NONFICTION - May 28, 1995

THE NEW VICTORIANS: A Young Woman’s Challenge to the Old Feminist Order by Rene Denfeld (Warner: $21.95; 330 pp.) This is a very naive book. A smug author leers on the cover out at the generation of women she blames for leading feminism astray. “The New Victorians,� she calls them, have taken suffocating, moralistic positions on pornography, date-rape, male-bashing, and many other issues. They take the “very same morally pure yet helplessly martyred role that women suffered from a century ago.� Author Carol Gilligan, who has spent her life researching gender differences and helped many women to raise their daughters to be stronger people is described as someone who “promotes sexist stereotypes of women.� Gloria Steinem uses too many “five-dollar words.� Anyone who describes women as victims of a “vague patriarchy� is hysterical and extremist. Links between pornography and rape are sarcastically dismissed. “If there wasn’t pornography, rape would rarely occur. Voila, the cure.� Pornography, you’ll be pleased to hear because the author asserts it, is not, in fact, increasingly violent. It’s just something Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon thought up to upset you. Oh, and “there hasn’t been a celebratory book on female sexuality written by a feminist since the mid-seventies.� It’s just a bunch of overly academic old sticks sitting around trying to ruin their daughters’ good times. And way too much time is spent ripping Goddess worship apart--I must say Cynthia Heimel does it much better by just making fun of them. Denfeld sounds like a teen-ager who is mad for some good reasons and some mythological reasons at her mother. The discourse, with its spectrum of extremes that she dismisses as irrelevant, does not have to cease in order for her generation to make their more immediate demands: child care, birth control, abortion rights, political parity, sexual violence. The last chapter, which enumerates these needs, is very useful. The rest is just ungrateful.