Customer Reviews

The Feminist Dilemma: When Success is Not Enough

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This was a great read and the authors are to be commended for their research and honesty. The women's organizations have become dishonest political organizations, bent on their own survival and which skew facts and figures in order to propagate the myth that women are still victims in our society in need of special protection. Their organizations survival is dependent upon the success or failure of this myth and the book does a great job of exposing how these organizations twist and bend the truth to suit their own purposes. The playing field has not only been leveled, it is tilting the other way! I highly recommend this book for people who want to know the true facts regarding gender equality in this country.

The premise of THE FEMINIST DILEMMA is fairly simply - as women have gained more and more ground in society, the ideological and political movement of feminism has become more and more irrelevant. That is the good news. The bad news is that feminists, being about as odious and dishonest as it is possible to be, refuse to acknowledge this and continue to contort the concept of "equality" in order to perpetuate their own existence.

There is actually not much new in this book. Anyone who keeps up on the subject already knows that the economic picture of women painted by feminists is bogus, that girls are not being shortchanged at school and that the legal area of sexual harassment has become a Kafka-esque minefield. THE FEMINIST DILEMMA is useful, however, by providing more in-depth statistical analyses of these subjects and by demonstrating that many programs specifically meant to benefit women are counterproductive by making business itself more difficult due to over-regulation.

There is one down point to this book. It is painfully dry. The two authors, Diana Furchtgott-Roth and Christine Stolba, are a couple of policy wonkettes at the American Enterprise Institute, one of our better think tanks. Unfortunately, like many eggheads, they are strong on intellect at the expense of excitement. Come on ladies, you are criticizing feminism! Your hearts should ring with merriment not only at the benefit you are doing for society by exposing feminist falsehoods but also for the emotional misery you no doubt are causing the feminists themselves. Let your writing style reflect the glee.

This book is treacle. If there is no wage disparities why are so many vital woman-dominated concerns from child-care to elder care to library workers among the lowest paid? Why do the majority of these vital jobs have no pension plans attached? Why are children, young citizns, seem as merely a "lifestyle choice" with no help from the establishment on matters of child care and family leave to help integrate a true work/life - style? Why isn't biology mentioned and studies that show that the women's brains are hard-wired differently when it comes to language and math than are men's? Why is dyslexia more common in men and math disfunction more common in women and which disorder receives all the attention and support? In this climate the female, Oxford educated economist is the freak which may account for some of the drivel read here. It never ceases to gall me that women of extraordinary privilege always seem to think that is only by sheer dint of their own unique specialness that they are in the positions they are in now without mentioning the stuctural support they have been handed on the proverbial silver platter. Keep in mind this is a work from women who oppose the mimimum wage (for those lowly useless others) while endorsing a capital gains cut (which clearly benefits useful productive citizens like the authors). The authors talk about workers getting on the "bottom rung" of the labor market and "working their way up." Well, that's really hard to do when you keep getting the boot in the face from above.