Welcome to The Bombshell, a regular column about the peculiarities of the fairer sex.

It can’t be easy to be a man these days, what with the gender’s looming end, but thinking about Naomi Wolf’s new and much-ridiculed biography of the vagina has reminded me once again of the main reason why I would not want to be a man, or, make that a heterosexual man. Having sex with a woman is a complicated challenge. It exhausts me to think of it.

I feel sorry for the mystified males who have to have sex with us. One friend recently left by his wife wants to write a book for men called Stop, It Tickles. Here is how he explains his title: You meet a woman, she likes you a lot, you get together and maybe get married. But there always comes that night when you are doing the thing you always did, the thing she always liked, and suddenly she says: “Stop, it tickles.” And that’s the beginning of the end of all of it.

Another male friend, also not long ago turfed out by his wife and hunting for a replacement in the brave new world, has discovered that all the women he dates seem to come with their own plastic battery-powered devices. He’s had to learn how to operate them.

What do women want? No, really. What the hell do women want?

The mystified Viennese head doctor was well and truly perplexed, and a century of women (and not a few men) have since tried and failed to come up with a satisfying answer, leaving men like my two friends, helpless. Now comes—and comes—pop feminist Naomi Wolf with a suggestion. Her advice book is so prurient and visceral that the title is asterisked out on the iTunes library on my iPad.

In Vagina: A Biography, the answer to what women want is simple and old-fashioned: Women want flowers, eye-gazing, poetic language, cuddling and a lot of languorous attention to a very particular spot between the legs.

Who could possibly argue with that? And yet, the book has already spawned a slag pile-on, by—surprise, surprise—other women. And not just any women, but slightly younger pop-culture feminists, some of whom have at one time or another been anointed, as was Ms. Wolf in her 1990s heyday, as the “new” face of feminism, another photogenic, usually New York-based and usually Jewish gal ripe to step into Gloria’s pumps.

Interestingly, every one of the reviews of her book that I can find are by women. Perhaps because it’s a visceral topic, literally, for women, book review editors from The New Yorker to Slate decided that this one is not man’s territory. That’s too bad, because men are the ones who need to read it.

Vagina could have been an interesting bookend under everyman’s bedside reading lamp, beside Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men. As capital-M Men are going extinct, small-m men will have to step up to the big V with more reverence than ever before.

Ms. Wolf’s book shows them why and how.

How women come has perplexed heterosexual males since long before Freud’s “what do women want?” It has driven men to poetry and pornography and, finally, to prostitutes, who enable those who can’t figure it out to dispense with the tricky problem altogether.

Ms. Wolf’s book is filled with much purple silliness about goddesses and half-baked science about body chemistry, but it raises a legitimate question: Does a happy vagina make a happy woman and, by extension, a happy home and world? Given that benign intent, why then has her book sent so many of her peers into apoplexies of meanness, sarcasm and statements like this one from British reviewer Susanna Moore, who after decrying Ms. Wolf’s book as self-help crap dressed up as feminism, dubbing it “a bit anti-dildo” … and noting that “it’s like lesbianism never happened, nor class, nor vast swaths of feminist theory, ” concludes, “I can be this brutal because … I am indeed a cunt.” Yikes!

I’m not a Naomi Wolf fan. Her book is indeed cringe-worthy. But something about the tenor and tone of the reviews is so over the top it seems reasonable to ask why.

The reviewers are or once were members in good standing of the “young feminist writers” club. They have all written provocative books or essays about women’s needs, women’s problems, women, women, women. And they too have revealed themselves intimately at least once or twice, in print, because … oh yes, the personal is still political and, well, that stuff sells.

The New York Review of Books gave British writer Zoe Heller several thousand words artfully arranged around a very distracting color print of Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde, his 1866 painting of a woman’s crotch. Ms. Heller, a “confessional” English journalist, born in 1965, who made a shtick of her own romantic life in her columns for the Independent before writing novels including Notes on a Scandal, finds nothing redeeming in the book, pointing out that Ms. Wolf doesn’t know her “correlates” from her “causes” in science. She goes beyond the book to critique Ms. Wolf’s demand that Julian Assange’s Swedish rape accusers come forward, since hiding their names is a pre-feminist Victorian relic. “There is a strange hubris in Wolf’s claim to understand how all rape affects all women,” Ms. Heller writes. “It is the same hubris that compels her to instruct us on how all women need to be wooed, and how all women feel when they come … Her refusal to acknowledge the heterogeneity of female temperament, of female sexual proclivity, of female desire, would be galling, if it were not so dotty.” Ouch.

