Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Essential Book, December 5, 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: Killer Woman Blues : Why Americans Can't Think Straight About Gender and Power (Hardcover)
This is the third book I have read in DeMott's trilogy on class, race, and gender. As in _The Imperial Middle_ and _The Trouble with Friendship_, the author once again takes on an issue about which it would seem there is nothing new to be said. By the end of the argument, DeMott has cast fresh light on contemporary American life and highlighted previously unrecognized connections between popular and elite culture, between the multiplex and the boardroom. DeMott takes as his subject images of and debates about gender and sex in the last half decade of American life. From sitcom America to feminist academia, DeMott guides us across a wide and varied field of modern American voices. Along the way, we are shown that all around us feminism's original promise---as voiced by writers from Wollstonecraft to Gilligan---is today too often neglected. Contemporary America has replaced an aspiration for egailitarian gender relations with a deformed ethos of tough women and, what DeMott calls, "gender shift." What is lost, DeMott reminds us, is feminism's liberating promise. DeMott writes with a fierce commitment to shared democratic values and reconnects the gender wars to larger questions of politics and power. One concludes this essential book with a fuller appreciation of how the coarsening of modern democratic life has been in large part accomplished in the cultural realm, by shrill voices unalert to human sympathy and by those with an inability to imagine a fuller world of gender possibility.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
13 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
DeMott can't think straight, January 29, 2001
This review is from: Killer Woman Blues : Why Americans Can't Think Straight About Gender and Power (Hardcover)
I bought this book with the hope that Benjamin DeMott would provide an insightful, thought-provoking look at gender politics - and instead found myself disappointed before I had finished the introduction. DeMott seems to have created a theory which he wants desperately to prove: that women have shed their femininity to become men largely because the media - arts, journalism, commercials, etc. - has innundated our culture with images of the "killer woman", an aggressive, asexual figure. DeMott's supporting facts are weak and often a real stretch, so that when he occasionally gets things right, it seems an exception rather than the rule. His generalizations go too far, and his understanding of contemporary women not far enough. It struck me that the author was trying to fit the facts to a theory and not the other way around. Much of this seems (whether fairly or not) to reflect the author's sense of being threatened by strong women. Who else would find a female journalist's tough questions as a shedding of her womanhood? Does he truly expect Diane Sawyer to ask Al Gore about the draperies hanging in his house instead of calling him to task for his exaggerations? The only interesting aspect of this book is the variety of sources upon which he draws, from television shows to Joyce Carol Oates to Susan Faludi. I really hate to pan a book, but this one truly disappointed me. I found it a waste of my time and intellect.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very Thought Provoking, January 29, 2002
This review is from: Killer Woman Blues : Why Americans Can't Think Straight About Gender and Power (Hardcover)
Don't be put off by the reviews of some of the female readers on her. This book has an important, long over do message about both men and women. It is definitely worth the read. Anyone whose worked in corporate America knows of the kind of woman that Demott is describing. But one need not be in the office to see her. Today the "Killer Woman" is found with celebratory fame on numerous shows and in the media. From termagents for wives to Lorenna Bobbit, the so-called no-nonsense woman that is not concerned for liberty and completely lacking in moral fortitude, is virtually championed. Today many buisnesses have taken note of this species of woman, who is referred to as a "bully broad." They are most commonly found in human resources, but where ever they are they share that same immaturity of mind, the kind reminescent of the proud little girl in the school yard whose expection that the entire world must yield to her demanded she retaliate on the world when it didn't. Demott brilliantly shows the hypocricy of many women who claim they are for feminism, liberalism, and equality yet demonstrate by their actions they are far from having any such concern. Ask any man under 40 and he will laugh at the old hackneyed statement that women are more nurturing and are better at communicative skills (just look at the tripe that, say, writers like Natalie Angier or Helen Fisher are preposterously peddling these days). A few years back the essayist Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in Time magazine that Lorenna was a victim and had a right to do what she did. Ehrenreich continued on to offer her suggestion of how she would have sexually mutilated a man. It is this culture that Demott is addressing. Later it was found that Lorena Bobbit had a long history of physically abusing people, including her mother who she beat with a baseball bat. Moreover, it is a culture that is tolerated where women are allowed to do damaging things in the name of equality, even on youth. Two years ago, as an example, Oprah sponsored and televised a show about the Brotherhood/Sisterhood Club of Los Angeles, a summer camp for teenage kids. In what Oprah termed a "life changing experiment," the boys were subjected to nearly three hours of sexual humiliation and emotional abuse by the girls for, as one girls innanely rationalized, "to teach boys a lesson" about what "girls go through everyday." Several lawsuits were filed and several of the female psychologists who orchestrated the "program" came under investigation. But more darker still is the impact on male youth who witnessed this, a subject that Demott also addresses. Several of the female "participants" were later the targets of sexual retribution by other males, and no doubt these young males reasons with a like-minded rational: to return the favor of the "lesson" they had learned. Not surpisingly the "program" had the opposite effect: it made otherwise kind men into angry offenders. I find this aspect the most interesting for Demott is taking on how damaging today's culture is to society. Seeing the moral collapsing in women gives men a cause to not follow the rules, and this correlates well with the undeniably decline in chivalry over the decades. Many men are tired of listening to the real double standards of so many women wanting to have policies in their favor and at the same time not take responsibility for actions that if a man had done would be dealt with severely. Demott's book is right on target.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
