In his The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde, Joseph Pearce obliquely defined propaganda as “a collage of facts, carefully constructed, can either present a kaleidoscope truth or a colossal lie.” Propaganda in the retelling of history is far more complex problem to diagnose, but if historians are piloted by contempt for their subjects, it is the duty of the reader to navigate the text as if they’re walking through an ideological minefield. Anita Sarkeesian and Ebony Adams’s first plunge into revisionist history, dramatically titled, History vs. Women: The Defiant Lives That They Don’t Want You To Know, is presented as a teen-friendly coffee-table history, one that fits neatly into the oppressive framework of Tumblrfied intersectionality: a postmodern identity that views Western values as everlasting gobstoppers of oppression. It’s a gorgeously designed book that veils the insidious agenda found inside, one that the book’s “Afterword” only partially addresses:

Note the authoritarian use of language: “That must change,” and “must strive.” Though no rational person would argue against inclusivity, we’ve been conditioned by third-wave feminists to view their use of the word “inclusive” with suspicion. It’s the kind of fashionable language that increasingly reads like a Maoist essay on cultural revolution, not something you’d feed the fictile minds of teenagers. The book’s stated purpose is to reveal the untold stories of 25 women “you’ll be hearing about for the first time”; an insult to their audience but necessary form of historical corrective-surgery they themselves have diagnosed as being botched from the start, because of their alleged “North American, English-language bias…weighted towards towards Western figures,” which the naive reader might translate as scholarly self-awareness, not obliviousness to a specific kind of prejudice.