I'm Judging You summary

Difficult dinner companions are just one unfortunate aspect of having a social life. There are also nine types of friends that can really test our patience.

At number one is the Competitor, the kind of friend who’s always trying to outdo you and make any bit of good news in your life about them. Got a new job? They got promoted. Got a new boyfriend? They just got engaged. Eventually, you’ll wonder if this friend wishes you well at all!

Two words serve as a clear sign that we’ve taken cosmetic surgery too far: anal bleaching. That this procedure exists is proof there are no limits to how superficial we can be.

The sad truth is that skin-lightening procedures of all kinds can be found around the world, as our idea of beauty is tied to light skin tones. Just do an image search for the word “beauty” and see how white the results are.

Sexist, racist, homophobic and hypocritical people – these are the shitty human beings that Ajayi has no end of judgments for.

We tend to think of racists as those horrible, tiki-torch-carrying people at the Charlottesville rally in 2017. But the truth is, you don’t need to be carrying a torch or wearing a white robe to be racist. You can be a very well-intentioned person and still have straight-up racist tendencies.

Here’s something every man should know: women don’t appreciate being yelled at as they’re walking down the street. What some men fail to realize is that there’s a very serious culture of sexual violence in the US, causing many women to feel vulnerable. The last thing they need is an aggressive stranger yelling at them.

There’s still a general attitude that women are not equal to men – that they’re sex objects whose primary purpose is to service men. It doesn’t help that the political system is dominated by men that want to regulate what women can and can’t do with their bodies, furthering the sense of oppression and the idea that women must bend to the will of men.

Luvvie Ajayi has long been a faithful Christian, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t felt strongly judgemental about organized religion, especially in the way it was used as a tool of oppression.

Sure, there were deadly wars waged by religious leaders in centuries past, but religion is still being used today to oppress the gay community and prop up racist ideas. The hypocrisy has got to stop!

Few things on social media can get Ajayi’s blood boiling like hashtag abuse.

Sure, hashtags can be useful in collecting posts related to important movements like #MeToo, but there are far too many people online who are either clueless or purposefully wrongheaded in their use of hashtags.

A lot of online entrepreneurs can easily prove themselves to be clueless by making some simple mistakes. The first, of course, is the use of Comic Sans. That has got to stop ASAP.

The second is the continued use of a Hotmail or AOL email address.

Shakespeare once wrote that all the world’s a stage, and we’re just the players, but even he would be amazed at how appropriate those words are now. With everyone carrying around a camera in their pocket, we can all post episodes of our own reality show every day.

This has led to some people becoming internet personalities by receiving endorsement deals and a certain level of fame and money. For others, it’s led to desperate measures to try and attain this dubious level of fame.

Luvvie Ajayi wrote the bulk of this book before the 2016 US election, so her comments on racism, feminism and fake news turned out to be remarkably relevant when the book was released.

But the election and its aftermath showed just how crucial it is that we pay attention to these issues.