A reasoned, intelligent, even elegant study, when its author isn’t smartly smirking.
A clever, sarcastic, slender jeremiad on the self-defeating forces that still ail women in the aftermath of second-wave feminism.
In the name of progress toward gender equality—and she admits there have been tremendous achievements over the last few decades—Kipnis (Media Studies/Northwestern Univ.; Against Love: A Polemic, 2003) wonders why emancipated women continue to be blocked from getting what they want: namely, what men have. She blames women’s “ambivalence” (toward feminism, and whether to reject or embrace femininity) with forcing them to collide continually against their “unanticipated opponent: the inner woman.” Kipnis examines here in discrete chapters four familiar self-imposed fetters that keep women from achieving total social progress: envy (the Freudian desire for what men have, because women lack something); sex, in terms of a “sexual-pleasure gap” currently reigning between men and women; dirt, the projected anxiety that women’s bodies are unclean; and vulnerability, women’s universal fear of rape. All four areas, indeed, have to do in some way with how women relate to the female body. In her chapter on envy, the author addresses consumer culture (what she calls “the girlfriend industry”) and the aggressive media reinforcement that women are inadequate and need improving. In the minefield of sex, she finds that women’s more complicated apparatus eludes easy orgasm, and women can’t decide how they want their orgasm—or whether just to lie about having one. In “Dirt,” she often refers to godmother Betty Friedan and her classic book on housewives, and explores why women (unlike men) have to care so much about keeping the house clean anyway. Finally, in “Vulnerability,” she debunks the reality of the fear of rape, when, in fact, men are far more likely than women to be crime victims. Despite digressing somewhat toward the end in discussing Andrea Dworkin’s rape claims, Kipnis offers some sound fodder for talking heads.
A reasoned, intelligent, even elegant study, when its author isn’t smartly smirking.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2006
ISBN: 0-375-42417-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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