Roaring and Wailing
King, Florence
Florence King Roaring and Wailing BENJAMIN DEMOTT'S KILLER WOMAN BLUES: WHY AMERICANS CAN'T THINK STRAIGHT ABOUT GENDER & POWER inadequately chaperoned expatriate adventuress with bad judgment...
...For those who prefer to read books, a collection of essays by women fantasizing about being a man for 24 hours is called Dick for a Day: What Those not ready for outright hermaphrodism can remain female and still imitate men with "in-your-face sexual bravura" to this organ, as well as the other two that go with it...
...On the perverse end of the scale we have New York celebrity-about-town Bijou Phillips, who threw a woman friend to the floor of a nightclub and raped her with a dildo, afterward saying, "So I raped you—deal with it...
...Florence King Roaring and Wailing BENJAMIN DEMOTT'S KILLER WOMAN BLUES: WHY AMERICANS CAN'T THINK STRAIGHT ABOUT GENDER & POWER inadequately chaperoned expatriate adventuress with bad judgment in letters of introduction, but baby has come a long way since then...
...Crime novels...
...Toughness is a conviction among the powerful that the answer to the bottom sector's so-called needs is intimidation—an end to coddling and pampering...
...Everything depended on the willingness of the female of the species to be deadlier than the male, but that was made easy by a feminism that had whetted their appetites before running out of answers...
...What, pray, is going on with women...
...Camille Paglia, whom DeMott calls the "socker scholar," extols the superiority of hardhat, redblooded masculinity and thinks wife-beating is great because a lot of "hot sex" goes with it...
...The ultimate Killer Woman, in DeMott's view, is none other than the frail-looking English professor, Joyce Carol Oates, whose novel Zombie (1995) describes frightful atrocities with an "iron imperviousness to horror" and "a seemingly exuberant embrace of barbarity...
...Killer Womanhood is not a preserve of the elite, but is promoted wherever "Sitcom America" turns for guidance...
...Equally shocking to him is In the Cut (1995) by Susannah Moore, about a woman who welcomes torture, not out of female masochism, but to prove that she can take it just like a man...
...Mass-market women's magazines have articles on "Testosterone Isn't Just a Guy Thing Anymore" and "How To Feel Him Up in the Elevator," and interviews of offbeat amazons such as the six-foot-three, 200-pound professional wrestler who calls herself "an empowered woman who kicks guys in the nuts for a living...
...If you doubt it, see Demi Moore in G.I...
...Self-help...
...Shows about lady cops kickboxing men into insensibility and warrior queens chucking spears are all over the tube...
...DeMott calls this "the politics of pitilessness" and maintains that Killer Woman is behind it all, doing such a good job of imitating men that white-supremacist groups are now actively seeking to recruit female members...
...others do it for them: Geraldo said flat-chested Christiane Amanpour had "big ones," and Sharon Stone was proud as punch when a producer called her by the plural of her surname...
...Commercials feature females, including a little girl, shilling products in gravelly truck-driver voices...
...Deprived of positive images of sexual equality, women relished the chance to kick butt and crack nuts and make like Michael "Greed Is Good" Douglas...
...The book disappoints in other ways...
...86 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ April 2001 Anti-intellectual intellectuals...
...Regan is just one of many women in the book who lay claim indulging in "in-your-face sexual bravura," like Erica Jong and the Killer Ladies Who Lunch, who expounded to a reporter in lascivious detail just what they would be willing to do to service Bill Clinton, and how, and why...
...a whole new line of defense—a new savior—for the country's profit-maddened...
...In between—if there is such a place— is power publisher Judith Regan, who was overheard advising a male underling, "You can't tell me what to do...
...if there were enough of them in high-profile positions, the thinking went, long-held images of "ruthless" corporations would fade from the public mind...
...Given a good pruning and tightening, Killer Woman Blues would make an excellent lead article for Harper's, where some of his other work has appeared...
