As a feminist, I bought The Richer Sex expecting a moderately earnest but well-paced account of the rise of women to economic independence. I was too idealistic. What I got was an insulting caricature of what women might do with their new-found economic power. Mundy, apparently a gender eugenicist, contends that men, genetically incapable of competing in the post-industrial world, will inevitably descend into the new Second Sex. She celebrates the emergence of a new American underclass of unemployable males suitable to be mined as attractive and docile mates for the new class of 21st century superwomen. I am tempted to say that the vision it presents of women's motives is anti-feminist in itself. Instead I pray that the generation of alienated ands rootless men she gleefully predicts will, rather than subordinate themselves as domesticated capons to their financial superiors, join struggling working women to fight a corrupt and vicious system.
I gave the book five stars because I believe readers need to obtain a clear idea of the perfidious future that nominally progressive think tanks like the "New America Foundation," captained by Exxon's apologist-in-chief Steve Coll, have in mind for us, a dystopia run by and for the pleasure of its few economic elites ( A New America indeed!). In Lundy's vision, these will be overwhelmingly female, giving these breadwomen the opportunity to exploit men as thoroughly as men have exploited women in the past.She calls this her optimistic vision for a future of "mutual respect," a sentiment that resounds nowhere in the pages of this book. Any work celebrating the creation of a newly impoverished class, exploitable by elites of either gender, deserves not the approbation it has garnered in conventional media outlets. It merits contempt.
If a man wrote a book trumpeting the fact that women still only make 80 cents on the dollar of men, or gloried in the struggles of single women for equality, because such factors create a pool of appropriately submissive wives, I would justly dismiss him as a craven and despicable troglodyte.
I would not speak differently of Liza Mundy.
And incidentally, Ms. Finnegan, the main difference between your daughter and your son is that one of them has a bad mother.
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