I forgot to Slog about this book review after reading it on Sunday, but it’s recommended reading in my book. Reviewer Ana Marie Cox rips apart author Kate O’Beirne’s new book, Women Who Make the World Worse. The book takes down old school feminists, from Betty Friedan to Gloria Steinem, but it’s O’Beirne who receives the big bruising here. My favorite part of the review, though, happens when Cox really sticks it to O’Beirne where it hurts:

In the age of the book-as-rant (see Goldberg, Ann Coulter, Al Franken and Michael Moore), perhaps one shouldn’t expect better than O’Beirne’s simplistic caricatures. Today American women have unprecedented access to educational and professional opportunity and to the machinery of power. O’Beirne, however, attributes women’s progress not to any feminist agitation but to “the natural evolution of social expectations.”

Unfortunately, there is no such thing. Social change is often the product of confrontation between extremes. To depict one extreme as pernicious and all-powerful reduces real debate about equality into a cartoon about underarm hair. Feminism isn’t always pretty (see: underarm hair). Without it, however, Kate O’Beirne would have been unlikely to have this book published - and most women would not have their own money to waste on it.