready.This weekend I'm going to move the Quran which I keep with the Andrex to my bedside and burn my "Free Speech - Very Short Introductions" book. Can't wait!What else, the author deserves terrific credit for drawing such devoted followers out of nothing. Very well done her!One final point: Titania in hardcover can paper cut in a way Titania on screen cannot but this is not a quality control issue. I have found the further along my journey I go the less it happens. When I'm good at maths or telling jokes I regress

I received this manuscript yesterday (manuscript is a very problematic word) and I just couldn't put it down, I am literately halfway through the book and I already know that I need to just apologize to every woman on the face of the planet for being instrumental (another problematic word) in their oppression.this book should be taught in schools, I don't think primary school aged kids are too young to have this read aloud to them until their thinking is corrected; instincts are just another form of male oppression and after all, it's best to teach them when they're young - to paraphrase someone from Germany "they alone, who owns the youth, gains the future." and as the BBC have been pointing out in the latest Doctor Who (stunning, brave and a welcome change from the 50 or so years previous where some privileged man basically mansplains to as many lifeforms as possible) "the future is female" (female is another problematic word).get this book unless you're male, in which case buy it twice; you owe women that much.

I kept this book under my pillow last night and LITERALLY felt woke this morning! I quickly discovered that the poetry had to be sung aloud in order to fully appreciate it, which left my feline companion somewhat nonplussed but prepared to engage in debate nevertheless. After a stonecrafted jug of artisan ale or seven, the ferment of ideas in this book inspired me to the project of wiping out the gender pay gap at my workplace next Tuesday afternoon. This I will achieve by simply facilitating everyone to declare themselves a woman at half-past-two. It's so simple that I can't figure out why all these trade unions have been making such a meal of the problem.