Customer Reviews

The Female Thing: Dirt, envy, sex, vulnerability (Vintage)

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I was relatively new to `gender wars' literature when I read this book. I really didn't know which side of the wars to put it on. I saw it as a journey into the female psyche, and a wonderful explanation for the spectrum of attitudes and behaviors women have had in our culture since the women's movement began. I can only speak from a man's perspective. But the many paradoxes of woman, the modern woman, are wonderfully revealed here and there with just one or two sentences. The author states that women are "left straddling two rather incompatible positions. Feminism and femininity are in a big catfight, nowhere more than within each individual female psyche."

She speaks of a "desperate quality to female femininity these days" with diets, makeovers and baby-doll drag and that it might have something to do with the failure of the institution of marriage, as social glue. She writes that while men fetishize women through pornography to the tune of nine billion dollars a year, women will spend $1.2 billion on romance novels. The endless hours of Soap Operas women watch suddenly made sense to me.

One of the biggest mysteries of feminism for me has been eco-feminism. It never made any sense to me at all. I was so happy the author finds it just as inexplicable. She also speaks about how women's cleaning fetish compared to men has something to do with their body image.

It appears this book hasn't gotten as much attention as other books for or against feminism. If that's true, I believe it is because more popular books deal with feminism politically. This book delves into the true source of all the craziness and conflict concerning gender and gender roles over the past three or four decades; specifically, it delves into the female psyche.

I reserve five stars for just the best of the best. But this is a wonderful book. Just what I was looking for.