Based on Ms Tersigni’s popular Twitter thread, this tome collects details of classic art (with a very helpful index in the back! For anyone who has suffered from 'mansplaining' or the woefully unhelpful or patronising, the images and quotes in this Men To Avoid in Art And Life Calendar for 2024 are brilliant! To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. One of the most fun things about owning a Sharing Library (which is the un-trademarked name of the more ubiquitous Little Free Libraries) is finding treasures like these generously popped in by an anonymous donor. Advanced electronic review copy was provided by NetGalley, author Nicole Tersigni, and the publisher.

It's in the vein of the popular comical memes that pair vintage art with sassy statements; only here, the art is classical and the statements are a painful kind of comedy as they highlight the ludicrous lows of sexism.The “comments” pair well with the artwork and in some cases, I had to wonder (based on the expressions of the women) if they weren’t actually thinking something similar.

Yes, it was thousands of paintings: I would sit there for hours and scroll through, and my eyes were probably bleeding, but it was good. We had the chance to talk with Tersigni about that and about the issues that women, in the paintings and real-life, still have to struggle with.

Other women are fantastic, and you clearly have no respect for them if you think that saying that I’m not like them it’s a compliment. It’s such a universal experience that you have when people come into your space repeating your own words to you as they thought of it. Hahaha - It is so satisfying to see the annoyed, yet jaded expression on the woman's face in great works of art when the man is being so infuruatingly patronizing!

It is interesting how the author collected paintings where women seemed truly annoyed, bored, astonished or simply fed up. As a reader, I can tell you that what I got from your book was a bittersweet feeling, because on one side I thought that this kind of things, from mansplaining to sexual harassment, happen too much frequently, but on the other side I felt understood like I was not alone fighting that. I love the fact that you took them and gave the paintings a very different meaning than the one that the painters wanted to give. She said that I was in the newspaper; she showed it to her mom and she laughed a lot, and she hadn’t heard her mom laugh in a long time. He goes to you and says, “it’s a joke”, when he says something terrible, but it’s not how jokes work, and even if it was a joke, it’s not a good one.It’s not the kind of criticism that I need to take in and reflect on; there is obviously a lot of feedback that is good to get and you need to think about how you’re impacting the world when you have such a large platform, but the other kind is very easy to ignore.