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Killer Woman Blues: Why Americans Can't Think Straight About Gender and Power, by Benjamin DeMott
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The new "killer woman," says Benjamin DeMott in this lively and provocative book, believes that empowerment lies in tough, aggressive, "male" behavior. This gender denial, he contends, is reshaping American society and betraying the original vision of feminism, which embodied the ideal of a more compassionate and nurturing society for both women and men. Today, many women believe they must "become men" to succeed -- and men are perceived as often ruthless and brutally competitive. Differences molded by nature and history are obscured, as is the healthy flexibility that would free both sexes from rigid gender positions. The other side of this coin is an increasingly hard-nosed ethos in corporate America and in our public policy.
We can no longer think straight about gender and power, DeMott argues, because we are inundated daily by a flood of cultural material -- popular and literary fiction, movies, sitcoms, commercials, cartoons, the whole media mix -- embodying the killer woman and her values. It leads us to believe that the sexes have nothing to teach each other except ever harsher modes of selfishness and cruelty, both at work and at home. DeMott makes his case persuasively with a wealth of fascinating and highly entertaining material. Present, among others, are Nicole Kidman, Walt Whitman, Courtney Love, Teddy Roosevelt, and Rudy Giuliani, along with The New Yorker, Salon, Ally McBeal, Sex and the City, and much more.
Concluding with a passionate plea for a return to feminism's large-spirited vision of human variousness, KILLER WOMAN BLUES clarifies several of our nation's most troubling social problems and will surely be heatedly discussed.
- Sales Rank: #7968571 in Books
- Published on: 2000-12-12
- Released on: 2000-12-12
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.25" h x .63" w x 5.50" l, .88 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 256 pages
Amazon.com Review
"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
From Publishers Weekly
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.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
A leading social critic argues that the goals of early feminismDa more compassionate world for allDhave been forsaken by "killer women," who aim to be as tough and aggressive as men. Women just can't do anything right.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Very Thought Provoking
By James Picardo
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 for Demott is taking on how damaging today's culture is to society. Seeing the moral collapsing in women gives men a cause to not follow the rules, and this correlates well with the undeniably decline in chivalry over the decades. Many men are tired of listening to the real double standards of so many women wanting to have policies in their favor and at the same time not take responsibility for actions that if a man had done would be dealt with severely.
Demott's book is right on target.
10 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
An Essential Book
By A Customer
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.
13 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
DeMott can't think straight
By Debbie Lee Wesselmann
I bought this book with the hope that Benjamin DeMott would provide an insightful, thought-provoking look at gender politics - and instead found myself disappointed before I had finished the introduction. DeMott seems to have created a theory which he wants desperately to prove: that women have shed their femininity to become men largely because the media - arts, journalism, commercials, etc. - has innundated our culture with images of the "killer woman", an aggressive, asexual figure. DeMott's supporting facts are weak and often a real stretch, so that when he occasionally gets things right, it seems an exception rather than the rule. His generalizations go too far, and his understanding of contemporary women not far enough. It struck me that the author was trying to fit the facts to a theory and not the other way around. Much of this seems (whether fairly or not) to reflect the author's sense of being threatened by strong women. Who else would find a female journalist's tough questions as a shedding of her womanhood? Does he truly expect Diane Sawyer to ask Al Gore about the draperies hanging in his house instead of calling him to task for his exaggerations? The only interesting aspect of this book is the variety of sources upon which he draws, from television shows to Joyce Carol Oates to Susan Faludi.
I really hate to pan a book, but this one truly disappointed me. I found it a waste of my time and intellect.
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