True Love Waits, and Other Essays and Criticism

Description

Whether she's taking on bimbo feminism, crime and punishment, gun control, sexual mores, self-help books, or Woody Allen's indiscretions, Wendy Kaminer holds an unforgiving mirror to our world. True Love Waits brings together fifteen years of Kaminer's best writings from publications including The Village Voice, The New York Times, Mirabella, and The Atlantic - thoughtful, acerbic, and prescient essays that have helped us understand ourselves. Though her topics range from popular culture to politics and law, and her thinking has evolved over the years, her concerns have remained constant. This is no accidental collection but a cohesive set of reflections on fundamental themes - self-reliance, justice, sex, and civil liberty. First and foremost, Wendy Kaminer is concerned with feminism, a diverse and conflictual movement that includes among its adherents women who oppose pornography and women who consume it, women who want to integrate the military and women who'd like to dismantle it. A longtime proponent of equality feminism, Kaminer has been surveying the feminist landscape for over a decade, mapping its contradictory ideologies. She was also a critic of popular celebrations of victimhood long before criticism of victimism became fashionable, and Kaminer turns from questions of personal responsibility raised by the feminist movement to questions of accountability in the criminal courts. A onetime practicing attorney, her early writing on our confusion about crime, punishment, and retribution and the balancing of social injustice with the demands of criminal justice seems practically clairvoyant today. She examines the equation of the personal and the political, in the courts, the feminist movement, and the culture at large and finds a tendency to trivialize the political and inflate the personal to sometimes ridiculous proportions. And, of course, she trains her eye on the personal development tradition, the subject of her celebrated I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional, offering trenchant analyses of self-help literature, popular therapeutic culture, and politics. In other words, her interests are what interest us. In these thirty-seven pieces, arranged thematically, Kaminer draws an incisive portrait of American culture. Her witty, clear-headed rationalism is an antidote to the emotionally driven ideologizing that deafens public conversation. Wendy Kaminer is a Radcliffe Public Policy Fellow and a contributing editor to The Atlantic Monthly. Her previous books include It's All the Rage and I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional. Cover Inside Flaps Back Cover Title Credits Contents Introduction True Love Waits The Privacy Problem Bimbo Feminism No Sex Is Good Sex What Is This Thing Called Rape? Feminism's Third Wave: What Do Young Women Want? Feminism's Identity Crisis A Virtuous Woman Put the Blame on Mame Just Like a Woman 20th Century Foxes Feminism and the Devaluation of Rights Feminists Against the First Amendment Harassed and Abandoned Porn Again Of Face-Lifts and Feminism Crashing the Locker Room Divorce Laying Down the Law on Sex Second Thoughts on the Second Amendment Murder Most Feminine Not a Love Story The Avengers The Wrong Men Morality - The Newest Deal When Freedom of Speech Meant Not Saying the Pledge Church & State, Inc Sweet Sin The Borrowing Kind The Berlin Wall of Foley Square The Shrunken Reality of Lives in Therapy Do You Want to Talk About It? I'm O.K., You're Dead Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Shirley MacLaine Just Good Friends It's a Wonderful Life