SOURCE: Shalit, Wendy. “Daughters of the (Sexual) Revolution.” Commentary 104, no. 6 (December 1997): 42–45.

In the following excerpt, Shalit offers an unfavorable assessment of Promiscuities.

The signals of distress currently coming from the fairer sex merit a hearing. They issue from books and magazine articles, and they are echoed in the often impossibly contradictory statements by leaders and spokesmen of the feminist movement on themes ranging from women in combat roles to the threat ostensibly posed to womankind by the all-male Promise Keepers.

On the one hand, we are still being assured by feminists that any behavior on the part of men that suggests a protective attitude toward women is by definition sexist. “Chivalry,” the writer Nancy Henley has declared, is an “oppressive tool”; according to the philosopher Marilyn Frye, even the act of opening a door for a woman sends the abhorrent message that “women are incapable.” As for the...