Over at Slate, Katie Roiphe offers her take not only on the book but on Wolf’s entire career. Ms. Roiphe—a single mom of two, living in New York, born in 1968—wrote a controversial book on date rape that kinda, sorta blamed the victim, called The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism. She has since crafted a career as the go-to girl for the slightly anti-PC feminist take—not Caitlin Flanagan, but Caitlin on the left.

Ms. Roiphe gets into the ring and administers a full-body takedown in the first 10 seconds. “I doubt the most brilliant novelist in the world could have created a more skewering satire of Naomi Wolf’s career than her latest book,” she opens. “The very public story of how Naomi Wolf went from a bright, promising Rhodes Scholar to this inventive variety of navel-gazer tells us some uncomfortable things about the culture and more specifically, the media.”

Ms. Roiphe proceeds to rip apart everything Ms. Wolf has written or done since her first book, and yes, O.K., comparing her Caesarean to being crucified and then publicly announcing she discovered Jesus on a book tour in Scotland was a bit much, but does that really make her a “yuppie barracuda”?

Last but not least, The New Yorker gave Ariel Levy a handful of pages and her own podcast with Judith Thurman and Sasha Weiss to talk about how Ms. Wolf’s book is just Fifty Shades of Grey dressed in an old second-wave-feminist Guatemalan alpaca vest. “Anger the vagina and the woman will have no choice but to become a harpy. Biology is destiny once again,” writes Ms. Levy, an out lesbian and author of the crackling cultural zeitgeist book Female Chauvinist Pigs (2005), for which she was anointed by no less an authority than Cindy Adams of The New York Post as “feminism’s newest and most provocative voice.”

All this fury and revulsion begs the question: Why not just ignore her, if what she’s saying is so idiotic? Why is this book getting so much space—mansions—in the nation’s high-end media real estate, the Fifth Avenue of pop culture? Is it the Rhodes scholarship? The New Voice of Feminism mantle she once wore? Or is it something more … personal?

I suspect that Ms. Wolf’s purple new age-y prose drives these women nuts because (a) their editors handed the book to them for review because they thought it was an Important Feminist Book when it’s actually slight and (b) there’s a grain of truth in what she’s trying to say.

There certainly are orgasms and orgasms, and women know the difference. But trumpeting the V orgasm as superior to all others is problematic for a number of demographic groups, including under-endowed men and the women who love them, lesbians, and any of the one-third to two-thirds of women who, according to Ms. Heller, simply can’t come that way.

The problem is that Ms. Wolf accepts nothing less than total “technicolor” vaginal orgasm satisfaction. “Unfortunately there is not, physiologically, much middle ground available for women,” she writes. “Either they are extremely well treated sexually, or else they become physically uncomfortable and emotionally irritable.” She concludes that: “A happy heterosexual vagina requires, to state the obvious, a virile man.”

As a heterosexual female who celebrates sex with virile men, Ms. Wolf’s point of view is radical. She doesn’t tote sex tools in her purse on dates with under-endowed or aged-out Viagrans who left their blue pills in the other pants pocket. She doesn’t have sex with women. She apparently has a boyfriend who does things the way she likes. Those facts of her life put her outside the mainstream as mediated by feminism’s new elites, who promote the doctrine that there are so very many different kinds of sex, so very many different roads to pleasure, all equally satisfying depending on what gets you off.

Maybe so. But like the virile capital M men going the way of the woolly mammoth, Ms. Wolf’s white-bread real P-in-V sex for red-blooded hetero women is just not the fashionable option anymore.

Nina Burleigh is the author of The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Trials of Amanda Knox among other books. Follow her at @ninaburleigh.

“This is the first action we’ve organized,” related Karina Garcia, a press officer for WORD. The march kicked off at Times Square at 1 pm with over a hundred people participating, around a quarter of the crowd male. “Women have been treated like bargaining chips, particularly by the Democratic Party. Politicians seem to think that they can trade off our rights.”

Ms. Garcia was referring to the incident last summer when President Obama told the Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, “I'll give you abortion in D.C.” to reach a budget compromise. This means that low-income women in the District of Columbia will be prevented from receiving Medicaid assistance offered by the D.C. government for abortion procedures.

On August 24, we bonded over dinner with Radical Women and their leader, Anne Slater. Radical Women is a socialist, feminist organization dedicated to achieving the full equality of women. It was formed in Seattle in 1967 and has since expanded into an international organization. The dinner was held at the Black Women’s Blueprint in Brooklyn, at the table where Ms. Coretta Scott-King, Rosa Parks and other Civil Rights activists communed to bring about change. This served as a reminder that the battle for suffrage came directly out of the battle against slavery.

