Exiles on Main Street

I APPROACHED this book with the maximum possible amount of ill will. Mary Pipher, Ph.D.—that’s how she is billed on the book’s back flap—is the author of Reviving Ophelia, the 1994 classic of victimology in which adolescent girls were revealed to be groaning under the iron heel of patriarchal oppression. I have been thinking of Mary Pipher, Ph.D., as part of that Axis of Evil that comprises, amongst numerous others, feminist Carol Gilligan, who was Harvard’s first Professor of Gender Studies, and William Pollack, Ph.D. (what is it with these people and their degrees?), who wrote a 1998 book, Real Boys, around the basic idea that boys ought to be encouraged to act more like girls.

I note in passing that there is a great deal to say about the business of asylum from a policy point of view. Like the larger matter of immigration, this is a topic so hedged around with fashionable taboos, it doesn’t get half the airing it ought to. The asylum process is apparently riddled with abuses: In my newspaper today there is a report of a Manhattan lawyer who has pleaded guilty to submitting over 1,000 fraudulent asylum applications.

About the Author

John Derbyshire

Mr. Derbyshire is a former contributing editor of National Review.

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I APPROACHED this book with the maximum possible amount of ill will. Mary Pipher, Ph.D.—that’s how she is billed on the book’s back flap—is the author of Reviving Ophelia, the 1994 classic of victimology in which adolescent girls were revealed to be groaning under the iron heel of patriarchal oppression. I have been thinking of Mary Pipher, Ph.D., as part of that Axis of Evil that comprises, amongst numerous others, feminist Carol Gilligan, who was Harvard’s first Professor of Gender Studies, and William Pollack, Ph.D. (what is it with these people and their degrees?), who wrote a 1998 book, Real Boys, around the basic idea that boys ought to be encouraged to act more like girls.

I note in passing that there is a great deal to say about the business of asylum from a policy point of view. Like the larger matter of immigration, this is a topic so hedged around with fashionable taboos, it doesn’t get half the airing it ought to. The asylum process is apparently riddled with abuses: In my newspaper today there is a report of a Manhattan lawyer who has pleaded guilty to submitting over 1,000 fraudulent asylum applications.