A Genre Is Born

THERE is nothing better calculated to make some reviewers’ hearts sink than a feminist tract. Not this reviewer. On the contrary, I am a convert. Ever since I read Carol Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat, I can’t get enough—of feminist tracts, that is. Her jolly little number, which ends with the resounding injunction, “Eat rice, have faith in women,” pursues the parallels between carving meat, rape, and racism. What we have in this sort of writing is nothing less than a genre. It’s quite pointless to show inconsistencies in evidence or argument. One should just sit back and enjoy it. There is something hilariously attractive in the way these ladies pick up a dotty idea and solemnly and relentlessly pursue it.

Mr. Anderson is the editor of This Will Hurt (National Review Books).

DA

About the Author

Digby Anderson

THERE is nothing better calculated to make some reviewers’ hearts sink than a feminist tract. Not this reviewer. On the contrary, I am a convert. Ever since I read Carol Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat, I can’t get enough—of feminist tracts, that is. Her jolly little number, which ends with the resounding injunction, “Eat rice, have faith in women,” pursues the parallels between carving meat, rape, and racism. What we have in this sort of writing is nothing less than a genre. It’s quite pointless to show inconsistencies in evidence or argument. One should just sit back and enjoy it. There is something hilariously attractive in the way these ladies pick up a dotty idea and solemnly and relentlessly pursue it.

Mr. Anderson is the editor of This Will Hurt (National Review Books).