“Right now, we are facing an attack on women’s rights,” Ms. Slater announced to the hushed room. “The media are calling it the War on Women. Over the last two years, state legislators have passed 164 laws restricting women’s rights.” Ms. Slater is visiting NYC to support the Durham-Lopez Freedom Socialist presidential campaign, which prioritizes survival issues facing women, LGBT communities, people of color and immigrants.

The Observer endeavored to speak to three pioneering women about the importance of campaigning for women’s rights. Activist Shelby Knox, who starred in “The Education of Shelby Knox,” documenting her campaign for comprehensive sex education in the high schools of Lubbock, Texas, told us why the documentary filmmakers had reached out to her.

“We had already made headlines in Lubbock with our campaign,” Ms. Knox recounted. “In the Washington Post a reporter wrote:- ‘There’s nothing to do in Lubbock except have sex, says 15 year old virginity pledger, Shelby Knox.’ My parents and grandmother were thrilled.”

Unfortunately, despite arduous campaigning, Ms. Knox did not succeed in changing the law.

“There is still an abstinence only policy,” she admitted. But the undaunted crusader has not stopped campaigning since then. Ms. Knox is now the Director of Organizing, Women’s Rights for Change.org and recently helped 14-year-old Julia Bluhm convince Seventeen magazine to make a pledge not to photoshop and to show diverse ranges of beauty in their pages.

For Ms. Knox, the dwindling support for the Feminist movement may be the result of poor education in schools concerning women’s struggle for equality.

“We are not really taught the history of women, both our struggle for our rights and also the history of what women contribute to the world,” she explained. “I think it’s very important that we have a day that we sit down and remember that history.”

“Any social reform takes about a century to really seep into society,” Ms. Knox replied when we asked how long she thinks it will take to reach full equality. “In this country we really do see unfortunately the birth of women’s rights in the 1960s so I would say, we’re into that century about 50 years. And I don’t know if in 50 years we’ll be completely equal but hopefully we’ll at least be having the right conversations.”

In Bryant Park, the Observer had lunch with Ariel Levy, author of Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of The Raunch Culture (2005), which criticized the highly sexualized American culture where women objectify each other and themselves, and where female sexuality is about performance rather than pleasure. Coincidentally, we were sitting next to a couple engaging in an enthusiastic game of tonsil tennis.

“They’re really fond of each other. They like each other a lot,” Ms. Levy commented. Tearing our eyes away from the spectacle, we asked how she had reacted to Republican Todd Akin’s infamous comments last week about “legitimate rape.”

“There are plenty of people who don’t have any sense of how the female body works and who don’t believe in science. I mean it’s the same minds that bring you Creationism,” she replied, unsurprised by his gaffe. “It’s a fundamental philosophical difference and you either think abortion is murder or you don’t… and if you don’t, then you don’t think people should be imposing their religious views on your body.”

For Ms. Levy, the public reaction to Mr. Akin’s comments proves that there is still an enduring Feminist conscience.

“People are in a genuine froth about that Akin quote,” she added. “I think it’s going to play a big part in the next election. The War on Women is sticking. People do care about that.”

In Female Chauvinist Pigs Ms. Levy hammered the point home that gender is constructed rather than innate, so we asked what she thought about campaigns such as Pinkstinks, which targets products and media to undo the “pinkification” of girlhood and the gender stereotyping of children’s toys.

“I don’t think the solution to fixing our world is to tell your daughter she can’t wear a tutu and be a ballerina if that’s what she wants,” Ms. Levy replied. “I think the point is to make it clear that there are other options.”

“The other thing that is really important is that you don’t want to be saying “pretty” all the time,” she added. “You don’t want to be drilling into a little female person from the minute she’s born that that’s her value. I think that to me is more something I would be fixated on as a parent than pink and blue, and dolls versus trucks, because a lot of the time it seems like resistance is futile.”

After coffee with Ms. Knox and lunch with Ms. Levy, the Observer finally managed to corner lawyer, professor and political commentator for Fox News, Susan Estrich. She bluntly declared that she would not be celebrating Women’s Equality Day.

“I think what I’d really celebrate is when we have Men’s Equality Day. The idea that we still have to have a Women’s Equality Day, it just suggests that we’re not even close,” Ms. Estrich replied. “It’s like every day we have Men’s Equality Day and then one day we pick out a day and say this is Women’s Equality Day.”

Mr. Akin’s comments about “legitimate rape” enraged Ms. Estrich who not only was a rape victim herself, but also published a book called Real Rape dealing with the legal and social issues surrounding the cataloguing of rape cases.

