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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
I miss the innocence, but I also miss the Easter Bunny, May 9, 2000
This is a wonderful bit of pop sociology that only a woman could write. If a man dare say what Pearson says here, the feminists would hang him by his word processor. But journalist Pearson, who has a super-fine feel for the politically correct, steers her way through the granite rocks by flatly stating that women are just as violent as men while slyly suggesting that if some people don't think that women have the same capacity for violence, maybe they are buying the "weaker sex" mythology and by extension continuing the subjugation. Let me tell you, this hits home with the Ms. crowd big time. Pearson paints a picture of women and violence that would give Charlie Manson pause, and you get the sense that she has the feminists soberly nodding their heads, "this is true, this is true." Susan Brownmiller, author of Against Our Will, and bona fide feminist icon, even contributes a blurb for Pearson's book, allowing that there was "much to agree...and disagree with," but registers her approval with "...my tilt was definitely in her favor."Mine too. I was actually surprised at the stats Pearson quotes showing the extent of feminine violence. Men too get beaten up (although let's be clear about this, not nearly as often). What I like best about the book is the hope that it is the beginning of an understanding that violence is a human sickness, not confined to one sex, and that psychological violence can be as brutal as physical. The violent evils that women are statistically more capable of-infanticide, crimes against the elderly, the murder of children, etc.-are starkly documented here. The real horror though, that women actually create the violent psychopaths through sexual choice, is a truth that even Pearson is not capable of addressing-yet. It's coming, though. When it is realized that the women who "can't help themselves" when they choose to mate with violent psychopaths in preference to milquetoasts (to use a word Pearson employs) also share responsibility for the violence in human society, then we will have made real progress toward ending the violence. The chapters on women as predators, and women as partners in violent crime, and especially the chapter on women in prison make the book. I always wondered why the prison system couldn't keep the drugs out. This book has the answer: the prison authorities want the drugs in as a means of helping them control the prisoners. Pearson points out that pacifying drugs, like heroin and hashish, are easy to get; non-pacifying drugs like cocaine are not so easy to get. Pearson also makes it clear that violence is, as I said above, a human problem, not confined to one sex; indeed this is her point and a reason for exposing all the female violence that we as a society tend to forget and to downplay. Pearson wants to make sure we don't forget. As I read this book I was reminded of why I seldom read feminist writers or listen to macho AM talk shows: the hard core sexists in their pathological need to hate the opposite sex are so dishonest and so prejudiced that what they say has no informational meaning. Pearson exposes this mentality again and again, sometimes by quoting feminine authors in vacuous support of some female murderess as "courageous" or as someone "justifiably" bent on "righteous" rage. Some (now) purely political words that feminists might want to lose (it occurred to me as I was reading this book): "courage" as in "the courage to heal"; "empowerment," as in shooting her husband was "a liberating act of empowerment" (we all want to be empowered); and especially "liberating." What we need to get liberated from is the nature of sexuality itself, from identifying ourselves, as most people do, primarily as sexual creatures. Sex is the instrument of the evolutionary process, the tool of creatures who eat and are eaten. It was here long before we evolved and it will be here long after we are gone. While reading Pearson's vivid glimpses of women in prison, I was struck by how demoralizing it is to see people with nothing better to do than parade their sexuality, whatever the nature of that sexuality. But worse yet is people like feminist Jane Caputi (quoted in Pearson's book as saying that serial killers act on behalf of all men as henchmen in the subordination of women) who identify themselves primarily in terms of sex, saying they are feminists. Pathetic. I should be a "masculinist" or whatever the male equivalent is. When I was twenty I identified with myself as a "man." I didn't think how much better it would be to identify with myself as a human being. But I was twenty. What's the feminist excuse?
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by Peter Vronsky
by Philip W. Cook
by Patricia Pearson
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