Customer Reviews

The inevitability of patriarchy

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This book is a joy to read, if what you like is painstaking, step-by-step logic, with Mr. Goldberg proving the strongest possible case -- that patriarchy is not merely highly probable but inevitable -- using the fewest possible determiners. He dismantles feminist arguments -- putting them forward as reasonably as possible, trying to make sense of them when they themselves do not make sense, and then carefully illustrating the fallacies therein. And not only the fallacies, but the distortions of evidence . . .

This book is bound to annoy, if only slightly, any woman reading it. Naturaly we don't like to be told that patriarchy is inevitable, that all societies everywhere have always been male-dominated and always will be, and that men are always going to predominate in leadership roles. We don't like it, but must nevertheless consider if it may be true. This book was published in the early seventies and i understand has been updated since. There is one point in the book where Mr. Goldberg states confidently "South Africa will never elect a black Prime Minister". Oops, I bet that line's been deleted from the new edition. The references to Germaine Greer seem strangely dated too, nowadays she has little interest in feminism and mostly writes about her garden. Mr Goldberg does not argue that women are less intelligent or less able than men, merely that few women have the drive to achieve high-ranking positions of authority. Is this true? I don't know, certainly it does seem that there are still relatively few women in high-ranking positions in many professions. He writes that there are no women in the Senate, is that still true? Frankly, I'm not entirely clear what the difference is between the Senate and the Congress, sorry but I have enough trouble coping with the House of Commons and the House of Lords, keeping track of foreign political systems is too much for me. His argument that there are far fewer women of genius than men of genius is one I've heard before, he doesn't say that there are none, just fewer (he does not, as the previous reviewer claims, suggest that Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Brontes are less talented than male authors). I found myself struggling a bit with parts of this book, it gets quite technical here and there, but it's interesting.

Consider the great women through history you've read about: great women scientists, writers, etc. What do they have in common? They had unusually high levels of testosterone.

So pointing to them as proof that a woman can be a genius is self-defeating.

I'd read about this book earlier and wondered about it, so I was rather pleased when it appeared in my college library. I'd hoped that behind the inflammatory cover there would be a well-written and thought-provoking discussion of the biological differences between women and men.

Time constraints didn't allow me to read the entire book, but I was unimpressed by what I did read. My assumption when I'm forced to skim a book or only partly read it is that the treatment of smaller arguments is indicative of the treatment of the large arguments- that is, if a small argument is well-made, then the author will have taken the same care with the argument or theory on which the book is based. The example that sticks in my mind is Goldberg's example of how men are more likely to be great writers than women: he says that Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Brontes were indeed great writers, but we can't truly compare them to great male writers such as Homer and Virgil.

Yeah, darling. Uh-huh.

Actually, that's a ridiculous statement. To properly compare writers, thay have to be from rather similar backgrounds and time periods; the proper female counterpart to the classical writers would be Sappho. Unfortunately only fragments of her work have survived, but both her contemporaries and modern-day scholars agree that Sappho produced what was, quite possibly, the best writing- both in technique and in sentiment- of Ancient Greek. Ever.

Therefore the question to ask is not how Austen, Eliot, and the Brontes measure against the classics, but how they measure against male writers working at the same time- writers like Balzac, Flaubert, and Tolstoy, against whom they stack up very nicely. Had Goldberg brought up this sort of argument at my college, every single person there would have pointed this out to him. Including the science majors.

There's a great book out there that carefully and insightfully explores the biological nature of the differences between the sexes. This isn't it. My opinion of Steven Goldberg dropped like a brick after reading that passage: if he didn't know that it's a poor comparison, he's incompetant; if he did, he purposely misrepresented the facts for his own benefit. I also could argue with many of his assumptions- that women lack the same levels of agression as men, that they can't compete with men physically (I also have arguments with The Frailty Myth, but it's more recent and takes into account the female athletes of the 90s; it's an interesting read), and so forth.

I can usually get a feeling early on, not just of how well a book is written, but of why it written. This book was written in the early seventies, and the feeling I get from this book can be summed up in two words: running scared.