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

Don't be put off by the reviews of some of the female readers on her. This book has an important, long over do message about both men and women. It is definitely worth the read.Anyone whose worked in corporate America knows of the kind of woman that Demott is describing. But one need not be in the office to see her. Today the "Killer Woman" is found with celebratory fame on numerous shows and in the media. From termagents for wives to Lorenna Bobbit, the so-called no-nonsense woman that is not concerned for liberty and completely lacking in moral fortitude, is virtually championed. Today many buisnesses have taken note of this species of woman, who is referred to as a "bully broad." They are most commonly found in human resources, but where ever they are they share that same immaturity of mind, the kind reminescent of the proud little girl in the school yard whose expection that the entire world must yield to her demanded she retaliate on the world when it didn't. Demott brilliantly shows the hypocricy of many women who claim they are for feminism, liberalism, and equality yet demonstrate by their actions they are far from having any such concern. Ask any man under 40 and he will laugh at the old hackneyed statement that women are more nurturing and are better at communicative skills (just look at the tripe that, say, writers like Natalie Angier or Helen Fisher are preposterously peddling these days). A few years back the essayist Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in Time magazine that Lorenna was a victim and had a right to do what she did. Ehrenreich continued on to offer her suggestion of how she would have sexually mutilated a man. It is this culture that Demott is addressing. Later it was found that Lorena Bobbit had a long history of physically abusing people, including her mother who she beat with a baseball bat. Moreover, it is a culture that is tolerated where women are allowed to do damaging things in the name of equality, even on youth. Two years ago, as an example, Oprah sponsored and televised a show about the Brotherhood/Sisterhood Club of Los Angeles, a summer camp for teenage kids. In what Oprah termed a "life changing experiment," the boys were subjected to nearly three hours of sexual humiliation and emotional abuse by the girls for, as one girls innanely rationalized, "to teach boys a lesson" about what "girls go through everyday." Several lawsuits were filed and several of the female psychologists who orchestrated the "program" came under investigation. But more darker still is the impact on male youth who witnessed this, a subject that Demott also addresses. Several of the female "participants" were later the targets of sexual retribution by other males, and no doubt these young males reasons with a like-minded rational: to return the favor of the "lesson" they had learned. Not surpisingly the "program" had the opposite effect: it made otherwise kind men into angry offenders. I find this aspect the most interesting

This is the third book I have read in DeMott's trilogy on class, race, and gender. As in _The Imperial Middle_ and _The Trouble with Friendship_, the author once again takes on an issue about which it would seem there is nothing new to be said. By the end of the argument, DeMott has cast fresh light on contemporary American life and highlighted previously unrecognized connections between popular and elite culture, between the multiplex and the boardroom.DeMott takes as his subject images of and debates about gender and sex in the last half decade of American life. From sitcom America to feminist academia, DeMott guides us across a wide and varied field of modern American voices. Along the way, we are shown that all around us feminism's original promise---as voiced by writers from Wollstonecraft to Gilligan---is today too often neglected. Contemporary America has replaced an aspiration for egailitarian gender relations with a deformed ethos of tough women and, what DeMott calls, "gender shift." What is lost, DeMott reminds us, is feminism's liberating promise.DeMott writes with a fierce commitment to shared democratic values and reconnects the gender wars to larger questions of politics and power. One concludes this essential book with a fuller appreciation of how the coarsening of modern democratic life has been in large part accomplished in the cultural realm, by shrill voices unalert to human sympathy and by those with an inability to imagine a fuller world of gender possibility.