Speaking of Sex: The Denial of Gender Inequality

by Deborah L. Rhode

Book Overview

Speaking of Sex explores a topic that too often drops out of our discussions when we speak about sex: the persistent problem of sex-based inequality and the cultural forces that sustain it. On critical issues affecting women, most Americans deny either that gender inequality is a serious problem or that it is one that they have a personal or political responsibility to address. In tracing this "no problem" problem, Speaking of Sex...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674831780
• ISBN13: 9780674831780
• Release Date: September 1999
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.06 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Eminently sensible, worth four and a half stars

Reading this sensible and intelligent book, and remembering how much I enjoyed Rhode's later book on the reform of the legal profession, I wondered why it is that such an eminently reasonable and articulate woman, who has provided such a thorough and well documented defense of feminism, should be so obscure in the world of public intellectuals. Rhode teaches at Stanford Law School, this book is published by Harvard University Press, and she does not write in a the complex academic jargon that all good journalists are trained to hate. Yet she is never called upon when journals like The New Republic or the New York Review of Books thinks it should have a female contributor. Pity, because this is a good book. Let's start off with "Ideology and Biology." Rhode points out the flaws in biological explanations in sex differences. There are species of primates where the men tend the infants and the women forage for food. Media trumpet studies that point out gender differences, and ignore the many studies that find no difference or are ambiguous (especially on PMS). Over the last thirty years the differences in math scores between boys and girls has dropped dramatically. Those differences that do remain "have not taken account of even obvious influences such as the number of courses taken." "Many studies find no correlation between levels of testosterone and violence, hostility, or aggression." Much of the gender gap on physical strength is clearly related to our aesthetic desire for unhealthily thin women and our desire to encourage boys sports. "Men may be more likely to use speech patterns to establish control because they are more likely to occupy positions where they are IN control." "Beginning at Birth" starts off with how in 1918 one journal stated that boys should be clothed in pink and girls in blue, since it was obvious that pink was the more masculine colour. And we're off to how toys rigidly reinforce gender rules and unreasonable body ideals. If you think that it may simply be PC to worry that Barbie Dolls are unrealistic, consider the survey of 33,000 females. Three-quarters considered themselves too fat, though only a quarter were overweight and a third were underweight. "In recent surveys [of children's books], male characters come up with solutions five to eight times as often as females, and females care for children eight times as often as males." Then it's on to Media Images, about how the media euphemize rape and how incredibly snotty TIME magazine was towards feminism during the 1970s.One cannot go into full detail about the next chapters, which look at sex and violence, about the problems of women's work, about family values (and in particular, welfare, child custody and teenage pregnancy). What one should point out is how well documented this book is, with 79 pages of notes to 250 pages of text. Moreover consider the depth of the sources. Rhode quotes anti-feminists in considerable detail. She has read very wi