KILLER WOMAN BLUES

A distinguished social critic argues that advances in women’s rights are threatened by pervasive cultural pressures to adopt the more noxious aspects of traditional masculine behavior—the “kickbutt culture.”

DeMott (The Trouble with Friendship, 1996, etc.) believes that we are in the throes of a “mania for gender shift” (i.e., for “imitating stereotypes of the other sex”) that springs from a deluded belief that doing so “significantly enriches the self.” He provides a plethora of instances of “men and women looking and sounding roughly the same.” Drawing from what must have been an enormously fat research file, he alludes to a myriad of movies, television sitcoms, advertisements, popular music lyrics, and talk shows; after wading through pages of this, readers will eagerly agree there is indeed an “astonishing ubiquity of images of women-becoming-men.” He also identifies a “horror of softness” in society—and believes Marcia Clark, for example, lost the OJ verdict because she delayed her pursuit of the domestic-violence aspects of the case. DeMott ventures near conspiracy theory when he argues that corporate America is the primary beneficiary of the “images of the killer woman”: responsible for “the collapse of families . . . [and] the wrecking of homes and neighborhoods” are aggressive, nondomestic women, not the “institutional profit obsession”—the true culprit. DeMott believes that “gender flexibility” is the proper alternative to “women-becoming-men.” He wishes that men and women would “engage each other’s knowledge, experience, and power” and “imagine changing and enriching each other in ways that are beneficial to the larger society.” DeMott’s prose turns sluggish in the second half as he expends many pages summarizing—and often quoting long passages from—the research and theory of other writers whose work he admires, including Catherine MacKinnon, Carol Gilligan, Joan Cock, and Robert Bly. Wendy Shalit and Susan Faludi he trashes.

A provocative thesis—but so slender that DeMott fleshes it out with examples and summaries that at times seem more superfluous than essential.