SOURCE: Gring-Pemble, Lisa M., and Diane M. Blair. “Best-Selling Feminisms: The Rhetorical Production of Popular Press Feminists' Romantic Quest.” Communication Quarterly 48, no. 4 (fall 2000): 360-79.

In the following review, Gring-Pemble and Blair argue that writings by “popular press feminists” such as Sommers “derive their powerful appeal from assuming the form of archetypal romantic quest narratives,” which ultimately “limit possibilities for critical assessments as well as honest debate and exchange.”

On the open highway, battling stormy nature and dodging mammoth eighteen-wheelers (today's piratical tramp freighters), woman has never been more mobile, more capable of the archetypal journey of the heroic quest, a traditionally masculine myth.

(Paglia xi)

In Vamps and Tramps, Camille Paglia provocatively casts women as self-sufficient individuals on a quest to recover feminism's true nature from academic distortion. Paglia's book represents just one of several national, best-selling, “feminist” books published in the past decade, including Rene Denfield's The...