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

"She's a cutthroat killer," Martha Stewart gushes about the head of an investment firm. A Cosmopolitan cover story exclaims, "Infidelity--It's Not Just for Men Anymore." "Go Ahead, Be a Bitch," counsels Woman's Own. Rick tells Oprah how his wife "liked to slap [his] face a lot." Demi Moore plays a hard-driving, ruthless executive who is also a sexual harasser. Taken individually, these homages to violent or exploitative behavior by women might not be worth getting riled about. But with the blight of images of aggressive women in every genre of entertainment (the list of films about women killers alone fills two pages), cultural critic Benjamin DeMott smells something akin to a cultural conspiracy going on, one that silences feminist calls for reimagining relations between the sexes without stereotypes (what he calls "gender flexibility") and transmogrifies feminism into a dumbed-down campaign to turn women into men ("gender shift"). DeMott sees this phenomenon everywhere, from riot grrrls to bruiser chic guy-talk, from sitcom humor in King of the Hill and The Single Guy to the writings of cultural critics such as Camille Paglia and Katie Roiphe. In each case, they reduce equal justice to "free expression of violent hatred of the other sex" and equal sexual candor to "equal right to objectify and humiliate."

None of this is the stuff of true feminism, DeMott reminds readers as he turns to the works of such feminist writers as Catharine MacKinnon and Carol Gilligan. Rather, feminism is liberationist politics and the goal is humane interactions. DeMott's biggest concern is that the raiding and pillaging of gender identity is undermining women's moral authority and weakening the country's sense of social justice. Through stories about people such as Sandra Quintana, a high school gang member in New York City who was transformed with the help of concerned teachers and school programs, DeMott links the "violent woman" with the rise of the politics of pitilessness and acceptance of corporate greed. While it's easy to be skeptical of his claims on the surface, just as it is to laugh at gender shift jokes, his lengthy list of examples and critiques of contemporary writings are compelling. This is an eye-opening addition to the literature on feminism and a trenchant indictment of where the sexes have landed at the turn of the millennium. --Lesley Reed