Hunting Girls: Sexual Violence from the Hunger Games to Campus Rape

This is an important book which looks at sexual violence against young women from US campus rape to the so-called 'empowered' heroines of YA fantasies such as The Hunger Games, Divergent etc. Oliver makes some crucial points about the disturbing way social media has turned rape into a spectator sport via 'creepshots' and other filmed footage of women being violated, blurring the lines between 'entertainment' and brutal attack. She also suggests that strong heroines such as Katniss and Tris pay for their power by being beaten up, bloodied and sexually attacked on screen. All of which are important points, it's just that they are made repetitively in this book without the argument being particularly developed.There is much story-telling and description here (precisely those things we nag our students not to do) rather than analysis, and it might have been helpful to have contextualised what analysis there is with theory (e.g. gender and the gaze).There is some interesting material such as medieval French versions of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White which make the rape narrative explicit in these fairy tales, an element which gets sanitised in nineteenth-century versions through to Disney (though Maleficent reinstates it, at least partially). Did we really need to have these stories detailed, though, at such length?I suspect this should really have been a long journal article rather than a book: it's a short read, just three chapters, and if we take out all the story-telling, it's even shorter.So some important points and an interesting contribution to the debate about the eroticisation of non-consent in books such as 50 Shades, but more penetrating analysis would have given it greater scholarly weight.Thanks to the publisher for an ARC via Netgalley