Hating Women: America's Hostile Campaign Against the Fairer Sex

Bestselling relationship rabbi Boteach, author of Kosher Sex, pillories our lewd, misogynistic, unladylike age in this vigorous jeremiad. From the Internet to reality TV to Girls Gone Wild videos, Boteach observes, popular culture portrays women as ""Greedy Gold Diggers,"" ""Publicity-seeking Prostitutes,"" ""Brainless Bimbos"" or ""Back-stabbing Bitches"" epitomized by the likes of Paris Hilton and the ""vulgar and crass degenerates, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera."" Boteach blames feminism-not for demanding equal rights, but for toppling femininity from its position of dignity, refinement and presumed superiority over masculinity and for proclaiming a ""farcical notion of equivalence"" that pushes women to be as gross and callous as men while depriving them of the moral authority to admonish and correct male loutishness. Because ""in a world without ladies there cannot be gentlemen,"" the result is a ""crisis in manhood,"" as men feel licensed to exploit women and, numbed by pornography, become unable to cherish real women in committed relationships. The author calls for boycotts to punish lewd and degrading depictions of women as well as female celebrities who pose or appear nude, and for a sexual counter-revolution in which women collectively refuse all premarital sex and confiscate their husbands' porn stashes. Readers may find Boteach's Kabbalistic gender mysticism to be essentialist piffle, his tribute to the chivalry of the past naive, and his idealized conception of women as ""seraphs of heaven"" for whom ""being holy and spiritual... came naturally"" confining. Still, his critique of the coarseness and oversexualization of images of women-and, especially, of the misogynistic cast of the contemporary male mindset-should stimulate a needed debate over the tenor of popular culture.