Killer Woman Blues: Why Americans Can't Think Straight about Gender and Power

Soccer player Brandi Chastain and Disney's warrior girl Mulan are just two of the female idols taken to task by DeMott (The Trouble with Friendship), who argues that American culture valorizes ""women-becoming-men"" (by which he means women becoming violent, crude, greedy and aggressive). This awkward locution is shorthand for what DeMott identifies as our tendency to measure women's progress in traditionally male terms. The bottom line, according to DeMott, is ""wasting the intellectual and social promise of feminismDlosing touch with the liberationist ideal of gender flexibility... could, in truth, disastrously blight our country's psychomoral future."" Most of the examples he cites are from pop culture and the media: examples of ""kickbutting women"" like the TV characters Buffy and Xena, Demi Moore in GI Jane and Heather Graham, who has said, ""As an actress, it's fun to do rageful things."" DeMott even fingers the milk industry for suggesting that mustaches aren't just for men. Though DeMott insists he's seeking a return to what he sees as the core values of second wave feminism, his book reads like a 1950s throwback: ""When women's highest ambitions are seen as identical with corporate ambitions, a human past beyond price or valuing is buried"" sounds suspiciously like ""A woman's place is in the home."" The assertiveness that DeMott derides as ""gender confusion"" might just be women finally getting their say. Nevertheless, his prominence as a writer for the New York Review of Books and Harper's, plus his deliberately contentious writing style, ensures a lively reaction to his analysis. (Dec. 12)