“The whole point of the book was that you didn’t have to be raped by a stranger in an alley, which I was, to be really raped,” Ms. Estrich told us. “I wrote that book in 1986, and what’s really depressing is to be making the same point in 2012. The problem is that you can change the words of the law but unless the public understanding, the public and prosecutor’s perception changes, having a better-worded statue doesn’t get you necessarily a different result.”

For Ms. Estrich, the “hook-up culture” of no-strings-attached sex, often under the influence of alcohol, unfortunately makes it much more difficult to prove a rape case.

“It can look in a lot of cases like a man is taking advantage of an inebriated woman. She is a state in which it may look like she can consent, but she really shouldn’t be held capable of giving consent,” stated Ms. Estrich. “I used to joke, only half in jest, that since everyone should be using condoms anyway to protect themselves, the condom container should have a space for two initials, and you should initial the condom the way you would for any other contract or agreement to show that you’re doing this voluntarily. And people would laugh, because it was, I quote, unromantic. I mean what’s so romantic about a woman who can’t see straight?”

When we asked all three interviewees what was the most critical issue for women since getting the vote, the control over one’s body was considered to be of the utmost importance.

“Until women have control over their reproductive freedom, they are not going to have full control over their lives,” reiterated Ms. Estrich. “We have won the battle in the courts but lost the war in many states and communities, because there is no access to abortion, or that access to abortion is so laden with punishment that many women are effectively denied safe, free access to abortion.”

It didn’t quite work out that way; the shoe selection, though marked down an additional 40 percent, was still mostly out of my price range, and seemed heavily skewed in favor of really, truly impractical shoes, like 5-inch stilettos with ultra-thin metal heels—they looked like they would be good for self-defense (a person kicked in the balls with them would definitely have to be taken to the hospital) but not for actually, you know, walking in.

After I decided that I in fact didn’t need a pair of metallic pewter Manolo Blahnik high-heeled sandals that were 75 percent off and yet still half a size too big, I made my way over to the clothing section, which had way too many of the same Rag & Bone studded dresses and too few of the perfect black Phillip Lim cocktail dresses that I had invented in my mind. But even though the pickings were slim, I acquired a pile of stuff and headed to the makeshift dressing room—just a corner of the sales floor with a few full-length mirrors along the walls. I hung my clothes up on the rack and started attempting to pull a too-small Diane von Furstenberg satin dress over my head.

“Excuse me, do you mind if I ask you—do you like this?” The speaker, whom I’ll call Amy, was a short, skinny, dark-haired woman with tattoos on her arms, who was trying on a sleeveless party dress that appeared to have been Bedazzled with oversize rhinestones.

“It looks nice,” the other woman, whom I named Pauline in my head, said noncommittally.

“I just can’t decide,” said Amy. “I mean, it’s expensive. It’s really expensive. It’s more than I’ve ever spent on a dress in my entire life.”

Pauline nodded sympathetically.

Amy looked at herself in the mirror again. “Oh, I just don’t know what to do. See, it’s my 40^th birthday party in a couple weeks, and I just want to be wearing the dress that when people see me, they just go, wow. You know? I want that dress.”

“Oh, I know what you mean,” said Pauline.

“It’s just so expensive. I mean, even with the discount, it’s still, like, $500! So it’s like … do I get the dress or do I pay my rent this month, you know?” Someone else chimed in that it might be better to get the dress. Anonymous shopping-enabling at work!

“I should get it, right?” Amy had an audience now. “I mean … I have a photo of this dress as my screensaver on my computer!”

“Oh, you have to get it then!” said someone else.

“Well,” said Amy, looking at herself in the mirror, “I’m never getting married. I’m never going to have a wedding. So this is sort of like my wedding dress, you know?” Sympathetic murmurs from the crowd. “I’m turning 40. I just want a dress where people are really like, wow,” she said again. “Is this that dress? Do you think this is that dress?”

It was sort of like that Sex and the City episode where Carrie registers for a pair of Manolos (then I was really glad I hadn’t bought them) because hers had been stolen at her friend’s baby shower and, she rationalizes, she should be allowed to have a wedding … to herself. True, Amy wasn’t asking her friends or anyone else to purchase this dress for her, but there was something about the idea of what you might call liberated materialism that scared me.

I told my wise friend Marisa this story and asked what she thought. Was I being judgy? Or—and this was harder to swallow—maybe I was projecting my own insecurities about getting married onto this woman? “Maybe there’s a little joy in being able to pick out your own dress at Barneys and not some frothy confection of a wedding dress, you know?” Marisa said.

