Benjamin DeMott

"The new "killer woman," says Benjamin DeMott, believes that empowerment lies in tough, aggressive, "male" behavior. This gender denial, he contends, is reshaping American society and betraying the original vision of feminism, which embodies the ideal of a more compassionate and nurturing society for both women and men. Today, many women believe they must "become men" to succeed - and men are perceived as often ruthless and brutally competitive. Differences molded by nature and history are obscured, as is the healthy flexibility that would free both sexes from rigid gender positions. The other side of this coin is an increasingly hard-nosed ethos in corporate America and in our public policy.". "We can no longer think straight about gender and power, DeMott argues, because we are inundated daily by a flood of cultural material - popular and literary fiction, movies, sitcoms, commercials, cartoons, the whole media mix - embodying the killer woman and her values. It leads us to believe that the sexes have nothing to teach each other except ever harsher modes of selfishness and cruelty, both at work and at home."--BOOK JACKET.

In this provocative, insightful, and sure to be controversial work, eminent social critic Benjamin DeMott shows how black and white neoconservatism, the rise of the black middle class, and the imagery and rhetoric of racial amity promulgated by contemporary media are coalescing into a whole new orthodoxy - one that obscures continuing racial inequity and threatens to halt the further progress of African Americans. DeMott examines a stunning range of cultural evidence - from Clinton oratory to popular cinema and television, to scapegoated welfare mothers, to some of today's most respected thinkers - to lay bear the thrust and assumptions of this new friendship orthodoxy, which maintains that racial problems can be solved simply by blacks and whites working together, one on one, to reconcile differences. DeMott argues that such an appealing perspective is dangerous because it is so blatantly ahistorical, because it turns a blind eye to entrenched poverty, because it ignores the racism still alive in the land, and because of its real consequences. It distorts the public debate and absolves the body politic from the hard work that the civil rights movement began and that remains unfinished.