I’d like to add to Mark’s list for a proposed anti-progressive syllabus Midge Decter’s An Old Wife’s Tale. It’s written as a memoir, which is a hugely popular genre today, in general and in the academy as well. It is sharp, lively, based on the author’s expansive reading in primary sources as well as her primary experience as a supremely attentive witness to the rise of the contemporary women’s movement. It’s a book that challenges the reigning orthodoxy and from which students might obtain a complete, systematic, and alternative view of feminism and what it has done to our culture. On another note, several times Ms. Decter draws attention to the foul and explicit language used by feminists and wonders if she is alone in being very bothered by that. This raised an interesting question in my mind. Is the unbelievably disgusting and perverse material we see on TV today, even in programs favored by conservatives, like the appalling South Park, the frequently repellant Family Guy, and the utterly debased Sopranos, as well as the fact that whole cohorts of people talk dirty and deploy the f-word as every part of speech–is all this due at least in part to the fact that women let down the standard of expecting decent language and respectable conversation in polite company and themselves began to talk and act like sailors on leave in foreign ports? I haven’t seen that many of these programs but what I’ve seen had me simply abashed. Also, for a piece I’m writing, I viewed the DVD of The Vagina Monologues and am still in shock. People (men and women?) sit in a theatre and watch that, and laugh and sigh and take it in, and don’t die of embarrassment? And evidently it has become a phenomenon on college campuses?! Here is an urgent, useful critique of it by Christina Sommers. Well, a friend tells me he’s been informed that those who went to school in the 70s and 80s are fully accustomed to this kind of thing. Indeed, it is their “culture.” To whatever extent this is true, I say Alas.