When I was growing up, my mom had a friend, a successful TV writer named Meryl, who had never gotten married. (She was my mom’s only single friend, I think, and her existence was treated as a sort of cautionary tale: Crazy single New York ladies buy too-tight Chanel suits and also wear leggings and mules.) By the time I remember meeting her, she was probably in her late 30s, living alone on the Upper East Side. Meryl liked to call my mom crying and tell her how lucky she was that she was married and had kids. One day, in the mail, my mom got an invitation to Meryl’s 40^th birthday party; on the invitation, Meryl had indicated a jeweler to which her invited guests could send money so Meryl could purchase her chosen necklace. “Well, why shouldn’t I?” she told my mom. (Oh, I don’t know, maybe because it’s tacky and you already have more gaudy jewelry than you know what to do with, and the only reason you’re doing this is to remind people that you, Meryl, were dealt a bad hand in life and everyone should feel sorry for you?)

Amy, the Barneys woman, seemed positively enlightened in contrast.

“I mean, it could be a liberating moment and not a pathetic one,” said Marisa, as we mulled the question of the dress some more. “But I also think it shouldn’t be that Sex and the City feminism equals choosing my choice … to buy my luxury goods. Choosing our choice is way more expensive than TV made it out to be.”

It occurred to me that we, the post–Sex and the City generation, are sort of stuck. How are we supposed to know if we are unmarried because we want to be? As an unmarried 30-something woman in New York, you can’t say you want to get married, because then you’re that unmarried 30-something woman in New York who’s obsessed with marriage. But if you go around saying you don’t want to get married, people think you’re lying, or that you’re so traumatized by your past dating experiences that you must hate men. (Perhaps related: Most of my friends were completely captivated by Ariel Levy’s story in The New Yorker last week about the Van Dykes, the roaming pack of separatist lesbians. But today I think we’re all afraid we’d end up like Ruth on Six Feet Under, when she thinks her friends are serious about starting a women-only compound in Topanga.)

Or maybe my generation is just too concerned with what other people think.

dshafrir@observer.com

Also heading over to 4 Times Square is New York Magazine contributing editor and writer Ariel Levy, who has already posted the news to her personal web site.

David Remnick wrote in an email to Media Mob that they are both expected to "write reported pieces."

Ms. Levy wrote in an e-mail that she starts on April 1 and adds: "I am really psyched. I've loved working at New York magazine but I've also been there for TWELVE years if you can believe that, since I was an intern at the gossip column and Kurt Andersen was my boss. So, you know, I think it's time for a change."

Bet that got someone’s attention. Woo-hoo!

Ms. Hayt must believe that any writer who begins a book with whimsical lesbianism, infidelity and cunnilingus deserves decent book sales and kudos for being brazen and honest. (This reviewer is hoping to reel readers in for 800 words—did I mention that she performed the act in her childhood bedroom?) The impulse actually isn’t surprising. A book about growing up, getting married, having a child, divorcing early, dating around, having sex, doing drugs—the basic and ordinary stuff of life—desperately needs something new and shocking on page 1 to justify the publisher’s decision to stick the whole thing between hard covers. So without a particularly original story to tell or a particularly elegant command of the language, Ms. Hayt—like many writers before her—has produced an ostentatiously frank car-wreck memoir, so called because it invites irresistible rubbernecking and, inevitably, a book deal.

Her honesty is a pose. She’s like the high-school girl who sheepishly “admits” that she loves football to a group of guys whose girlfriends are demanding that they turn off the Giants game and switch to the John Hughes marathon: One suspects she doesn’t really love football. She might understand the rules and know the players’ names, but she doesn’t totally relish the brutish spectacle. She just wants the boys to notice her.

Ms. Hayt wants to be noticed. And she’s also trying to appeal to women who long to hear about other women who regret their decisions, who are conflicted about love and marriage, who are just dying for really good sex.

Throughout her tale of growing up with dysfunctional parents in Great Neck, marrying her college sweetheart and painfully pursuing a career in writing, one doesn’t doubt that Ms. Hayt loves sex, resents motherhood, or faces life’s problems with a sympathetically familiar mixture of pluck and heartache. But because (I repeat) we’ve heard this story again and again, she feels she has to do some rhetorical kegstands to bust through the memoir malaise: She uses words like “cock” and “cooch,” sometimes in the same sentence (“I preferred cock to cooch”); she describes her post-divorce sex life in blandly graphic language (“Penetration required gentle pushing”); she treats her son like an annoyingly overlarge piece of furniture (“Bad enough I was a mother who chafed easily”) in the name of oppressed moms everywhere.

