6. #PopsugarReadingChallenge: Mousetrap Inc.

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book with the name of a board game in its title
Book: Mousetrap, Inc., by Joseph Guzzo

This book had an irresistible premise: a young man looking for work in the 90's can only find one job: working for a scam-ish company with a love-to-hate boss. Mousetrap, Inc., solicits people's ideas for inventions, charges them $3500 to write the idea up and send it to manufacturing companies, knowing full well that nothing will come of it. Nick, the narrator, has to come up with dozens of ways to describe a combined alarm clock and medication dispenser. The company gets onto legal and financial thin ice, and we know it'll all come crashing down.

So it's really frustrating that this book has a major "she breasted boobily" problem. Every time we encounter a female character, we get the narrator's opinion of her breasts, backside, etc. I suspect someone pointed this out to the author, because there's a tacked-on scene where one of the women tells the narrator (unasked) that she likes it when men ogle her. (That character then disappears from the story, having apparently served her purpose). It's a pattern throughout the book: put in something painfully sexist (like the narrator's friend loudly asking a barista "how much for a blowjob"), then hedging on it afterward (the friend tells the narrator - not the barista - that he was wrong to do that).

I realize that the narrator doesn't necessarily speak for the author. But there's just so much of it - in fact, the one woman who didn't get sexualized at all was the one where it would have made sense: the narrator's girlfriend (later wife). It may not have been the author's intent, but it came off feeling like there are a few women who are respected, and the rest are sexualized, and never the twain shall meet.
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