Books in Brief: Love and Liberation

Love and Liberation, by Lisa Hobbs (McGraw Hill, 159 pp., $5.95). Miss Hobbs is a militant feminist awash in a sea of leftist cliches. But unlike her crazier sisters who have lately been polluting the marketplace with crackbrained books, she is also a first-rate writer, and like all good women writers (and I suppose saying this makes me a sexist) she possesses a strong streak of commonsense and a sharp social eye. She does a beautiful job of debunking psychiatry, for instance, and she reminds us of how silly Freud was, with his asinine notion of “penis envy.” Her opinion of sexologist charlatans such as Kinsey and Masters and Johnson is succinctly stated—“What a crock!”—and she is outraged at the air of cheap sexuality which smothers our society. Contemporary woman, she points out, is degraded by the image of herself as it appears “in the swollen breasts of the Playboy bunny, or more so in her little erect tail … in the beauty contests where like cows in the stockyard the contestants offer their buttocks and breasts for male evaluation.” She is militant, but not unreasonable. She concedes, for instance, unlike Friedan, that many women can find fulfillment as homemakers, and she calls those feminists such as Anne Koedt who advocate lesbianism “grossly pathological.” And unlike Millett, she doesn’t hate men. She feels sorry for us, damn it, and those of us who live the commuting life may feel a bit uncomfortable with her description of modern man, a creature conditioned for centuries to hunt and fight, now a “poor eviscerated bull” who spends his days “shuffling paper.” As a political thinker, Miss Hobbs is third-rate, but as a social critic and observer, she is very good indeed.

JC

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J. R. Coyne Jr.

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Love and Liberation, by Lisa Hobbs (McGraw Hill, 159 pp., $5.95). Miss Hobbs is a militant feminist awash in a sea of leftist cliches. But unlike her crazier sisters who have lately been polluting the marketplace with crackbrained books, she is also a first-rate writer, and like all good women writers (and I suppose saying this makes me a sexist) she possesses a strong streak of commonsense and a sharp social eye. She does a beautiful job of debunking psychiatry, for instance, and she reminds us of how silly Freud was, with his asinine notion of “penis envy.” Her opinion of sexologist charlatans such as Kinsey and Masters and Johnson is succinctly stated—“What a crock!”—and she is outraged at the air of cheap sexuality which smothers our society. Contemporary woman, she points out, is degraded by the image of herself as it appears “in the swollen breasts of the Playboy bunny, or more so in her little erect tail … in the beauty contests where like cows in the stockyard the contestants offer their buttocks and breasts for male evaluation.” She is militant, but not unreasonable. She concedes, for instance, unlike Friedan, that many women can find fulfillment as homemakers, and she calls those feminists such as Anne Koedt who advocate lesbianism “grossly pathological.” And unlike Millett, she doesn’t hate men. She feels sorry for us, damn it, and those of us who live the commuting life may feel a bit uncomfortable with her description of modern man, a creature conditioned for centuries to hunt and fight, now a “poor eviscerated bull” who spends his days “shuffling paper.” As a political thinker, Miss Hobbs is third-rate, but as a social critic and observer, she is very good indeed.