Her intentions are transparent, and almost everything backfires. Even the sex scenes fall flat, and you end up feeling sorry that the son must endure the mother’s self-absorption. It could so have easily gone the other way, but Ms. Hayt is intent on being a tough, unique woman rather than a thoughtful or funny writer.

In a recent smart book (with a loathsome title), Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, Ariel Levy writes: “There is a widespread assumption that simply because my generation of women has the good fortune to live in a world touched by the feminist movement, that means everything we do is magically imbued with its agenda. It doesn’t work that way. ‘Raunchy’ and ‘liberated’ are not synonyms.” In her quest to realize her destiny as a modern woman rather than a housebound hausfrau, Ms. Hayt finds herself in the same nebulous, seductive territory that Ms. Levy describes: Ms. Hayt confuses explicit language with real freedom, and a crass, almost masculine sensibility with a candid, feminist message.

And yet there’s one episode in I’m No Saint that works: Ms. Hayt’s mechanical, cliché-free portrayal of her date rape at age 13. She wants to say no, but she doesn’t: “Eventually the deed was going to go down, so what was the goddamn big deal anyway?” In effect, she draws an illuminating and disturbing parallel between the way sex is portrayed to young girls (as if virginity were something girls protect and then relinquish, something boys pursue and then take) and the process of rape (something is violated and taken). To the teenaged Elizabeth Hayt, succumbing to date rape felt wrong, but not all that different from losing the virginity she’d been taught would be stolen anyway. The whole scene is only about four pages long.

Date rape may have had something to do with Ms. Hayt’s screwed-up love life and depression, but no more than her crappy relationship with her parents, or her drug problem, or her long-standing feelings of insecurity—I’m No Saint is a catalog of women’s woes. We like to think that surviving a specific trauma makes us stronger, and so we’d like to think that recovering from rape in particular could have helped Ms. Hayt to achieve some kind of stability. But we never hear about the date rape again—she has other things to deal with, including cocaine addiction, sobriety, new men, old men, being a better mom, anorexia, plastic surgery and starting to write for The New York Times. What she demonstrates is that some women just get over date rape like they get over everything else. It’s the one truth in I’m No Saint that might actually come as a shock.

Suzy Hansen is a senior editor at The Observer.

Ms. Levy does a fine job lining up the evidence for the pornification of American women. Her thesis is that the female self-image has a reached a new low. Heiress/porn star/actress Paris Hilton is only the poster girl. Ms. Levy presents dozens of other real-life examples—from middle-class college girls who beg to strip and fake “hot” lesbian action for the Girls Gone Wild cameras to porno writers on the best-seller list, Olympians posing for Playboy, the scary ubiquity of boob and vagina jobs among the middle class, misogynistic San Francisco lesbians remaking themselves as boorish teenage boys, pre-teens in thongs, teen girls hosting “rainbow parties” and, worst of all, women who should know better—well-educated women, veteran female entertainment industry hands—working behind the scenes producing this crap. These are the women Ms. Levy calls Female Chauvinist Pigs.

The premise lacks a wee bit of historical perspective. Anyone remember the 1970’s? At least in the venial-sins department, we’re not that much closer to hell’s burning lake today than we were back then. Coming of age in that raunchy decade, my pre-teen girlfriends and I dressed like Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver whenever we could get away with it. Wild horses—let alone our horrified mothers—couldn’t have dragged us away from the blue eye shadow or our tube tops and “hot pants.” And when we graduated from that look, we squeezed ourselves into the slipperiest thigh-slit disco halter dresses and sallied forth to have as much sex as we could procure.

But that was before Ariel Levy’s time. The progeny of two 1960’s radicals, she came of age in the ultra-P.C. 1990’s and was educated at Wesleyan University, where the English department did not offer a class in the Western canon—and actually refused to add one to the curriculum when students asked for it. Instead, students got classes in how to deconstruct porn. (One wonders whether the Wesleyan English department has yet arrived at its “What were we thinking?” moment. Perhaps that’s for Ms. Levy’s next book.)

In any case, she somehow learned how to write very well. This book is deeply researched, sparkling with witty outrage, readable. What’s missing, though, is a stringent analysis of the cause of the problem, the succinct J’accuse.

Reading this litany of “raunch,” I tried to identify the common denominator between this era and that of my sordid youth. The obvious similarity is the high price of oil—perhaps some freakonomist will demonstrate a correlation between the rising price of Saudi crude and the willingness of American girls to dress and act like street whores.

