SOURCE: Johnson, Diane. “Something for the Boys.” New York Review of Books (16 January 1992): 13–17.

In the following excerpt, Johnson discusses the significance of The Beauty Myth and renewed interest in feminism, gender roles, and masculinity, as reflected by a number of new books published in the early 1990s.

1.

Dorothy Parker is said to have remarked to the authors of Modern Woman, the Lost Sex, “I bet you say that to all the sexes.” Reading these books together is like being locked in the coat closet at a cocktail party to overhear a muffled cacophony of half-truths, partial insights, and entrenched wrongheadedness, from which emerges the general impression of a society foundering in reproachful cries of loster-than-thou from all the sexes (cries which the events surrounding the Clarence Thomas hearings and the William Kennedy Smith trial have intensified). The male writers, as usual, tend to find women essentially peripheral to...