...Which should surprise no one, says DeMott, because toughness as virtue and flexibility as vice have been embedded in American culture since Teddy Roosevelt raged at "mollycoddles": Toughness is the majority will, the national voice of gender shift...
...The dairy industry's milk-mustache ads hint that a healthy diet can erase sexual differences...
...On the wholesome end of the scale is Brandi Chastain, the soccer player who tore off her shirt after scoring the winning goal, who was praised by one media maven for "meeting the androgynous ideal of women as men who can have babies: muscular, irreverent, aggressive...
...And toughness has been voted in...
...DeMott, an emeritus professor of humanities at Amherst, is a lively writer when he is relating the often hilarious fruits of his research into the cultural scene, but when it comes time to interpret them, he all too often slips into the drone of the faculty lounge: But the central thrust of her work lies elsewhere, in the critique of standard-brand, off-the-rack, gender-frozen attitudes toward cognition—perspectives she views, correctly, as overattached to either-or simplifications, overcommitted to binary oppositions (subjective/objective, impressionistic/ logical, hard/soft, intuitive/rational) that split the world of thought into pointlessly rank-ordered, noncommunicating sectors...
...The author nails part of the answer when he cites "the power still exerted, despite women's advance, by stereotypical masculinity...
...Those who aren't ready for outright hermaphrodism can remain technically female and still imitate men by Would You Do If You Had One...
...Turgid passages like this abound, as do undigestible chunks of quoted dialog from novels, movies, and TV shows, as well as an unintentionally funny tribute to manhood guru Robert "Iron John" Bly...
...His thesis is that Killer Woman is a "stand-in for the corporate ethos...
...Welcome to the "kickbutt culture," Benjamin DeMott's apt name for the sex-role reversal that has turned women into men and men into guests on "Men Who Are Beaten Up by Their Wives and Girlfriends...
...Killer Women come in all types...
...At this point the book gives off a distinctly primeval smell of fear, as if a male-devouring succubus had just flown over it, and DeMott's readiness to blame women for the failure of midnight basketball is exposed as nothing more than a progressive liberal version of the age-old game of blaming women...
...Jane yelling "Suck my dick...
...ends city funding for soup kitchens and teenagers' sports leagues, cuts the Board of Education's capital budget in half...
...Often, they don't even have to make the claim themselves...
...DeMott has a knack for well-turned phrases ("the devitalization of the instinct "Number three, step forward and say, 'Thar she blows.'" THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ April 2001 87 for decency") and clever coinage ("tough-guy feminism"), but he repeats himself incessantly, adding to the tangle with signposting ("it bears repeating," "putting the point differently...
...The Killer Woman emerged onto the national scene in the Nineties and she is not to be trifled with...
...It came about, he says, like this: By admitting ambitious, aggressive women into its ranks and allowing them to achieve executive power and status, Corporate America engineered a convenient makeover for itself...
...evidently the girlish urge to make up a set is still strong, but no longer limited to bridal silver...
...Scorning feminism's original goal of mere equality for the higher calling of proving her machismo, she has invaded the locker room, the truckstop, and the playing fields of Wall Street with blood in her eye...
...Houghton Mifflin, 235 pages, $26...
...Women are reputed to be the gentle sex, the "nice" people...
...Try The Princessa: Machiavelli for Women by Helen Rubin, whose idea of a role model is Lady Macbeth...
...Patricia Cornwell's feature a female medical examiner who coolly performs hideous autopsies while her male morgue assistants gag and pass out...
...One of the contributors is the matey Australian feminist Germaine Greer, author of The Female Eunuch...
...I've got the biggest cock in this whole building...
...This accurate assessment offers ambrosial food for thought, but unfortunately, DeMott loses conservative readers by blaming everything on capitalism...
...Toughness indicts sentimental liberalism__ Toughness erases after-school programs, developmental workshops, school-based group activities, slashes day care centers, youth jobs programs...
Vol. 34 • April 2001 • No. 3