Ms. Levy doesn’t go there. Instead of searching for answers in the larger political-cultural moment—wartime, economic uncertainty, vast right-wing hypocrisy—she looks to the women’s movement of the 1970’s and finds her culprit there. Talk about blaming the victim.

In Ms. Levy’s analysis, the schism that erupted in the women’s movement between the Andrea Dworkin–Catharine MacKinnon anti-porn faction and the “pro-sex” sexual-liberation feminists ultimately left women in a quandary. The women’s movement was blown apart when its leaders split on whether sex with men was tantamount to rape, or pornography was the starting point for liberation. To Ms. Levy, today’s “hot” baby hos are paying the price for this confusion.

She’s quite right that that split was bad news. But the women’s movement was ultimately beaten by the stronger forces of darkness that opposed it, specifically the powerful alliance forged to kill the Equal Rights Amendment, which then brutally turned the argument about women’s liberation away from the finer points—day care and equal pay, for example—and into a desperate trench war simply to keep abortion legal. Distracted for decades by that fundamental threat, the women’s movement has been unable to deliver other benefits that it might once have promised, including offering a path to healthy sexuality and self-image for women.

Though it misplaces the blame, Ms. Levy’s provocative book identifies a trend. The current pornification of America has coincided exactly with the triumph of the right wing. This shouldn’t surprise anyone: Prick a radical conservative and the kink oozes out. You can bet your riding crop that Capitol Hill’s dungeon dominatrices, strip-club owners and proprietors of members-only “swinger” boîtes welcomed four more years of W.

Pundits on the right will of course reply that “blowjob” only became part of the national pre-teen lexicon thanks to Bill Clinton’s lascivious ways. But haven’t Presidents—even Presidents from Texas, where such acts are illegal—always had the pleasure of oral ministration? It took the Republicans to bore a keyhole through which the nation could peer.

Ms. Levy doesn’t have much to say about the right’s taste for voyeurism, though that’s certainly part of the story. She’s too busy damning the plastic-fantastic, pole-dancing, X-rated Paris Hilton version of female sexiness that so many women of all ages, and especially the youngest, have accepted as normal sexuality.

Back in the 1970’s, women expected to enjoy sex—or anyway, my girlfriends and I did. According to Ms. Levy, today’s commodified hotties aren’t in it for fun. She argues that the garish pornification of women’s sexuality, and women’s willingness to go along with it and to pretend to like it, is damaging women. She cites example after example of thong-wearing, blowjob-giving high-school girls admitting to having sex without feeling anything at all, and without expecting to, and of American women everywhere who have completely internalized the notion that their bodies exist not for their own but for male pleasure. She’s right on, if a little gynocentric. She might have discussed how porno makes rotten lovers of men, too.

On so many levels that it would require a full-length term paper to quantify (perhaps some Wesleyan professor of porno deconstruction has already assigned it), George W. Bush is the quintessential Hooters guy. What Ariel Levy’s research shows is that during his ignominious reign, the entire country has become Hooterville—not the mythic cracker town, but a national amusement-park version of the bigbusted franchise. Women’s real sexual needs (such a quaint notion; even quainter to find there’s actually a thoughtful 30-year-old woman still writing about them) are simply irrelevant in a nation where the female role has been reduced to its darkest primordial essence: entertaining the troops.

Nina Burleigh’s most recent book is The Stranger and the Statesman (Perennial); her next book, about the French scientists who founded Egyptology, will be published by William Morrow in June 2006.

Ms. Levy does a fine job lining up the evidence for the pornification of American women. Her thesis is that the female self-image has a reached a new low. Heiress/porn star/actress Paris Hilton is only the poster girl. Ms. Levy presents dozens of other real-life examples—from middle-class college girls who beg to strip and fake “hot” lesbian action for the Girls Gone Wild cameras to porno writers on the best-seller list, Olympians posing for Playboy, the scary ubiquity of boob and vagina jobs among the middle class, misogynistic San Francisco lesbians remaking themselves as boorish teenage boys, pre-teens in thongs, teen girls hosting “rainbow parties” and, worst of all, women who should know better—well-educated women, veteran female entertainment industry hands—working behind the scenes producing this crap. These are the women Ms. Levy calls Female Chauvinist Pigs.

The premise lacks a wee bit of historical perspective. Anyone remember the 1970’s? At least in the venial-sins department, we’re not that much closer to hell’s burning lake today than we were back then. Coming of age in that raunchy decade, my pre-teen girlfriends and I dressed like Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver whenever we could get away with it. Wild horses—let alone our horrified mothers—couldn’t have dragged us away from the blue eye shadow or our tube tops and “hot pants.” And when we graduated from that look, we squeezed ourselves into the slipperiest thigh-slit disco halter dresses and sallied forth to have as much sex as we could procure.

But that was before Ariel Levy’s time. The progeny of two 1960’s radicals, she came of age in the ultra-P.C. 1990’s and was educated at Wesleyan University, where the English department did not offer a class in the Western canon—and actually refused to add one to the curriculum when students asked for it. Instead, students got classes in how to deconstruct porn. (One wonders whether the Wesleyan English department has yet arrived at its “What were we thinking?” moment. Perhaps that’s for Ms. Levy’s next book.)

In any case, she somehow learned how to write very well. This book is deeply researched, sparkling with witty outrage, readable. What’s missing, though, is a stringent analysis of the cause of the problem, the succinct J’accuse.

Reading this litany of “raunch,” I tried to identify the common denominator between this era and that of my sordid youth. The obvious similarity is the high price of oil—perhaps some freakonomist will demonstrate a correlation between the rising price of Saudi crude and the willingness of American girls to dress and act like street whores.

Ms. Levy doesn’t go there. Instead of searching for answers in the larger political-cultural moment—wartime, economic uncertainty, vast right-wing hypocrisy—she looks to the women’s movement of the 1970’s and finds her culprit there. Talk about blaming the victim.

In Ms. Levy’s analysis, the schism that erupted in the women’s movement between the Andrea Dworkin–Catharine MacKinnon anti-porn faction and the “pro-sex” sexual-liberation feminists ultimately left women in a quandary. The women’s movement was blown apart when its leaders split on whether sex with men was tantamount to rape, or pornography was the starting point for liberation. To Ms. Levy, today’s “hot” baby hos are paying the price for this confusion.

She’s quite right that that split was bad news. But the women’s movement was ultimately beaten by the stronger forces of darkness that opposed it, specifically the powerful alliance forged to kill the Equal Rights Amendment, which then brutally turned the argument about women’s liberation away from the finer points—day care and equal pay, for example—and into a desperate trench war simply to keep abortion legal. Distracted for decades by that fundamental threat, the women’s movement has been unable to deliver other benefits that it might once have promised, including offering a path to healthy sexuality and self-image for women.

Though it misplaces the blame, Ms. Levy’s provocative book identifies a trend. The current pornification of America has coincided exactly with the triumph of the right wing. This shouldn’t surprise anyone: Prick a radical conservative and the kink oozes out. You can bet your riding crop that Capitol Hill’s dungeon dominatrices, strip-club owners and proprietors of members-only “swinger” boîtes welcomed four more years of W.

Pundits on the right will of course reply that “blowjob” only became part of the national pre-teen lexicon thanks to Bill Clinton’s lascivious ways. But haven’t Presidents—even Presidents from Texas, where such acts are illegal—always had the pleasure of oral ministration? It took the Republicans to bore a keyhole through which the nation could peer.

Ms. Levy doesn’t have much to say about the right’s taste for voyeurism, though that’s certainly part of the story. She’s too busy damning the plastic-fantastic, pole-dancing, X-rated Paris Hilton version of female sexiness that so many women of all ages, and especially the youngest, have accepted as normal sexuality.

Back in the 1970’s, women expected to enjoy sex—or anyway, my girlfriends and I did. According to Ms. Levy, today’s commodified hotties aren’t in it for fun. She argues that the garish pornification of women’s sexuality, and women’s willingness to go along with it and to pretend to like it, is damaging women. She cites example after example of thong-wearing, blowjob-giving high-school girls admitting to having sex without feeling anything at all, and without expecting to, and of American women everywhere who have completely internalized the notion that their bodies exist not for their own but for male pleasure. She’s right on, if a little gynocentric. She might have discussed how porno makes rotten lovers of men, too.

On so many levels that it would require a full-length term paper to quantify (perhaps some Wesleyan professor of porno deconstruction has already assigned it), George W. Bush is the quintessential Hooters guy. What Ariel Levy’s research shows is that during his ignominious reign, the entire country has become Hooterville—not the mythic cracker town, but a national amusement-park version of the bigbusted franchise. Women’s real sexual needs (such a quaint notion; even quainter to find there’s actually a thoughtful 30-year-old woman still writing about them) are simply irrelevant in a nation where the female role has been reduced to its darkest primordial essence: entertaining the troops.

Nina Burleigh’s most recent book is The Stranger and the Statesman (Perennial); her next book, about the French scientists who founded Egyptology, will be published by William Morrow in June 2006.